Hello from Turkey! This post finds me enjoying my holiday in my wife’s home country with her family. It also finds me struggling with a Turkish keyboard, which has extra characters on it (so don’t be surprised to notice a few more typos than normal in this one) and my mother-in-law’s painfully slow Internet connection. I will be back in the office at Korea International School on January 5th, but for now I’m in Izmir, Turkey.
Creativity and technology go hand-in-hand these days. As proof of this statement I offer myself as evidence. Six years ago I first used Movie Maker. Immediately my wife and I started producing, directing, and starting in our own movies about ourselves and our travels. It was a wonderful new way to share our adventures with our families and friends, but I wouldn’t call the final products much more than gloried home movies or fancy photo albums. My students on the other hand began making actual music videos and short films.
Two years ago, I was given a MacBookby my new school in our first year as a 1:1 school. My experiences with students in the past allowed me to feel free turning my new students loose with the technology. They compiled some interesting and amazing projects with little direction given and small amounts of experience with such open-ended and large projects (Korea being a country where education means listen to the teacher and spew out for the test, repeat). I was truly proud of them, but it was my own journey that began to interest me as an educator.
I have never been musically nor artistically inclined. Growing up I hated music and art courses, because everything I did was always wrong. My stick people were too stick-like; my voice too loud for the music our teacher chose. Reading and writing came more easily to me, which was wonderfully lucky for me, because our educational system favors those skills. I was successful and forgot about attempting anything artistic. (Just ask any of my students about my ill-fated attempts to draw pictures for them on the whiteboard.) Then came GarageBand and literally everything changed for me.
Now only two years later, I have created more than 35 of my own songs, recorded a poetry reading and a few of the stories I normally tell in class. (Some samples can be found on my previous blogs.) All original and creative content that I did not have the ability to do only two years before. Meanwhile, with iMovie, my home videos have begun to have the look and feel of actual attempts at film making. A new side of me is developing and maturing, an artistic side that never existed before. Imagine what we can unlock for our students! Imagine what we can unlock within ourselves.
