Assessing your choirs was NEVER easier.
21st Century tech provides hard data
Data. As a choral or instrumental conductor, when you hear that word, does it energize or frighten you? If you are organized and work HARD to assess your students, it could still be another layer when you MUST assess every student while the rest of your students are doing ____________. Or, you may need to take your before, after school and lunch hours, just to have data supporting your well-planned and executed rehearsals.
If you have never truly assessed students to obtain solid, verifiable statistics to prove your efforts and how hard the students work as well, this can be extra work that befuddles you:
• What standardized assessments must I use?
• HOW MUCH TIME will it take to subjectively assess what every student
does and does not know?
• What could / should I do with the data?
• So what. It is only our students. Does it have relation to other parts of our district music offerings?
Completely aware of these vexing problems, we at Tools for Conductors ™ provide approachable, standardized, high-rigor, materials for students from Kindergarten through University to MASTER sight-reading and music literacy. But the buzz-phrase that we keep hearing in workshops and conventions was “we NEED hard data that doesn’t take so much time!”
Our association with MusicFirst in 2017 has provided the technology to deliver 675 professionally composed assessments for band, choir (vocal), orchestra, elementary school, and rhythmic assessments. You do not need to write assessments….but you can!
“YOU WON’T MISS A BEAT”
assessments describe what YOU will be doing, while your students are being digitally assessed in a practice room. You will be conducting and running rehearsals !
With MusicFirst and PracticeFirst™ technology, powered by MatchMySound™, Tools for Conductors™ assessments will allow your students to practice anytime, anywhere, on most internet-enabled devices. Students receive instantaneous & intuitive feedback, allowing them to gain meaningful insights into the quality of their practice and accelerate their achievement. Perfect for band, orchestra, choral, elementary, rhythmic and solo instrumental & vocal practice,
students will be able to:
• Practice anywhere, anytime, on any device
• Send practice or completed assessments to you if they wish
• Have easy-to-use tools for creating assignments.
• Tailored for students of all levels
• Use exercises and pieces, and also allows you, the conductor, to
create your own
• Assesses rhythmic and pitch accuracy
• Use memorization and sight reading modes
• Work with polyphonic instruments like piano and guitar
• Choose their instrument themselves when practicing
• Use a built-in tuner for instruments that need to be tuned before
playing
• “Click track” option in place of the metronome for exercises with
floating tempo
• A great practice and assessment tool, perfect for choral students
• Fully integrated with the MusicFirst Classroom’s gradebook,
scheduling, portfolio-building and other features.
• Use our content, or upload your own
Conductors will be able to:
• Instantly see pitch and rhythmic scores on their desktop
• GRAPH and store data for years
• Share their data with parents, administrators, and colleagues
• Use the data to assess and monitor their own work with students
• Create data to present to boards, administrators, colleagues,
conventions
• Adjust challenge parameters from easy to hard
• Tailor exercises for students of all levels
• Create exercises with multiple parts from multipart scores
• Monitor and comment to students as they practice
• Compose your own assessments as special needs arise
• Meet with district or regional colleagues and coordinate programs
based upon factual data, not subjective opinion
You can watch an actual 1:44 video of an assessment here:
As conductors, what little extra time we can find needs to be focused on student and program needs, not eaten-up with a required assessment that is obsolete, and doesn’t do the job!
Imagine, knowing, perhaps for the first time exactly what your students do and do not know. How will that impact rehearsals and the way you instruct music literacy? Do you truly teach sight-reading? How effective is your instruction? How do you know?
The goal of true and effective music education is independent Mastery of basic and incremental skills by each and every student. That could be time consuming. But if the tools take less than 4-Minutes per day and the assessments less than 3 minutes as often as you wish, why would we not embrace the tools and the efficiency they provide?
Visit Toolsforconductors.com to explore 21st century sight-reading materials, and contact MusicFirst for assessment tools at:
https://www.musicfirst.com/applications/practicefirst/
to completely provide the instructional and verifiable tools that are now being used worldwide, and bring your vision of world-class music to your students. Then present the music you always wanted to play or sing, knowing that they CAN actually read it …….. and you can PROVE it!
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