The school year is almost over! As you count down the last few weeks (or days), you’re likely considering all sorts of year-end activities. While you check in school instruments, make plans for summer repairs, and organize your music library, it’s also worth taking a few minutes to make sure your SmartMusic account is ready for summer break, too. We created this SmartMusic year-end checklist to help.
Archiving your class and doing some minimal prep work now will simplify getting started next fall. You can even give students the opportunity to practice over summer break with SmartMusic.
Archiving a Class
Archiving this year’s classes will help keep your Gradebook tidy, prevent extra info from showing up on your Classes page, and speed up the process of deallocating student seats (for students who aren’t returning next year).
Remember, archiving a class is permanent, so before you archive, you’ll want to make sure that:
- All assignments are turned in
- All grades are finalized
- You’ve exported your grades
Although you’ll still be able to access grades (and recordings) for this class, you won’t be able to modify or export them. Accessing the recordings from past years can be a fun way to show students just how far they’ve come!
Once you’re ready, go to the Admin page, select your school, and find the classes you want to archive. Click the red icon on the right that corresponds to the appropriate class to archive it.
Archived classes are hidden from your Active classes list, but can still be found on the Admin page in the Archived classes tab. Any paid student seat occupied by a student who isn’t also enrolled in another paid class will be deallocated. If you deallocate seats for students who return next year, you can easily re-enroll them next fall.
You can find more detailed instructions for archiving classes on our Help Center.
Manage Educators
You’ll also want to make sure that you’ve correctly allocated educator seats in SmartMusic. If you have new teachers coming on, you’ll want to get them set up as soon as possible. Maybe you finally got that stipend for a percussion specialist added to next year’s budget – you’ll want the team on the same page before school starts!
You can allocate and deallocate educator seats at your school on the Admin page, and send invites to any new educators who need to connect to your organization.
Assignment Templates, Rubrics, and Units
There’s nothing you need to do with assignment templates, rubric criteria, or units at the end of the school year. These are attached to your account, not to the class or even your school. Any templates, criteria, or units you built will be waiting for you when you return to school, ready to assign to a new class of students.
Summer Activities
If you’re feeling motivated, you can get a head start on fall by creating classes for next year. You can complete each step of the class set up process ahead of time, including:
- Enrolling returning students
- Enrolling incoming students via email
- Setting up a Grading Calendar
- Setting up a Grading Scale (you can reuse an existing scale)
- Building and assigning units
You can also schedule assignments for a future date so that students don’t see them until you’re ready. Alternatively, you can assign a special “Summer Practice” unit. Some teachers customize the SmartMusic Awards parameters so students who practice over summer break can be rewarded when they return.
Really want to go the extra mile? Preview potential concert rep by taking a look at the SmartMusic library, or build your favorite warm ups in a notation program and upload them to SmartMusic so you can use them with students.
See You Next Year!
Since this is the SmartMusic blog, we of course need to also mention that any time – end of the school year included – is a great time to renew your subscription. New pricing options make it more affordable than ever before. Plus our sales team are ready to make it easy. They can help you take advantage of “use it or lose it” funds, make sure you have the correct number of educator and student seats, and plan ahead for next year’s budget.
Additional Resources
Check out this related archived webinar: