My new assignment sheet for this year has a new check box indicating if a student should send me a video of their playing during the week. Here’s my assignment sheet and how I enabled student video upload.
Here is the assignment sheet in PDF & Microsoft Word format: PDF Word
A quick explanation of some features:
- The Video Upload check box indicates that something is to be uploaded to my website at least 2 days before the lesson date. The upload should be a “perfect” take. Typically, this will be a difficult section of a piece that I want the student to spend time mastering.
- For each day, instead of checking off that the assignment has been practiced, the student marks in a face indicating whether they enjoyed (smile face) that particular task, disliked it (frown face), or was ambivalent (straight face).
- I also added a new column this year to reflect how much the student has met my expectations for the week.
To upload to my site, I am using the WordPress plug-in Frontend Uploader. It is not as clean as I’d like, for it conforms to WordPress’s media management standards — everything goes into one pile. I’d much prefer to keep my student uploads separate from my blog images. Nevertheless, i can review the upload and delete it after I’m done.
Later on in the semester I will decide if I want to offer the opportunity for students to publish their uploaded videos to peers. I’m thinking that this might increase motivation to practice to perfection before it is time to prepare for a recital.
Please contact me directly if you want extra details on how I implemented the uploader page.
Thank you to Debbie Dee’s post which contained a lot of sample assignment sheets.