Today is May Day, but on a slightly different order, it’s May Day for www.carolbroos.com. Since August 2006 I have had a website that I posted all the creative and innovative podcasts, movies, calendars, announcements and other documents. It was so popular that parents would go there first before the school website.

The www.carolbroos.com website was born out of a belief of giving back, allowing my students to place little “baskets” to the world, step back and let others listen, watch, and comment. I never dreamed that it would transform my students, parents, administration, and myself. I propelled me to heights I never dreamed and gave my students a platform to speak digitally.

Over the course of almost six years, it had over 76,000 hits. There were more than 4,000 podcasts. Many young student started on the site and quickly created their own platform at home. It was a beacon for other music teachers to see how a 21st century music classroom can share and learn.

But, I retired in September 2011 and MobileMe will be gone June 2012. It seemed right to end this run on my own terms. I have to let go and realize that the only thing that stays the same is change. It is time to change.

So, I gave the May Day basket to others and walking home with found memories and the belief my students did change the world for only a moment.

Thanks everyone, know that is was a great ride, so ‘Happy May Day,” as of 5:00CDT May 1, 2012 www.carolbroos.com is redirected to here.

The last screenshot of carolbroos.com

Then there are those still stuck in the weeds refusing to move or participate in any new technology or event.

So how do we move those weeders to the spaceship of collaboration, innovation, and passion? Don’t give up on them. They know they are in the weeds and are hoping no one will call them on it. This is not a generational thing, although admittedly many are older, I have witnessed a young 20-something that refused to use google docs in replacement of “dropping” powerpoint files back and forth between drop boxes. “I like it my way.”

But this is my charge! Everyday seek out a weeder and help. Find that ONE thing that will get them out of the weeds. Yep, I know it’s hard and we all love to be on the spaceship of new technologies and topics. But how? First, we slowly take them to the shore, drive with them in the car to the launchpad. They will be passengers first, then when boarding the spaceship, take on a specific role of independence.

Here are some of my de-weeding stories:

• An extremely tech-phobic PE teacher that didn’t do any professional growth activities due to the new online procedure. He loved eight-track music. He was given an iPod for the PE classroom and I  helped set up his computer to sync his music. It transformed his classroom with a new speaker set and he began to research new songs. Students were connecting with him about music while they were running at the start of class.  I showed him how to setup playlists and soon realized that the radio was also on iTunes as well. Slowly introduced Podcasts and iTunes U. Then through email, I would send interesting songs I found on iTunes. I helped set up folders in mail and asked about social networking. He has become the leader of technology in the PE department, and it all started with an iPod.
• A business leader who loves to read. I suggested a Kindle.  Her comment, “I love to read with my hands.” I showed all the other possibilities that the Kindle had to offer, and she quickly she began to understand the power of having so many books at her fingertips. When I showed how easy it was to download the book and start reading, she was hooked! I introduced goodreads.com where she could connect with others that are book readers. She couldn’t believe some her best friends were on there and never told her! She now uses the Kindle for other things such as email and social networking, “It has completely changed how I read and connect!”

Notice, it starts with ONE technology and with the introduction of an additional possibility finds them out of their weeds. Get personal. Find something they use everyday, something that once they start using it, they can’t wait to see you and talk to you about it. Take the time to connect and listen to those weeders. But, if we don’t take the time, who will?

Tell me your stories of working with weeders and how you managed to get them on the spaceship?

Reading has become a passion for me to explore and learn. In junior high I did everything I could not to read, I actually hated to read. There was so much more that stimulated my mind like practicing performing, and interacting with my friends. But now I enjoy it so much, it’s a time that  I get to suspend my thoughts.

Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012. Print.  I know that the last thing that people think of me is quiet, but I adore “me” time. All those hours of practicing is also a trait of quiet people. This is a must read! In society today we value the extravert and diminish the value of the quiet introvert, The creative and innovative people are the quiet people. Artists and musicians will really enjoy this book and it explains a lot about the creative individual.

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. I attended a “chat” with Dr. Gee at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater hosted by National Lewis University and Golden Apple. His thoughts on education and how we should teach are truly enlightening.

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print. Enough said – just read it!

James, P. D., and Jane Austen. Death Comes to Pemberley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Print.   My book club read this for February, it is a classic P.D. James book. It starts slow and slowly takes you in that you can’t put it down. Suggestion: use a cheat sheet in the beginning to write down all the names of the people and how they relate to each other.

King, Stephen. 11/22/63: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2011. Print.This is my book club’s May meeting book. I am not a fan of Stephen King, however this is out of his genre. The date is the day Kennedy was shot. He is a time-traveler and goes back to prevent the assassination. I have just started it and I can’t wait until I read some chapters tonight.

Lindsay, Julie, and Vicki A. . Davis. Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2013. Print. These two educators are the leading technology innovators of our time. I loved the book and the way it is set up with qr codes and practical information for flattening your classroom. This should be required reading and participation in their projects as part of teacher education.

Keep reading, keep your imagination going!

I used the pictures I took for the 366project for the video.

I recently bumped into a parent of a student I taught a couple of years ago. He is an early adaptor, a student constantly searching for new ways to create and learn. When I had him in class,  he was making games in flash and creating his own web browsers. He created a website that won a national award with his games that he posted. By the time eighth grade came around he was interested in Photoshop. When I talked to his mom, he now is into photography.

Another student, currently in seventh grade, is a composer. His first song he ever composed was in fourth grade, the composition was the runner-up for the NAfME composition award. As he began to march through six and seventh grade, he now is working on movies with Adobe After Effects. He uses his composed music with video he created.

Cody Fry, he was an amazing student. In middle school he was the stage crew guru. In high school, he started out as a jazz piano player, reinvented himself for the stage as a lead in  the school’s musicals. He was always singing, composing, creating, and experimenting. His new video audio:cimena “Stop Breathing” and album are available on iTunes. Take the time to watch this video and listen to his music. He IS a life-long adaptor that is constantly changing and inventing new avenues of music-fused technology. You can purchase the entire soundtrack on iTunes.

These students are life-long adaptors. They are constantly changing and reinventing themselves. They teach themselves the new technologies using forums, youtube, experimentation and collaboration with others.  These students are inspired to work hours to adapt and teach themselves in creating purposeful meaningful artistic projects. Sadly, many schools are grading students on how well they follow the rules and less on how they innovate with a purpose.

These students are held in high regard with their classmates and their peers are always asking them “how did you do that?” They might be seen as absent-minded and aloof at times, it’s because they are thinking on how to do the next project, how to make it more interesting for THEM. They are purposeful students with a drive to create something innovative and different.

Now back to reality in our schools, as educators state they want life-long learners. The term originated in the 60′s and 70′s. Which can be formal and informal with no product. What they are really saying is that they want learners to learn the facts and rules. We all agree education today is different. We cannot continue to teach how we were taught. The life-long learner parade want students to learn for the sake of learning. There’s the problem. My former students create. They have a reason to learn. They are driven to learn. Think about that. What if every student had the drive to learn something new and then create using their passion; education today would quite a different place.

We should cultivate more students to be life-long adaptors, able to adopt new technologies and learn new programs. The important issue is we don’t have to know the programs or projects ourselves, simply ALLOW these students to be. Let their passions stir up the classroom. These students whatever they set their minds to will be a success and a blessing to classroom and society. They will be the brains behind and inspiration to others, just like they are and were in school with their friends. But, some of the teachers and administrators don’t see that, they see disruption and discourse. They didn’t follow the rules because they want life-long learners of learning. Learning what I ask.. ah… powerpoint?

Yes, how do we form a rubric, access, and grade? We cannot continue to have the same rules for everyone. In my music world everyone has different rules and is working with a different set of issues. That’s another blogpost where I will discuss the assessment piece of early adaptors.

So, I challenge you to seek our your early adaptors and allow them to be different. Looking at the world in a different prism, not the narrowness of a telescope. Your culture in your class will change like it did in mine. The moment I allowed these students to take flight, the rest of the class took off too. I began to expect more of myself and found myself becoming a life-long adaptor. Now, I am learning with a purpose to create.

• Attended a Beethoven class as part of the Northwestern University Alumni Continuing Education series.
• Had the freedom to attend and present at any conferences.
• Joined my church’s bible study.
• Taken two Photography classes at Chicago Botanic Garden.
• Joined my neighborhood book club.
• Been a part of the edreach.us network and currently host the aRTs Roundtable weekly podcast series.
• Had the freedom to help out my mom, who retired only months before me.

But trying to find “my people” who view the direction and issues that face the education in the world today the same why I see it is difficult to find. I was extremely lucky in my teaching career to have a positive environment of learning and respect. Also in my teaching career had an environment of fear, negativity and mistrust. I wanted that positive force in my second career. I wanted a group of educators that see the need to constantly change with the times, passionate about what they do, and view education as a personal relationship with students, colleagues, administration, and parents.

Then an opportunity arrives at my hands. An opportunity to continue my passion to change and mold the future of education. I am taking the position as “Technology Coordinator” at the Golden Apple Foundation. Their tag line “Transforming Teachers and Teaching” is exactly what I want do. I will transition as a consultant starting March 6, 2012, then work with the Golden Apple Scholars in the summer before working full-time at the Foundation in August.

This is a right turn. Music has always been a part of my life and I will continue to be a strong supporter of the arts and arts education. I will continue to mentor new music educators and give back to the music education community anyway I can. As I no longer will be teaching music, I will be using my musical skills of collaboration, passion of positive relationships with others, and the understanding of “practice,” makes perfect model in my new career.

Since I am passionate about music and have EVERYTHING with music.  Just taking pictures without involving music would be a crime, so I decided to ramp it up with a musical flair. I am a classically trained musician, so compositions take more time for me than taking a picture. I have higher standards for my compositions than my photography. One a month I will compose a composition using my pictures as an inspiration. I want to extend myself in creating thoughtful and meaningful pictures that are interesting as well as artful.

The pictures are an inspiration to my compositions I will create once a month. This month was a soundscape using soundcloud. Using technology tools is also an important element of this project for the year.

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I originally posted just the soundscape, now here is the full video. Of course I did not use all the pictures, just the pictures that made sense and worked well with the video.

The biggest battle was to figure out exactly what I wanted to do. There are days creativity flows very slowly or not at all. Other days it flows so much its hard to slow it down. On those days, work hard and let it RIP! It took me a long time to get started on this project, but once I did, wow, did the creativity flow.
Once I started gathering the material, i really don’t have a direction as to how is it going to fit together. I don’t have a problem blooming, my problem is pruning.  It is all about gathering, editing, then deleting. Creativity runs on its own time. Let the creativity come to you, don’t force it. It will happen. Allow it to happen.

I used the 16/366 (Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday) a picture I took at the Chicago Botanic Gardens in October. This is a quote from Martin Luther King “Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

I saw the staircase as someone’s life. So, when you listen you will me transported through a life.

I created this sound file in GarageBand using loops and dynamics. Dynamics is one of the important things in sound editing. If you have sounds fight themselves or just “appear” can disrupt the flow of the music. I overlapped many sound to create a flow or story.

Hopefully you will figure out what I was trying to express using sounds with music.

The first assignment is to make two signs with the graphics tool of our choice. This is part of my swiss cheese, I have limited technology skills when dealing with images, graphics, and/or photography. I rarely work with images, since I am a music teacher by profession. But, in this digital age we ALL have to be somewhat literate in music AND art. So, here is goes. I worked on this for over two days. Here are some of the beginning signs and symbols. These were all created in http://www.sumopaint.com

Here’s “staffy,” created in Text Art.  The symbol has five  lines – to represent the music staff. As the lines descend, they become clearer and clearer, to represent as we play and understand music, it becomes clearer to us.  I had many other staffs, some in different colors, some hand drawn, etc. Then I decided I had to much going on, so I created the entire file in black and white, making the blurring the important feature.

By importing the first symbol “staffy,”  I now can surround it by the rewind, play, and fast forward symbols. This represents the past, present, and future of music.

Ironically, it has taken me over an hour to get the FULL picture in this blogpost because it is not the standard square. There’s my 10%, creating and having excellence to get it the way I want it.

I have been so obsessed with this project, that I need to step back and let it sit for a while and see if it needs anymore work.

I thought that if I just cover over the ear buds while talking that would mute the call.  Ah…. doesn’t work that way. The ear buds only work for the “output” of sound, the input is on the phone itself.

Hubby came home in the middle of the two conference calls. So I started talking and catching up, etc….Yes, EVERYONE at the ICE meeting could hear!!! Well, the conference chair of ICE texted me “Carol, you are talking REALLY loud.” and another person at the ICE conference call DM’d me on twitter “Carol, please put your phone on mute.” I think I was on top of it, so it didn’t go on too long. Still, super embarrassing!! The poster co-chair was on the call and I am going to talk to her at 3:30 to see how bad it was…. Ah… Note to self – ONE online conference at a time:)

Anyone else have an embarrassing tech moment? I completely apologize to all those attending ICE, working on my tech skills as I write!