S.M.A.R.T.E.R Band Goals

We are well underway into the school year!  Lots of great things have been going on in my classroom.  My 7th grade band is to die for!  65 students and perfectly balanced with a low brass section that is huge!  I have four tubas in my 6th grade bands (2 tubas per band) and the 8th graders are adapting well to our funky split class schedule-22 minutes, lunch, 22 minutes.  Not ideal, but we will manage.

I have started working on my first goal per my last post which is to implement e-folios.  I am using our district Google account and Google Drive to accomplish this.  I created a mailing list with my students' emails and sent them a "practice email" requesting them to respond to me to make sure they got the email.  Later this week, we will head up to the learning center (aka media center) and our learning center specialist will work with the students to make sure they understand how use Drive-downloading assignments, uploading assignments and making sure the students share with only me.

Google Drive is pretty slick.  I have created folders for each band, and within those folders subfolders for each students which will contain their online assignments that I will share with them, so it will be more organized than just a bunch of emails coming at me from my students.

The 7th and 8th graders have an assignment that they will complete and send me in the next week.  Typically I do this during class, but we will test this out to see how it works.  I am hoping that there won't be too many complications.

SMARTER goals are an extension of SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Actions, Realistic, Time frame, Enjoyable, Resources.  By no means am I taking credit for any of this!  I believe many schools are implementing SMART goals, but we wanted to add on to this.  Many students, and adults, find goal making to be tedious and often associated to something that is not enjoyable.  So, we decided to put a spin onto it so that students realize that goal setting is important and the process as well as the product can be enjoyable.

This is what my students will be completing, sharing with me and storing in their Google Drive folder.

So, we will see how this goes. I am hoping that this will be beneficial to the students, as well as myself.  A side benefit will be less paperwork and passing back.  Just a few clicks of the button and away we go!