Carl Davis- President, Alabama Vocal Association Beginning, Middle, End.
The concept embodies most we do in life. Our profession is characterized by it. I love cyclical nature of our school year.
I
am grateful for the opportunity to begin, not only a new school year, but a final segment of my career as your Alabama Vocal Association President
Arnold Bennett said, “Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts”. However, what century is this? I have not visited a bank to deposit a check in over a year, choosing rather to use my smartphone to deposit checks from home. One of my goals, as your new AVA President, is to move our organization forward in its use of well- developed technologies that facilitate our current organizational behaviors--record keeping, registering for events, disseminating information and interacting with our membership. We should be suspicious of always having to determine what others are doing to chart our own course, yet we need not reinvent the wheel. I anticipate that these next two years will be characterized by testing.
Communicating with and within our organization is an essential. Maintaining a current up-to-date database of our membership facilitates our ability to communicate. In the past, your district chairman, during the month of May, attempted, with varying success, to update our district by district mailing lists. This method served us well in the paper and United State Postal Service era. Currently, however, it allows our AVA board to communicate with the membership only thru each individual district chairman. Again, what century is this? This year, we ask you to visit the AVA website and complete the following steps: 1. Visit
www.AlaVocal.org.
2.
Click the “Director Portal” 3. Enter the Case Sensitive Username and Password (all lower case) Username: pat Password: blackwell 4. Under the “Membership” Heading, Click the “Member Registration” button. 5. Enter your data.
ala breve
6. Provide feedback to the AVA board concerning your experience. Was it simple, trouble free? Did you experience any difficulty entering or submitting your information? We hope that this will be the method going forward in which we collect and maintain a current up-to-date database. In the future, we will require a yearly submission by the membership database information before allowing participation in any AVA event.
This
endeavor should yield our organization a current year-to-year reliable database of information. However, this year is a year of practice and testing. Please enter your database information and provide us with feedback.
Registering for events is essential to the functioning of our organization.
A
revised AVA Handbook with all current registration forms is now available on the AVA website.
This year, only forms
printed from the website can be used to register for events. This year, register for all events just as you have in the past. However, again I ask, “what century is this”? With our current method of registering for events, our executive secretary is required to hand type some 3,000 names from typed and handwritten registration submissions, just for all state auditions alone. We have decided to invest in Adobe FormsCentral as a possible tool for collection of event registration information. We have found the forms we already use on the website to be compatible with this system. Again, we ask that you register for all events as you have in the past. However the new forms on the website offer us added functionality.
“submit” button at the bottom of the forms on the website.
Possibly you will see a When clicking
“submit” on an AVA form, a database entry is automatically created that can be made available to the AVA board at a moment’s notice. This year, we ask that you register for all events as normal. However, if you see a submit button on the form that you are completing, try
clicking it at the completion of typing in your information. Clicking the submit button will only provide the AVA board needed information to decide if this is a method we wish to use going forward. It will not register you for an event.
As our organization progresses in the use of currently available technology, I hope you are willing to explore and test a variety of methods for our collecting of and presenting information. There will be more information concerning this presented at the Fall Workshop.
The 2014 AVA Fall Workshop will be held on the campus of the University of Alabama on Friday, September 5th. This year the fall workshop is a one day event. Rollo Dilworth will present four sessions which will address issues of effective warmups, artistry in performance and present more than twenty-three pieces throughout his four sessions.
These
twenty-three titles will be bound in octavo size and are included as part of your registration cost. We will also have 2-30 minute mini-sessions.
These sessions
will address: Sight-reading From the Adjudicator’s Prospective (Shirley Ellison) ; Tips and Guidelines for the Changing Voice (Dr. Phillip Stockton) ; Sex Differences in the Choral Rehearsal (Dr. Megan Rudolph); To Go or Not to Go—Why Directors participate in AVA Events or not (Khristi Motley). If you have taught 1 – 3 years, please register for the free New Teacher Luncheon.
Hilen
Powell and Dr. Rollo Dilworth will present some relevant information at that luncheon.
Remember to join or renew your NAfME membership before the fall workshop. I wish you all the best as you begin your new school year.
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