North East musicians Eric Lewis and Dave Shaw have secured Innovate UK funding to develop their digital video teaching resource, Addanote™ for use in schools and colleges across the country. The resource has also just been awarded a UK patent confirming that it is a unique resource, providing a novel digital approach to the teaching of music and musical instruments.
The patent has been awarded by the UK Patent Office and highlights the unique nature of the learning process which the owners worked on together for many years, tapping into their extensive and combined knowledge of music practice and pedagogy.
Eric, from Ryton, and Dave, from Sunniside, are both music teachers and gigging musicians, probably known more locally by their bands, “Erik and the Vikings” and “The Force”. Longtime friends since their teens, and now in their early 60s, they joined together in 2019 to form Addanote™ Ltd, in response to a challenge by a Sunderland school headteacher to create a video resource to help teach classroom music.
Addanote™ delivers the information the way teachers teach, in the most effective way possible to accelerate and embed learning. Supported by a wide variety of evidence-based research from the fields of cognitive and neuropsychology, teachers trialling it found it worked well in large classes with differing abilities, and it was also good for class behavioural management as it focuses students, allowing the teacher more freedom to move between pupils to check on individual progress.
It is built on years of research into cognitive and behavioural learning processes and reinforces the importance of errorless learning/teaching – minimising mistakes in the learning process to keep students engaged, allowing them to accelerate the learning process.
Innovate UK provides businesses with the expertise, facilities and funding they need to test, demonstrate and evolve their ideas, driving UK productivity and economic growth. The Addanote™ team received funding to bring their resource to the commercial market by improving the quality of the filming, increasing the speed of the patent protected production process, reviewing and improving branding and importantly, developing a marketing strategy.
RTC North, who specialise in helping North East organisations innovate and grow, are working with Eric and Dave to assist them in making strategic business decisions, look for funding and understand the world of commercialism, while content marketing agency, Allies Group, have been commissioned to provide direction and support in bringing Addanote™ to market.
Eric said: “We knew it would work from the very start, but didn’t have all of the evidence based research to back this up. Now we’ve proven that it does work, and have more than enough evidence to explain why. If you’re a teacher or an Ofsted inspector then you are always looking for a teaching approach that is sequential, incremental, interactive, cumulative and regularly revisits prior learning to convert working memory into more permanent long term memory.”
Dave added: “Pupils are more engaged and motivated when following a learning pathway of highly achievable goals, and as a direct consequence their behaviour management becomes less of a strain on the teacher. For school headteachers and business managers, Addanote™ is very affordable and very easy to use. There is no excuse not to give all pupils the opportunity to adopt, learn and master a musical instrument.”