Practice is critical in music training; however, many students struggle with spending optimal time or using effective strategies to practice. LessonLink, an app available for Android and IOS, was designed to improve students' music learning experience by gamifying independent practice, providing a platform for students to learn and apply self-regulation strategies, and maintaining communication with their teachers between weekly face-to-face lessons.
LessonLink is designed to make teachers' workflow easier by organizing lessons & assignments and enabling communication with
students (as well as their parents) about their progress, performance, and goals.
Students' interface allows students to seek help and receive teachers' feedback to help them mitigate misunderstandings while practicing at home. With this interface, students can view their assignments, record their practice, earn badges and rewards, and compete with other students. More importantly, students are always informed of what area they need to work on to improve their skills.
Studies have shown that parental involvement in students' learning activities strongly correlates with their enjoyment, motivation, performance, and commitment. LessonLink's parent interface allows parents to stay in the loop on how their children perform in each class, communicate with other parents, and customize incentives for their children to want to practice at home.
Students' motivation has a linear relationship with satisfaction, positive emotion, higher-order thinking, and behavioral persistence. LessonLink provides a fun, engaging, and incentivized learning environment to motivate students to practice. In this gamified platform, students compete with other students, earn points to advance in the quest, earn badges, and redeem customized rewards.
Self-regulated learners are active participants in their own learning process, and they can self-assess, self-help, and actively adjust their strategy to control their learning. LessonLink allows students to self-set weekly practice goals (e.g., frequency and duration of each practice session), self-record to monitor and evaluate their own practice, document their progress, and reflect on their practice sessions.
LessonLink allows teachers to create and manage courses and assignments with video demonstrations. In addition, teachers can create grading criteria and reward points for each lesson based on categories they set, this allows parents and teachers to see what categories (performance or behavior) are satisfactory and what areas need improvement.
LessonLink allows teachers, parents, and students to communicate during the week. With the communication functionality, LessonLink allows (1) students to seek help from their teachers when a problem occurs during practice, (2) students to connect with other students in the same studio, (3) teachers to make an announcement to all students/parents at once; (4) teachers to showcase students’ performances,
LessonLink's creator Adeline Brewer has been teaching piano for twenty years. Over the years, she realizes that many of her students struggle with practice at home. They either don't devote enough time to practice or do not know how to practice. Mrs. Adeline has seen the pattern that when students keep showing up in the lesson unprepared, their skill development remains static, leading them to a downward spiral of diminishing motivation and self-efficacy and ultimately withdrawing from taking music lessons altogether. Since practice is so critical in music education, a music student is typically expected to practice consistently (i.e., 20 to 30 minutes daily) to reinforce the learning they received from their music teachers.
LessonLink aims to provide a practical solution to address music-independent-practice problems. After intensive research about motivation and self-regulation as a doctoral candidate in Education Technology, Mrs. Adeline designed LessonLink to transform theoretical concepts, such as self-determination theory, self-regulation learning theory, gamified learning theory, and design thinking, into a realistic way of problem-solving.
To increase students' motivation and use of effective strategies to practice, LessonLink provides students with a fun, engaging, and incentivized learning environment and tools for students to implement effective strategies to practice during the week.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.