I’m exploring options for how to submit a record of your practice without having reams of paper to keep track of (I really hate paper). I’m hoping to do a Practice Challenge for fall, culminating in a prize to be given out before the holiday break (probably at the recital – date/place TBD). But how to keep track?
There’s Nancy Bos’ excellent practice journal, which many of you have (as do I), and I recommend it highly. But that means you’d either have to:
- Turn in your book to me, which means you wouldn’t have it to work with unless I gave it back to you right away, and then that’d mean I’d have to go write down what you did to keep track of things (paper!);
- Copy your sheets and give them to me (paper!);
- Copy them and scan them and email them to me (no paper, and convenient for me, less so for you).
In my searches, I found JotForm, a free platform to create fillable forms. I was trying to create a form that included entries for each day you practice. At first, I came up with a form that you could submit, but it only was one day at a time, and I figured that that would be hard to come up with (and trying to do a separate page for each day was NOT intuitive – then again, it’s a free platform).
So I came up with this form, which seemed much easier. It’s a variation on a form I created for my Milwaukee students about 7 years ago – I found it when I was cleaning out files. (I don’t even remember doing this, and I suspect that people didn’t comply, because, well…. paper!)
It doesn’t have everything that I want, and maybe I’ll figure out something later this summer, but for now, I think it’s going to work. You’re still going to need to keep something separate for yourself to keep a record of your daily practice (whether it’s Nancy Bos’ book or your own method), but give it a try!