The LessonMate Weekly Lesson Note
The idea of LessonMate really started to take form when we began to acknowledge a truly important component of the educational process. Transparency. Everyone knowing what’s going on week to week, month to month. Teacher, student and family. This is slightly different than communication, where there might be an expectation of constant dialogue between all parties. Transparency simply means that no one is in the dark, no one is confused about expectations and everyone understands the common goal. Confusion ultimately leads to stress. Stress stinks.
Enter the weekly LessonMate note. Your path towards transparency.
Unlike the LessonMate Makeup, the weekly note is a brief summary of the what was worked on in the lesson and what should be worked on for the week ahead. You’ve got a list of features to choose from in LessonMate — recording videos, embedding youtube clips, attaching pdf’s and mp3’s, ect. You don’t need to use them all. In fact, with the weekly note, you shouldn’t. Let’s try to be brief. Remember, the idea is to give the student something to reference during the week, the family some indication of how the student is doing and in the event there is a last minute sub, information that will help the sub jump right in.
A few tips to make the note taking really work-
- Use the template feature. Specific text that you find yourself writing every lesson (Lesson Book page…Theory book page…New Song… ) can be set to appear automatically on every student’s lesson page.
- If your device (cell phone, tablet) has a voice function for typing, use it. It really speeds things up.
- We recommend not waiting till the end of the lesson to create the whole lesson note, but writing bits along the way.
So. let’s avoid student confusion — it only leads to apathy and we all know where that leads. And let’s give that parent who is wondering at 10:00pm “What’s going on in those lessons?!” a place to go and find out :)
