I have never quite made up my mind about homework.

Sometimes I think it is entirely pointless, and having seen the unnecessary strain it can put on family life, think that children would be best left alone in their non-school hours to fill their time as they wish. What is a certain truth is that homework for the sake of homework is a criminal waste of time.

So, what is homework for? Especially in music, when the majority of what we’re doing in class is (hopefully) practical. We can’t expect students to practise what they’ve done in class at home, as we can’t assume that they have the necessary instruments, or the opportunity to work together as they might need to.

Homework policies generally state something about homework having to consolidate and extend work in lessons. In music, we do this in a somewhat oblique way: we invent a whole range of tasks that have a range of possible purposes:

• to fulfil the school’s homework policy (this, in itself, is not a good enough reason to set homework, in my opinion)
• to keep up with other subjects, especially at a time when music’s place in the curriculum feels threatened
• to cover some background information that there isn’t time for in lessons
• to give an opportunity for some written work/give music an ‘academic’ side
• to keep students in touch with their music work between lessons
• to make links between what students do in class and their personal musical lives
• to provide opportunities for students to do prep for lessons, or listen back to and reflect on work in progress

What follows are some rambling thoughts about how my approach to homework has evolved over the last few years, and an explanation of where I am at now.

A journey through formats

What has become very apparent over the last few years is that a good platform for sharing words, music, pictures, and documents online is immensely helpful for everyone concerned in the business of homework.

Our dallyings with Moodle – our school’s choice of VLE platform – were short and unsatisfactory. It was ugly, clunky, and just didn’t do what we wanted it to do. Uploading anything bigger than the smallest mp3 file took about a week, and students couldn’t navigate around it easily. As our SLT promoted it, we spurned it heartlessly and looked elsewhere.

As many forward-looking music departments did at the time, we hit upon NUMU as a safe and free online platform that looked like it would do what we wanted it to do. But, still clunky, and uploading stuff could be fiddly. I never did get the hang of uploading video. Spurned again after a year of enthusiasm.

So, we decided to set up our own WordPress blogs, having seen the great examples of people like Anna Gower and Jackie Schneider, who have got the art of music class blogging down to a very fine art. Being tarts, we all forked out for a dotcom domain name, and misswerrysclasses was born. I could make it look pretty, and organise it exactly how I wanted to. We ran into problems with uploading audio files as space soon ran out. Soundcloud was nice for a bit, and then they took the record button off their app (plus free accounts were limited) so Audioboom was our saviour for uploading audio. It took a bit of effort to get students to leave all but the most basic feedback on their work, but everything like that needs a bit of training…

Now our school has forsaken Moodle (finally) for the green pastures of Office 365. A one-stop shop of multi-media sharing. Woop woop!

There are teething problems, of course. We are still getting Sharepoint to do exactly what we want it to do, and struggle to make it as visually appealing and simple to navigate as we want it to be. But with unlimited storage, we can upload audio to our hearts’ content. Video is more tricky and needs to go via a link to an unlisted YouTube clip – but this is easy enough (I have never really understood the fuss some schools make about YouTube – if kids are not identified by name, surely it’s not a problem? And unlisting videos makes them impossible to find without a link…).

Year 7, in particular, have taken to Yammer – 365’s own, institution-based (and wonderfully square) version of Facebook. In Yammer, you can set up groups for your classes, publish homework, establish dialogue about recordings of work in progress, all that. Kids need to be taught how to use it – just saying ‘it’s just like Facebook’ doesn’t really do the trick, especially when it comes to them uploading their own work. But the best times are when they are genuinely chatting about their work, asking for and receiving help from each other. Or, alternatively, casting judgement – this is my favourite example:

Homework content

I went through a phase of setting really meaty, research-based projects for homework. So, for example, a term-long project on 12-bar blues would have a research project all about the civil rights movement, segregation, and the evolution of musical styles in C20th America.

The most academic students lapped this up, and the work they produced was amazing. For everyone else, though, it was a complete ball-ache, and they hated it. Marking it was laborious, and ultimately I had to make a decision as to whether all that effort was actually worth it. Despite the plus points, the eventual answer was no.

The illusion of choice

One of the most successful aspects of the way I ‘do’ homework now – apart from the reduced time it takes me to mark it – is students’ positive response to the illusion of choice. They pick their tasks from a ‘menu’ of possibilities – all of which are completely acceptable, obviously – which cover a range of things from research-based writing tasks to performing and composing. Here is an example from Year 7:

The work I have got back has been nearly all excellent, and students love it. (By the way, if you haven’t discovered incredibox.com as an easy way for students to engage with music between lessons, especially texture and structure, try it now!). I have been surprised and thrilled by the performances that they produce when they are recording in privacy. They have been inspired by the possibilities of using the ever-burgeoning number of musical apps to create their own music (MadPad and A Capella are the current favourites). Coming up with the ‘menu’ is infinitely less hassle than constructing a weighty directed research project.

Until I change my mind again, there is nothing not to like about all of this.