adjudication

Learn OmniFocus: Workflows with Robby Burns - Watch the Free Video Now

Last weekend, I had the awesome pleasure of being a workflow guest on Learn OmniFocus, a website dedicated to teaching and training on the task management app OmniFocus, complementary apps, and the productive way of life.

The video, along with resources mentioned in my appearance can be viewed here. I recommend watching it here because there are chapters you can use to skip around to the various sections of the video by topic. 

Alternatively you can watch the video on Facebook or on YouTube.

Topic include

  • the definition of multitasking

  • my love of quick entry and using a task inbox

  • how single item action lists are useful in the middle school band teaching environment

  • how to stay on top of more tasks than are actually possible to do in the day through use of tags and perspectives that filter out information only relevant to a particular context

  • Using the Drafts app for quickly capturing my thoughts, processing my tasks, and acting upon them in powerful ways

  • using project templates for larger projects like field trips and musical performances so that tasks don't slip through the cracks

  • using Siri Shortcuts to turn data into variables and make a blog post, shared document, and OmniFocus project for creating an episode of the Music Ed Tech Talk podcast

  • Using DEVONthink to connect documents to projects and tasks in OmniFocus and keep things I want to "check out later" off of my todo list

  • putting widgets with charts that show a view of my day in OmniFocus on the Home Screen of my iPhone

My thanks to Tim Stringer for his invitation and for his inspiring work with Learn OmniFocus and for inviting me to join!

Learn OmniFocus is a great website, resource, and community dedicated to empowering people to be more mindful and productive. The app OmniFocus is at the center of it but there is so much more to it than that, including productivity basics, apps, and services that compliment one another. Be sure to check it out here and become a member here. There are educator discounts!

🔗 Using Jamboard in the Music Classroom

UPDATE: Listen to Theresa’s appearance on my podcast and subscribe below…

Theresa Hoover Ducassoux is a band director in Virginia doing awesome work ensuring that her students are engaged and empowered in her band classes, online and in person. She is especially savvy with a lot of the web-based tech tools that are popular in education right now.

Her post, which I have linked and quoted below, explains some ways you might use Google's Jamboard app in the music classroom to engage students.

Getting Started with Google Jamboard - Off the Beaten Path:

Jamboard is one of the newer and lesser-known G Suite tools, but it’s one that I love and am excited to use this school year! Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard that be accessed by an app or web browser. The simplicity of the tool makes it great for education. Jamboard is a great way to have all students in your class share their voices.

Jamboard is indeed excellent. I used it for a number of things last spring. One way we used it was to communicate and share what we had been up to in our free time when school started online.

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I used this Jamboard our first day of online learning to ask students how they had been spending their extra time at home. Each section of the band had a page of the digital whiteboard to edit.

Another way we used it was as an adjudication tool for providing ourselves feedback on our virtual ensemble video progress. You can see a brief snippet of that process in the middle of my How to Make a Virtual Band video, below.

Go and check out Theresa's post, and all of her fine work at Off The Beaten Path Music. Spoiler: She is my podcast guest this week. Jamboard is just one of the many awesome tools and online teaching strategies we talk about. I learned a ton from her. That episode should be published tomorrow. Stay tuned!