What’s better than having a personal assistant, how about a Web 2.0 tool? uTutti is a Web 2.0 tool designed specifically for music teachers. uTutti handles all of the administrative aspects of music education, from inventory, budgeting, fees, fundraisers, and contact information. It also incorporates group email, parent communication, and grades. Having an online assistance would be wonderfully helpful. Always having your contact information and information at your fingertips, would be an amazing timesaver and stress reliever. You could keep track of all of your instruments; model numbers, who are currently using them, condition. You could also keep a complete record of your music library online. Going through music for concerts can be a real hassle, but if you had all the information online it would go a lot smoother.
But here’s the catch – it’s not free. There is a free 30 day trial, but after that, it costs $175 per year. Due to hard economic times, many budgets are being cut, which would not leave a lot of money for programs such as this, when you could but new music or make instrument repairs. While it would be wonderful to have all your information in one spot, I wonder if it would be possible to keep the same records with a couple of free Web 2.0 tools. For student and parent contact information, you could easily use Google Docs to create a form and then import the information into a spreadsheet. Inventory of instruments and your music library could easily be created using a Google Doc spreadsheet. A quick search showed that there are many Web 2.0 to assist in budgeting and fundraising. So while it would be more convenient to have all these items in one place, for those with fiscal restraints the same effect can be secured with other Web 2.0 tools. In addition, using iGoogle could keep all these different tools together to make all your information available in one place. So the question to ask is whether or not it is worth paying a subscription for convenience.
References:
uTutti. (2009). Retrieved October 14, 2009, from https://www.ututti.com/
Or if you can find a techy parent who could create the gadgets you want and need in iGoogle:)? Great posts Alicia.
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