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Teaching with this Title

In terms of an aid to teaching of the music curriculum it is a particularly good teaching resource both at junior and senior levels.  At junior level it can be used if for the melody writing part of the course where students can input their compositions and hear them on playback.  As some students are doing music for the first time they sometimes struggle to hear what they are writing, in using this they can hear the notes as they go along and get a real sense of an overall melody.
 Sibelius can also be used to analyze the scores of downloaded midi files, where students can source them on the net, open and edit them in Sibelius, see the scores and watch the notes as they play. This offers an excellent means of developing self-directed learning techniques with students growing in confidence as they work on their individual files

In terms of teaching I find it very beneficial to senior students who already have good notation skills as they can follow instruction easily when it comes to inputting the scores of their set works and developing a concrete rather than abstract knowledge of things like transposing instruments.

Something that is often overlooked in the classroom is the ability to score read and prior to using notation software, music students doing Junior Cert Music would have to read from a reduced score. Now with software like Sibelius, weaker students benefit from being able to see and hear the music and because of the playback marker, they are less likely to loose their way in the score.
 
Sibelius is also very useful for harmony as it can be difficult for students to hear 2-part writing when it is simply on paper but the combination of sight and sound provides clarity in such a lesson. Sibelius can be of great help in teaching choirs and directing musicals where scores can be inputted and saved to CD as backing tracks (not all schools have accompanists!). Upgrading to the more recent versions can provide valuable assistance as Sibelius 3 and 4 converts midi to audio, which allows me to download midi files from internet, edit them and give students personalised backing tracks on a CD.