Week 2 Reflection

Typically, I consider myself to be a somewhat creative individual, however it became evident this week that I am a situationally-dependent creative individual.  The week began strong with reading Howard Gardner’s thoughts regarding creativity. Initially, I responded to his reading by asserting that perhaps education in the United States should focus more on rigor and relevance since opportunities for creativity abound in our society, agreeing with several of Gardner’s points. I changed my view after reviewing the postings of several of my colleagues in which it was suggested that we encourage creativity when our students are young and continue to foster this creativity through their school years. These postings caused me to reflect on my own childhood, my early years in education, and my professional/personal experiences as an adult. Creativity was not fostered in my parent’s home. I was the eldest of five children and most everything was a group effort with little encouragement for creativity as an individual.  I believe a combination of my inherent reserved-temperament and lack of fostered creativity when I was much younger helped engrain both a reluctance of going out on a limb with an idea and a lack of ability to create without a template! No, I am not being too hard on myself nor am I finding fault with the parenting stye of my mother and father but rather I acknowledge the importance of fostering creativity in students regardless of their grade. 

Okay, all that said, I struggled with expressing my creativity within the realm of digital technology specifically creating a video. I had a great PSA idea about an issue that impacts my passion as a beekeeper, I gathered my photos from my iPad and my iPhone and spent what seemed to be hours importing additional photos online, and I wrote a script that corresponded to each photo. I thought I had it made until I went to YouTube and began creating. It wasn’t until I had moved the photos into the video template (once you do this you cannot go back or at least that is what I found) that I discovered that you cannot add a voice-over directly into a video created on YouTube. Honestly, I thought I was going to cry! Well, maybe it wasn’t all that bad but I was pretty disappointed.  I ended up creating slides in Keynote in order to include text that explained parts of the video because I couldn’t figure out how to add text to a slide. I googled “how to add text to a YouTube video” but didn’t have any luck. I know creativity takes time and patience but in this situation, I had neither.

As I thought about how I might plan a class video project for my English class, I wondered how in the world I could expect, never mind help, my students to develop a creative video when I could not do it myself. But then I remembered……my students seem to be very knowledgable about using digital technology and most likely could help me. I like the idea of having students create book trailers about books we have read in our English class and am certain they would prefer such an assignment over creating a…..poster! I reviewed book trailers created by students and marveled at how 

I think what frustrated me most about the “Make a Live Video” assignment was that although I had a great idea and was excited about actually making a video, I felt dead-in-the-water when it came to creating what I had envisioned (slides, slides with text, voice-over, music). I created a project using iMovie when I participated in the Southern Maine Writing Project and recall that adding voice over and sound took time but I was able to eventually figure it out through trial and error. I guess I thought it would be easier using YouTube within which to create my video because, well YouTube is all about videos! At any rate, I am going to attempt to create another video using iMovie and then upload it to YouTube to prove to myself that you can teach an old dog new tricks.