What reference material do you carry around? Is it available in a digital format, or can you digitize it easily? Digital references are much easier to search than digging through book glossaries.

3. Digitize Your Work

I used to send students home with printed music practice charts, which gave a concrete idea of what to practice, with a grid of boxes to check off when students had done the work. In the beginning, when students were still working to establish a practice routine, these charts were essential. As the students got older, I moved some of them to individual practice journals that they keep for themselves. For the new students, though--and younger ones who enjoy making the checkmarks for the chart--I wanted to keep using the charts. I couldn't just type them, as I was using a PDF chart found online.

Craigslist served up the answer this time. I picked up a super inexpensive older tablet PC there, the HP TC1100, to experiment. Since then I've upgraded to the HP 2730p. With Windows 7 and OneNote, I can keep all the practice charts on the computer. With the active Wacom digitizer and OneNote's ink tools, I can fill out the chart just like I did with the paper charts before.

(The Wacom digitizer, by the way, is much more than a stylus. It's a pen that actively communicates with the computer, which sees only the pen and not your hand, making for a very natural writing experience. It also allows the computer to "see" the pen before it touches the screen, allowing for hovering and rollover gestures.)