Getting Started with WeVu for Music Teaching

Getting Started with WeVu for Music Teaching (PDF: Getting Started with WeVu Music Teachers)

1. This is a quick guide to set up your WeVu site and inform your students so they can get accounts, get attached to your site, and start uploading video (or audio).

2. 30 day Trial then Monthly Payment. You signed up for a Free Personal WeVu Site, you activated your account and got your site called “Firstname Lastname Personal Site”. You should leave that one as is (Free forever, but without uploading, just Youtube storage). For your teaching, you’ll create your main teaching site (not one per student) and after 30 days you’ll get a popup where you can select a Music Teacher monthly plan at $14USD/month for up to 25 students and unlimited videos and pdf files.

3. Create the new site. This will be your main teaching site. It will be the one you pay for with a monthly subscription. Do this on the Manage page (from the left menu) and choose “New Site”. Give it a name like “Jane Doe Music Teaching”. You’re the owner already, so there’s no need to put in additional Owners unless you’re sharing the site with co-teacher.

4. Next, note that there are Site Settings. In fact, for most music teachers, our default settings are all you need. One of them is to allow students to upload and share to you (and specific Assignments you create) but not share to any other students in the site. That makes each student private from all other students. So you can leave all the settings as is unless you would like to have peer commentary among students.  Have a look so you know those options are there if you want to change settings later or create additional sites for group dialogue, or public viewing, or group commenting.

5. Inviting your students. Next is inviting your students, even if they’re already in your Free Personal Site. You’ll need to add them to your paid teaching site and make sure they upload to that site from now on. To do this:
Staying on the Manage screen, there are two ways to do this:

A) By sending a link: On the right side of the screen in the Invite Users box, just click the “Copy Link for Users” button. That’ll copy the link to your clipboard and you can put it in emails to your students. Make sure you tell them that they only need the link once and from then on they can log in at https://app.wevu.video/sites.

B) By adding email addresses: This way you put in their email address – or a list of them – and they’ll receive an email telling them that they’ve been added to your site. However this isn’t as good because they won’t receive this invitation with your personal instructions for how to get started and how you want them to upload.

6. Instructions for Students. You’ll obviously want to bring students on board with some instructions on how much you want them to play, how often they should upload, and some help with recording equipment. Here is our guid for uploading: https://wevu.video/support/uploading-video-and-audio-images-and-pdfs/

• We’ve found that by far the most important equipment for them is a USB microphone attached to their computer. Phone microphones are ok, but they’re nowhere near as clear as a USB mic.
• If you would like to give the students homework instructions or guidance, we have a suggestion for how to do this. We're creating materials for this, but for now, just drop us a line at support@wevu.video and we'll guide you.

7. Giving Feedback. Once students have uploaded, you’ll get to their videos from the main Watch & Discuss page. Students’ videos appear in a list in the Media dropdown near the top-right of the screen. They are in reverse chronological order – most recent first. You can always search the media dropdown list by keyword or name.

8. Assignments. From the main screen you can go to Assignments if you want to create assignments that students hand in to. These are just a container for you, making it easier to organize the uploaded videos. Note that Assignments are site-wide; you can’t make them visible only to particular students; though you can name them with a student name if you like. Each student has their own default ' hand-in' box anyway, that is where uploads go when they just upload and share to you.

• If you want to record yourself and share with all students, you just share the video with “Everyone in the site”. You can also set a file’s sharing status to an individual student if you want to send them a video or audio file or a pdf (of a score, perhaps).

9. Email notifications when students upload. You get email notifications when there’s an upload to your site. But students do not get email notifications when you make comments. That’s a feature we’re working on. So you’ll have to ask them to review your comments or ask them to check regularly.

Please contact support@wevu.video if you get into any difficulty at any time. We’ll try to get back to you in a few hours. You can also contact us for billing questions. If you’re part of a school and want to talk about a site license for the school, contact Fred Cutler at fred.cutler@wevu.ca. Oh, and send us feedback and suggestions anytime!