Beyond School

Not to beat this GarageBand horse too hard, but Wes Fryer’s Shanghai workshop last week really did lift my creative skullcap. This GarageBand composing is fascinating to me, because it has implications for revolutionizing musical creativity in the same way that blogging has revolutionized writing for me (and so many of you).

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: blogging did revolutionize my own relationship to writing, and radically so. I’m my own datum: before blogging, I surely wrote no more than a handful of reflective pieces per year from my first year of college in 1981 until the end of 2006. Do the math: 25 “I want to be a writer” years of, say 5 pieces per year (and that’s a generous estimate), and we get a total of 125 pieces over two and a half decades. (Interestingly, I did write a lot of lengthy, essayistic emails over some of those years, but they were always to an audience of one, obviously. I note this because emails share with blogs that real audience.)

Then, on Jan 1 of this year, I begin blogging about something I care about, and nine months later, how much have I written? About 325 posts.

Similarly, I always wanted to write music. I did not learn an instrument as a child, and tried to catch up as a college student in my early 20s. I took piano, guitar, the fundamentals of music and, due to an obsession with Plato as a starry-eyed freshman, I even took a year of music theory (voice leading and counterpoint). I’m sure I’m one of very few people in the world to take music theory without the musicianship to go along with it.

But I’m glad I took those theory classes. They did teach me structural, textural and what I want to call architectural things about music that make me “hear” music, and “see” its structure, better.

And with GarageBand (and Wes Fryer’s simple demonstration of his own composing workflow, which just made things click for me), I can finally put that old, inert, theoretical knowledge to use - 25 years later. In the past two days, I’ve composed more music than in the past 25 years.

And here’s something more interesting along these lines. Jason, my favorite teacher in the high school - I’ve blogged about him several times here, because he collaborated in a two-teacher/four-classroom history wiki with me last year, and then took off into his own wiki projects after that - heard that funk song I made yesterday. He listened to me explain Wes’ workflow.

A day later (today), he comes into my room with his MacBook agape like a clam holding a pearl, and indeed it held just that. He said, “I took your challenge, dude….and this is what I made today.”

It’s the first tune in the Ning music player I’m embedding below. It is Jason’s FIRST composition. Please, please, please give it a listen. There’s something of value in the fact that a teacher discovers his or her own creativity, perhaps even an untapped “intelligence” (in Gardner’s sense), as Jason surely did with this. He blew me away. (And yes, that’s him singing on the minimalistic vocal tracks.)

My point - and forgive the braindump here, where it’s my bedtime but I want to catch this - is this: maybe teaching teachers to think of computers and tech as tools for their profession should come later; maybe encouraging them to discover their own empowerment and pleasure, their own inner do-er and creator of whatever sort - writer, artists, composer, photographer, radio host, filmmaker, cartoonist, on and on and on - maybe that’s the key to converting the Old Dogs.

Because listen to what Jason made. After his are my two “first drafts.”

(And that Ning? My principal made that for our High School staff! Things are happening fast these days.)

My last shot: if you don’t know me, you should know that my school just went 1:1, and the laptops we decided to force students and teachers to use was a MacBook. iLife (of which GarageBand is a component) was a big reason for that. Look at what iLife is letting teachers discover about themselves.

We’re in month two of “the switch” to Apple. I’m hearing more and more of the early complainers already acknowledging that they don’t even want Windows on their Macs anymore.

So if you need evidence for your own 1:1 planning and persuasion, get in touch. I’ll offer all the anecdotals you want.

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A little more fun from the afterglow of the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference….

I took Wes Fryer’s workshop on how to compose music using GarageBand, and walked my Web 2.0 activity block students through it by creating a funk song in about ten minutes (okay, it’s a one-minute fragment, really, needing a bridge, chorus, and so forth - but it’s a start). They loved watching me play the fool and sing funk for the vocal track, and duplicating it to make a “deep soul” harmony track.

Fun and games? Yes. Learning? Yes yes yes! Why? No copyright violation if you create your own songs; more engagement; more “learning to learn” instead of memorizing ubiquitously accessible inert data (i.e., being a traditional student).

Anyway, I pulled the song from GarageBand to iMovie, then pulled photos tagged learn2cn on Flickr from iPhoto to iMovie as well, and threw a few of my photos from my own years in China as well.

The result? The funkiest Chinese travelogue ever created (and the worst mismatch of image and soundtrack known to humankind). Featuring funky guest stars Jeff Utecht, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Kim Cofino, Wes Fryer (talk about “speed of creativity” - Wes taught me the GarageBand skills to make this song in about 20 minutes!), and Will Richardson.

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[Update: By the way, the student comments in the first panel are quoted from our class Ning. So are my comments in the following two panels. I'm not making this up.]

Thanks to Diane Cordell, librarian/educator and word- and image-smith extroardinaire, for inspiring me to take my first stab at ToonDo. True to my worst nature, it’s way too wordy. But damn, I have a lot to say about this: so many of my students hate poetry - because of school.

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I don’t know Nick Senger, but just discovered his blog, Teen Literacy Tips: Working to Improve the Teaching of Literature, because he linked to my Screencast-o-matic for AP Lit post. (I just love how that works.)

Nick’s blog is a keeper for Language Arts teachers. Here’s a very simple, elegant poetry movie assignment he posted about - and modeled - on his blog. The timing is perfect, since I’d planned something similar, but typically more complex than necessary. Nick reduces the task to three easy steps.

And here’s his video showing his own success at the project:

There are many more great posts at his blog. Do yourself a favor, English teachers, and blogroll this guy! Another rising edublogger to learn from! [Update: "Rising" edublogger? Nick's been doing it waaay longer than I have. He's an old pro and award-winning teacher.]

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I really love Screencast-o-matic (SOM), the free, web-based screencast creator. I’ve been using it to make short edtech tutorials for teachers (who aren’t using them, of course) for the last week. But this Saturday morning, I used it for my students in AP Literature.

A few days ago, I had them do a timed writing of an old AP Lit essay question under exam conditions–40 minutes to read a challenging poem and write an essay that could make or break their opportunity to get college credit for our course.

Many students had a hard time with it. Many didn’t manage to write more than half a page, hand-written–two small paragraphs–for the assignment. (The poetry essays are apparently always what they do worst on in the real AP exam, which is why we’re starting the year with six weeks of poetry.) So I did the assignment myself, with headphones and mic on, talking through each stage of my own approach to taking timed essay exams on poetry.

I’ll share their feedback on the value of this as a learning tool as soon as possible. Here’s how it looks (but you really should take a glimpse at the AP Lit channel on SOM itself, because it allows comments, time-stamped notes, downloads, and more. It’s awesome!) :

Part 1: Attacking the question, annotating the poem:

Part 2: Writing the essay (part 1)

Part 3: Writing the essay (part 2)

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