One of the things we did today in class was look at iMovie and Audacity. I’ve had very limited experience with video editing or audio recording in my life, and before today even the thought of having to work with programs like iMovie  or Audacity would have made me anxious. However, after immersing myself in these program today for only a few minutes, my fears have begun to subside. iMovie was quite easy to use – I feel like after being exposed to it even for this small amount of time, I could go home and produce a piece of work that would be leaps and bounds ahead of what I could have produced when I got up today. The same goes for Audacity. This is encouraging for me as a future teacher, as I am now confident I would be capable of introducing programs like these to my students so that they don’t have to live, like I did, with an irrational fear of such useful tools. Instead, they can be introduced to these applications early, and quickly learn what fun they can have with them! See below for Youtube tutorials on both iMovie and Audacity.

A week ago, I watched Most Likely to Succeed, a film that follows grade 9 students at High Tech High, an alternative technical school in San Diego, California over the course of a school year. This was an enlightening film that provoked thought on how we view learning, curriculum, and the role of students and teachers in an educational setting. It is definitely worth a watch to anyone with children, or anyone interested in the educational discipline.  What I took most from this film was that the degree to which an educational setting engages students is one of the most, if not the most, important factors in determining whether or not a certain school or type of schooling is right for a given child. Historically, in Western/European culture, we have the tendency to think about things in ways that are overly binary. This has been the case with, for example, sexuality, gender,  or politics – we want to make our lives easier by categorizing people as gay or straight, male or female, conservative or liberal. The same can be said for schooling, where we have had the tendency in the past to think that there  is a right way to educate, or there is a wrong way – someone is either smart, or they are stupid. However, rather than making life easier for ourselves, we have really only made things more difficult. We have largely inhibited our ability to progress as a society because we have led a large percentage of our population to become disengaged with the education system, and the way in which we have been led to believe there is one ‘correct’ way for everyone to learn. As time has passed, however, Westerners have begun to become increasingly aware of an inarguable fact: people learn in different ways, at different speeds, and in different environments. So while I do not disagree that conventional educational setting are the right fit for some people (this type of setting was a good fit for me in more ways than not), what Most Likely to Succeed illustrated for me is that there are many people out there who would thrive in unconventional learning environments, either as students or as teachers. The degree to which many students and teachers at High Tech High were engaged, both with their work and with each other, was proof of that. Engagement sparks motivation and passion, and there are no better tools for a young person heading into the real world than those. We need more choice and creativity when it comes to education if we are to unlock the potential in as many people as possible, and this film is a testament to that necessity.