As a small business, My Music Staff is an invaluable tool, it organises all of our lessons, finances and helps to keep us all connected.
Logging in
You will find the login page here http://www.melodymakers.uk/student-login, If you don’t have a log in yet, please contact Claire (claire@westonshaw.com) who will send over an email with your password. You can also set up multiple parent profiles, fathers, nannies even grandparents are welcome!
Virtual lessons
We do offer virtual lessons (on zoom). Logging in is quite easy, about 5 mins before lesson time comes,
Go to mymusicstaff.com page
On your next event at top right hand side
Click on Icon next the word ZOOM
This will take you to the program and then you will need to click on start video in the bottom left corner.
For security some of the teachers have a password, they will contact you with this directly.
Home
In the home screen you can see a summary of your recent Practice, Make-Up Credits, Upcoming events, Recent News and Recent Lesson Notes.
In the upper right hand corner you can check and update your profile settings, please correct spelling errors in your name or address. Could I please ask you to check your details are correct, name spellings, address etc
Student profiles
As parents we are always looking for safe ways to give our children safe responsibilities and this is one of those times. We can set up student profiles so that we can send lesson notes directly, they can also download online resources, record their practice time and even book make up credit. The student accounts are secure and have access to everything except the financial aspects.
Reminders
As we all have such complicated and busy lives My Music Staff can send out emails and text messages before each lesson. These are easily disabled by either clicking on the disable reminders link at the bottom of the reminder email or profile settings at the top right corner by clicking your name, and changing the settings in the profile.
The Calendar
In general we run a 39 week academic year, and we plan five terms in advance, each term following the Merton Council academic dates.
As mentioned earlier, we also include three make-up days per term. You can find all the relevant dates:
In the calendar. (which you can also synchronize with your online calendar)
We also send out email updates at the beginning and end of each term, as well as the half term
On our website here: https://melodymakers.mymusicstaff.com/Term-Dates
Or on each invoice we include a termly newsletter which we upload for https://melodymakers.mymusicstaff.com/News-Letter.
You may find it helpful to know that you can have two views in the calendar either; Everything (which also includes open sessions - handy for booking make-up credits), or just the dates that are relevant to you. By clicking show ‘Everything’ or ‘Student name’ you can also change the view to day, week or month.
How to cancel a lesson
If you need to miss a lesson the easiest way is to do it through the portal, you can do it by whatsapp, email or txt to Claire (07971224821, claire@westonshaw.com). But please write it down as we can not be responsible for remembering verbally.
To cancel through the portal, you can do this by either cancelling the session in the home page (click on the lesson and click cancel) or you can look in the calendar and cancel it there (just select the date, click on the lesson and click ‘Cancel Attendance’). Your teacher will automatically receive an email letting them know which lessons have been cancelled, it will also be removed from theirs, and yours, calendar and a make up credit will be issued automatically.
How to book a make up lesson
Being an independent family run small business we understand that at times we all need a little bit of leeway. With that in mind we have organised our business to give everyone a little bit of occasional freedom. For example, If you need to miss a lesson we refer to these as ‘Make Up Credits’, our policy is here https://melodymakers.mymusicstaff.com/Make-up-Lesson-Policy. All of our staff work an extra 3 days in the holidays per term to make these sessions up. Any lessons that are cancelled are recycled into open sessions for other students to use. It's a much more efficient use of everyone's time.
The calendar is the second menu down on the left hand side, you can check how many Make-Up Credits are owed to in a two places:
In the home screen between last invoice and Upcoming events.
In the Contact Info menu (3rd down on left hand side) you will see Studio Information and My Teachers.
Contact
In this menu you can see contact details of the studio and your teacher and how many Make-Up Credits are owed to you.
News Feed
From our point of view this news feed is an incredibly useful tool, we duplicate any important messages in here so that it's easy for you to keep up to date. You can see it on the front screen nice and easy.
Accounts and Invoices
You can see all the transactions, charges and payments under the accounts menu and the invoices under the invoices menu. The system uses a Balance date, which should be the final date for the term, but can be changed for any date that you are interested in.
We try to always issue invoices a month before the end of the previous term.
Attendance
You can see your attendance by looking at your attendance menu on the left side of your screen. It has a summary of the percentage of attendance over the last 90 days. You can also see reports of your lessons and lesson notes. This report has many filters, Event, Date/time, Teacher, Day of the Week, Duration, Attendance, Notes.
Lending Library
This is where you can see any books that have been loaned to you. Our teachers keep a resource of books however most of it is out of our personal collection, it's important that we keep track of where they are.
Online Resources
This is an incredibly useful resource, it functions as a secure ‘cloud drive’. There is a studio folder where we keep the following;
ISM Members' Code of Conduct.pdf
ISM Safeguarding & Child Protection Policy, Code of Practice.pdf
Make up lesson policy - updated August 2021.pdf
Melody Makers Terms and conditions August 2021.docx.pdf
Additionally, each teacher has a folder where they can share resources with their students.
Practice log
This is where you can keep track of your home practice, the practice timer is a particularly useful tool, it can help you track how long you have practiced, just press start and stop when you are playing. You can also manually Add Time, in there you can upload attachments and send the log to your teacher.
Repertoire
Here is where you can see which books/sheet music you're working on, you can see which you have completed and when.
Email History
There can be issues with spam filters accepting emails from within our system, if this is you, please let Claire know (claire@westonshaw.com) and i’ll make a point to contact you for any important emails.
You can check your emails in the email history, however it does only include the ones directly from the system. So If you have a conversation on email directly with your teacher then you will find copies of that in your sent message in your email box.