Using My Voice to Find My Voice

I started a draft about student voice, but put it off to ring in the new year with friends and family. And now I’m back writing about voice from a different, yet connected perspective. This time it’s about my voice, finding it and sharing it in innovative and — hopefully — helpful ways. Part of what make this piece so special to me is the unintended connectedness of two unique events.

The first event was a deck my teammate, Jennifer Nusbaum, shared with me as part of our ongoing exploration of the One Little Word project. The idea presented in the deck was to combine your one word for 2018 with sound recording and a piece of (original) art.

The second event was the start of the Empower Book Club hosted by John Spencer on Facebook. The book club started this Saturday with a reading of the Foreword by George Couros and Finding Your Voice by A.J. Juliani.

Each time I find myself involved in these type of groups and discussions, I take pride in finding innovative ways of sharing my learning. I’ve tried Snapchat and Instagram Stories, creating original graphics with quotes from the books, and adding video to this blog. This time I’m adding my voice as I learn to find my voice.

The following Couros quote is from the Empower foreword.

Your legacy as an educator is always determined by what your students do. You change the world by empowering your students to do the same. (Couros, 2017)

I’ve taken some creative license to make the sentiment more personal. I used an audio waveform graphic generator to convert my voice, recorded on GarageBand, to both a spectrogram (the background) and the lighter and smaller waveform. I then layered the two images on Pixelmator. Then I uploaded the image to iMovie and laid my audio over the top. Finally. I uploaded the file to YouTube. As I practice this workflow, I’ll write a post detailing this process.

I’m curious how you are being innovative in sharing your learning with the Empower Book Club. Remember the title of the book.