Welcome Back!!

     I am more excited than words can express about the opportunity to work with our music students this year! The personnel realignment has re-energized my enthusiasm for teaching  This site will provide essential information and links to resources we will use in our daily classes in Room 201.  The first row of tabs along the top labeled with class period and short course name are for the communication of class related information including weekly plans for each class period as well as Syllabus information, special event calendar, etc.
     The second row of tabs is helpful links to other information about the music department in general.  Rm 201 is the main page where this post and others will appear and on occasion student created posts may appear hear as well.  CALENDAR is the music department calendar and lists all SW music department events of public interest such as concerts, fundraisers, etc.  BOOSTERS is a link to a page all devoted to our parent organization, the SW Music Boosters.  THEORY is a tab devoted to links for learning music theory concepts.  Many of these will be also linked in the weekly lesson plan table on the class pages.  But students may want to work on theory skills not often assigned in the class in which they are enrolled.  They can be found here.  Most of these are powered by musictheory.net. SWCS (Official) is a link to the official site of Southern Wells Community Schools.  SOCIAL is a page devoted to the many social media accounts that the music department has registered.  Some live feeds from twitter and pinterest are found there.  (sorry, but at this time, perhaps ever, you will not be able to view these from school for obvious reasons -self discipline, mine!  Finally, SMARTMUSIC is a tab for a link to the SmartMusic website.  SmartMusic is a program I am using extensively with our students here this year and beyond to assist me in the explanations of musical concepts and modeling sound samples.  It also provides a really cool mechanism for practicing music learned in class and recording oneself for self-evaluation.  It also has an assessment tool that will be implemented down the road as becomes appropriate.  Practice tools include a visual pitch tuner, a metronome, and as mentioned before a recording feature.  There is the basic overview of the SWHS Room 201 tabs.
     While viewing any of the pages described above, the column along the right will be displayed.  As you can see while reading this post, there are Quick Links to frequently used documents and forms.  These are provided there for the quickest access to that information wherever you currently are on the site.  You can scroll down to see additional posts to this blog and to find other information in the sidebar to the right.  I hope you understand that this site is a living document and is alway under construction and improvement.  Suggestions for how to make it easier to navigate are welcome and should be directed to Mr. Haigh.