I am not impressive to my fourth grader, nor are most (all?) of the things I share with her. But… there are some extraordinary, dare I say magical, things that exist in the world that did not exist when we were all kids. And I’m okay with her not being impressed with things I share. But… I can still hold onto those magical things for her, and for her generation. In this episode, hear about just how special and transformative GarageBand is for me, and how it really can help us reimagine what learning can look like with all students.
Transcript (auto):
Hey, there I am Bill Selak, and this is me talking. I guess that’s why I named the podcast Bill Selak Talks. So I’m going to talk with you wearing three different hats. I normally talk just in Ed Tech, Human Educator Leader space. I’m going to do that. So Ed Tech Educator Tech Director, brain hat. Let’s go with hats, not brains. That’s one of my hats. Second hat is going to be parent and the third hat is going to be, let’s call it the keeper of the magic. So you know Ed Tech, right? You care about doing extraordinary things with students, with other teachers around technology parent. I have a fourth grader. She is my oldest. And there’s a new era that we are entering into. If you have a kid that is older than a fourth grader, you are now giggling at me and you’re like, you’re not in your head. I know where he’s going. We’re not at the Tween yet. We’re like at the preteen. I guess Tween is preteen. So the pre preteen where she knows better, obviously. But also she’s not impressed with things that I say. Other people can say them and they will be impressive. I’m going to even like, there have been examples where I have taught a teacher how to do a thing. They have done that with her. And then she said, look how brilliant and smart this teacher is. We did a cool thing. I was like, yeah, I helped the teacher do that. That’s happened a couple of times. The point is that it’s just like I am not impressive anymore. And that’s okay. This is a new era. Here’s how I’m not impressive. Lately. My kids are, like, hopping in the GarageBand doing a thing. Mostly they’re on Minecraft. So it’s not like they’re like musical prodigies at home, although they could be they wanted to hop on and do like, a quick little recording something with the garage band. I hopped on my little soapbox that I think you’ve heard about just how magical it is that an iPad can help you record an entire band if you want. You don’t even need a real drummer anymore. You can just click the drummer track, grab some loops, bring it over, customize the drummer. Like, it’s so cool. And even now, as I’m getting excited about how exciting and what the possibilities are for every human, it’s not just adults. It’s not just professional musicians. It’s not like music students. It’s kindergarteners that can write songs in garage band. This is amazing. And so I start to share this and she cuts me off the fourth grader that she is, and she goes, I know, dad graduate is so great. Blah, blah, blah. Uh it’s amazing. And this is why you went to College, which um is true. So, like, at the very least, I’ll give her credit that she’s listening to me and knows that I legitimately went and got my undergrad in music because I wanted to be able to record my own music and record bands because I love the idea of having, like, a song in your head or being able to get together with a group of humans, write a song, play a song. But then to have that captured, like, it’s so ubiquitous. We have music all around us, and I think so many people don’t understand how extraordinary it is to be able to play a song and then have that captured, like, it’s so cool. So she at least gets that’s a thing. And that’s a thing that we do now. But the fact that you can do all of that is not amazing or magical or even impressive to most fourth graders. And I think it’s a similar thing for us as adults. I’m assuming you’re just an average aged adult human. When I see an airplane above me, I don’t stop and go, oh, my um gosh, like that. That is cool. Look at that. Look at that metal tube flying through the air. And you can go from La to San Francisco in an hour. That’s wow, that is cool. She’s like, oh, that’s a plane. Same thing with a car. I don’t think I can drive home in minutes, not days. I wouldn’t drive in days. I would walk or take a horse. I don’t ride a bike. Um but these things are not impressive. Pencils are not impressive to me in a similar way that I think for fourth graders and probably all kids like K Twelve, these devices are not inherently impressive, and I think that there are us. Now, this is where you need to be kind of around my age. Like, if you kind of grew up preinternet and now you’re an adult with the Internet, you grew up presmartphone, and now you have a smartphone, um there’s the ability to live in the current space. But then remember what we used to have. And this is what I think we can call the keepers of the magic, knowing at the very least who’s that in this movie. And as you’re watching the movie at home, what do you do? You open up IMDb, you look at it and you’re like, oh, that’s who they were. I used to spend months as a kid trying to figure out even in high school and College, not even just a kid, even early adulthood until IMDb was really a thing. What’s that person from, it would be months and you’d like to go out with your friends and hang out and you’re like, hey, have you seen this movie? Where is that person from? And that was it. You either figured it out or you didn’t. Similar with song lyrics. My goodness. My friend Chris loved Pearl Jam. And I had um the guitar tab book. Like, that teaches you how to play the notes on guitar, the um sheet music. And I had the lyrics. So my dad had a home office, which was like a big deal in the nineties with a copier. So I photocopied the sheet music, the guitar tab, and he had the lyrics. That’s how we used to get lyrics. Or you would just, like, look at the liner notes. So I think being able to live in both of these spaces where we are now kind of not like the world’s knowledge at our resources and fingertips and literally in our pockets or purses or whatever. Uh satchels. Let’s go with Satchels. But we can also remember time. Pre iPad, pre smartphone, pre garage band, in this case, where you couldn’t just record your own music. Like the intro. Here’s the intro again, right? So that’s me playing guitar. The main melody. There’s two guitars. If you’re wearing headphones in your left and the right ear, you can hear the chugga chugga, the palm muted, playing bass. And then I don’t play the drums. I play the drums poorly. But those drums, that was me dragging a drummer track into GarageBand. Here it is. Here’s me not needing to play the drums, but being able to record drums. That’s amazing. My fourth grader doesn’t think that’s amazing, and that’s okay. But I think what I’m stuck on right now is that I think it’s part of our job, certainly as parents, to be like, blah, blah, back in my day, but it’s not like back in my day, we just have to hike and now we have cars. But back in my day, we had a four track, um and then we don’t. We have garage band. But it’s like it’s holding on to that magic that any kid at the school I’m at right now can record their own music. That is some seriously cool stuff. That is some seriously magical stuff. And I almost wonder if it’s more magical that it’s not magical to them. Obviously, school is a place where I can write a song for a report, where I can write a song with my friends because I’m bored. Um where I can write a song for this project, where I can write a song and then play it at the walkathon or the talent show or whatever. There’s so many different ways where students can use these amazing tools to do all of these cool things. And if we switch just a little bit to kind of wrap it up, hop on the project based learning. So box were just a little bit so much of when I was in high school, as my kids call it in the 19 uh hundred s, which is technically true. Most of the way we got assessed, there weren’t a lot of options. The more interesting thing was kind of standard from the class and give her a report. But for the most part, it’s like multiple choice tests or written test. That was kind of it to demonstrate your knowledge poster board, you know, like, there wasn’t a lot. But now, like, dude, our kids and I’m talking about just songwriting. They could just open up GarageBand and just talk right? And if that’s too complicated for people, open up, flip grid, open up voice memos hop into seesaw so many very simple ways where kids can just hit the record button, talk with just their voice or talk with video and explain their thinking, explain their learning, aim the camera down at whatever they just wrote and explain why they did what they did, aim the camera and have them kind of hourly annotated the drawing or the diagram they just made so many exciting possibilities for kids to be able to create, to demonstrate their learning. And I think as we go through and pivot away from just consumption with kids towards more creation with kids, there’s a magical place to the outro music. There’s a magical place where we can hold just how cool that is because we certainly grew up with not nearly this robust technology and a lot of us probably start our careers without this much robust technology. God, it’s really exciting. So go out there, get out there and create do some amazing things with your students. Don’t forget about that magic that we have in our pockets called garage band called phones called I’ve had it’s an exciting time my name is Bill Selak this has been me talking.\
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