Our goal as online teachers should be to support my students with as little direct control as possible. Project Based Learning is a great approach for this, but the band director in me still wants to keep some order in the chaos! Through my online teaching, I’ve discovered and built several useful tools for this, but I keep finding that of these, the cloud-based “Leader Board” is probably the most useful and adaptable. In this short session, I’ll share how to combine Google Forms and Sheets to create a daily check-in workflow to track student progress in a blended environment, foster student motivation and focus, and support a high degree of flexibility in learning paths.

Presenter Bio: Jim Chlebak has been performing and teaching music for over 30 years and working with music technology even longer. In addition to teaching classroom and online music courses, his projects include synthesizer programming; website creation; coding & game design; audio sculpting and recording; and building tech tools that leave more time for working with and supporting students. By design, he works mostly with open source or free technology, such as Google docs or Joomla. He has degrees in French and French Horn from Oberlin College and Oberlin Conservatory, respectively, and an MSIT in music through distance learning from Marlboro College Graduate Center.