This year has been unlike any year in my educational career. It has been crazy, stressful, and really really hard! However, it has also forced me to explore some educational options that I would not have been able to explore before. Namely, using Canvas as a tool to help me assess students and provide viable feedback. However, that also means that students (and let’s be honest, parents) need to know how to use my Canvas pages to help their children succeed.
We will go over all of our testing in class, but I wanted to make a help page for parents with some Loom videos on how to access certain things.
Basic Navigation of Canvas
The important thing to remember about Canvas is that if they follow the links for their class, they can easily get to what they need to find. See the video below for more instructions:
What Tuner/Metronome Should We get?
I strongly recommend “Tonal Energy” as a tuner/Metronome app on iOS and Android devices. It is pretty inexpensive ($3.99) and does pretty much everything kids need for it to do. See the video below for a quick overview.
Submitting a Chunk
Chunks are small exercises that test a specific skill. When students add them all together, they will become outstanding players! See the video below to see how to submit chunks.
Quizzes, Quizzes, Quizzes
Quizzes help me to know if your child knows the basic things we have taught in class. There are a few things to know about quizzes
- You have to not only take the quiz, but then you have to report your score on the main quiz page. See the video for how to do this!
- If you click on your instrument quiz, it might say you have already taken the quiz that pops up. That is okay. There are 9 “Template” quizzes that are referred to, so Quiz 1 and Quiz 2 will both be Quiz A. That is okay. There are LOTS of questions on Quiz A, so each quiz will be slightly different. Just retake the Quiz A and report your new score.
- Feel free to take the quizzes as many times as you want to get the score you want. Any score below 30 (60%) will be a zero and require retaking.
- After you take your instrument quiz, make sure to go back to the quiz page to report your score! If you don’t do this, you will not receive credit. See video
Practice and Extra Credit
Students are required to do the following each week for their practice requirement:
- Practice 120 minutes each week (20 minutes a day, 6 days a week)
- Set a practice goal for each week (they get credit if they set the goal…not whether or not they achieve it).
- Use a metronome on at least 4 of their practice days.
- Record a one minute video each week, watch it, and grade themselves on it using the rubric on the practice record (you do not submit this video to me).
When they have done these things, they need to report their practice to me using the appropriate practice record on Canvas.
Extra Credit Practice
If you miss some practice time (or if you just do more practice than what is required), you can turn it in for extra credit. See the video for how to do that. This is the only extra credit I give.
Private Lessons