Tools to help make assessment and learning fun!
A BRIEF LOOK INTO HOW USING ONLINE SOFTWARE CAN BENEFIT YOUR TEACHING …
By Rebecca Mallory, District 5
Are you looking for an easy way to generate sight reading exercises for your instrumental or choral students? Are you looking for a way to easily assess their ability to sight read music notation, solfege or rhythms? Are you wishing you could easily keep records of all of your student’ s recordings and give them feedback at the same time? Sight Reading Factory( sightreadingfactory. com) does all of this and more, and is also very inexpensive. If you haven’ t heard about it, I encourage you to check it out!
My school has allowed me to pilot the use of this online software with my choral students and next year, I hope to use it with my instrumentalists as well. Since our students all have devices through MLTI, this tool is very useful for having students record singing, playing or clapping musical examples. Sight Reading Factory generates excerpts that reflect the tempo, meter, difficulty, notation and solfege customized by the teacher. Teachers generate classes and assignments, then students enroll with a code and have fun learning and practicing their skills. In addition, it allows students to generate their own practice examples.
I thought introducing this software would be met with some grumbling from my students, but they enjoy the challenge and appreciate the learning that comes from it. The fact that they have the option to attempt the examples multiple times also helps take some performance pressure off. Students submit their best example and it takes very little time to grade them and offer feedback. With large or small class sizes, we all