Collabra Practise App

Collabra is used to send video and audio recordings between student and teacher. Text comments can also be sent creating a conversation between student and teacher.

It’s an app that can help you keep track of your students’ practice and improve communication between you and your student outside of lesson times.

What Collabra Music App Does

• Record video or audio lessons directly to the cloud, bypassing the need for storage on your local device and time-consuming manual uploading
• Add bookmarks to make it easier for your students to review lessons and find what they need
• Send lessons/backing tracks to one or many students with the click of a button
• Archive and reuse lesson content with Collabra’s unlimited storage
• Gain insights on students’ practice habits with immediate access to their recorded practice sessions
• Leave real-time feedback on lessons or practices with timestamped comments
• Keep students accountable by tracking their practice time with built-in practice reports and analytics

How I Use Collabra

As a teacher, I use Collabra to send students video or audio recordings of:

• Listening music (a piece they are studying or a piece of similar style)
• Backing tracks to play along with
• Short recordings taken durng a lesson of tricky parts of pieces so the students can review or play along with them at home
• Drumbeat recordings so students can practise their rhythm exercises away from the piano

How My Students Use Collabra

• Send me video when they practise tricky parts of their pieces either when they get it right or if they are having trouble getting it right
• Send me messages when I forget to upload a track I promised them
• Send me recordings of their ‘noodling’ or just having fun on their instrument
• To prove they practised this week!

Technical Things

Collabra is a multi-platform app and works on most devices. It acts as a secure connection between teacher and student and the transferring of files is automatic (don’t have to press send) and almost instant.

If students don’t have access to internet all the time, they can download a desktop app from Collabra for free that will allow them to still record onto Collabra regardless of how good internet connection is. This app will upload the recordings automatically as internet connectivity is available, resulting in higher quality recordings.

Collabra is free to educators but there is a student subscription. There are also studio/school pricing options if you contact the Collabra team. Visit their website by clicking here.

Why I Use Collabra

• It is multi-platform and means every one of my students can access it if they have internet service
• It has a very clean, no frills layout in both the teacher and student accounts which makes it very easy and intuitive to use
• Really quick and very helpful assistance using the pink speech bubble on the website
• It is the only platform I have found that easily connects teacher and student that you can use to exchange video and audio, which is so important as a music teacher
• Sending videos, answering questions etc. from my student teachers.
• Great for group lessons because you can assign a “lesson” (backing track/video etc) to a group of students with one click
• I could probably use it instead of homework notebooks as well but haven’t done that on a studio-wide basis yet

Conclusion

I find Collabra the best solution to exchanging musical ideas/lessons/anything really in a format that my students relate to.

It’s ease of use and set up means most of my students use it on a regular basis and my parents almost forget it is there because the kids use it by themselves. I am always looking for new ways to use this app, please comment below if you can think of other ways it could be used in a music teaching scenario.

Are there any other ways you can track your students’ practice?