Ep 7: Chat with Katie Wardrobe Part 2: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Ep 7: Chat with Katie Wardrobe Part 2: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Debbie:
Here is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast Episode 7. Welcome again for the second part of my chat with Katie Wardrobe. Oh, you are in for a treat. We’re going to talk about who’s been influential in Katie’s life and a bit about gratitude. You just wait till we get to the Nuggets of Fabulous, they are going to knock your socks off. I loved Katie’s Nuggets of Fabulous. Luckily, you can replay podcasts because I think you’re going to need to listen to this a couple of times to get all of the value from it. Also, don’t forget, there’s show notes that you can go to, those notes are listing quite a few of the links and the ideas that Katie talks about. I know you’re going to love this episode.

Debbie:
I would like to know, in your journey, who’s been influential in your life professionally or personally, because like your journey has been a little different to many music teachers that are listening. Who would you say has been influential? I bet it’s hard to narrow down.

Katie:
It is hard to narrow down and there might be a few people, but I think initially from the music side and education side, both of my parents. Both of my parents were/still are and should be really retired and just resting at this point and just doing other things. But neither of them can stop. They’re both in their mid-seventies but both of them were music teachers, so that was all I knew. That was life. That was totally life. My mum, primary music teacher and my dad was secondary music teacher and conductor of orchestras and choirs and mum as well ran lots of ensembles and they both did musicals and we were both heavily into choral music, both from England, which is actually where I was born too. A huge English choral tradition in our household growing up so I spent a lot of time and my brother used to get dragged along to their choral ensemble rehearsals like this is small chamber choir type thing. We got dragged along every week to some cold church where we would be told to bring like matchbox cars and Legos to keep quiet in the corner. There were no devices to keep us happy at that time. And, you know, stick around there while they rehearsed each week, multiple rehearsals. We sat in on rehearsals for musicals while we were still young, and it was the secondary kids putting the music on, which I loved. I loved sitting and watching rehearsals for things like that but both of them are not only, they’re my parents, but they are both actually excellent musicians. Like they’re really good musicians, both of them sight read piano scores. Amazingly, that’s one of the stories of when they first met. They’re not together anymore, but when they first met, my dad was supposed to be like repetitive at some rehearsal and I wasn’t coping so well with I think it was like reading from an orchestral score during a reduction or something, I don’t know anyway. And mum just sort of said, you know, I’ll give it a go. She ended up doing that rehearsal but they both excellent musicians. I really was so influenced by them from that side of things. My ear training skills are very good because we were brought up listening and going to all those choral rehearsals and the singing were just a natural part of life. I was so shocked when I went to university and I finished school and I’m going from small handful of people doing music as an elective at year 12 and then going to university first year. I think there was 75 people in first year at Melbourne Uni and I was totally shocked that the ear training skills, I’m going to be honest, we’re not high at all. I quickly found that they split the group into an advanced group, which thankfully I was doing because I was getting kind of really, you know, sounds terrible, I was getting bored by the work we were doing in the big group together. I was really shocked that that wasn’t a thing for people doing music as their degree. It wasn’t a big highlight, so that was a huge influence on me. Just the way they both teach is quite similar. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake, like just have a go, let’s just have a go like that’s both of my parents style. It’s coincidental, I’m sure, but they’ve always been like that. My dad’s very giving like that in lessons and and my mum too so they’re really from music education point of view, definitely biggest influences. I guess other than that, there’s a few famous people, I’m not a massive, huge fan of famous people really but there’s a few people I look to like that person is classy. I would like to emulate that in some way possible. Like Cate Blanchett or Jennifer Garner, the American actress. Jennifer Garner, like she is gorgeous. I don’t know if you know her, can picture her, but she’s gorgeous and she’s just this beautiful personality and she’s really giving and down to earth. On her Instagram account, she’s goes live and she’s in sweats and her glasses on and, you know, looking unglamorous and like, I just wanted to share this thing. She’s got a golden retriever so what’s not to love? I do, too. I feel like she’s my people. And then the other people that come to mind really are a couple of people I’ve had in my life. One was a boss and one is someone I know from the online entrepreneurial world. Both of these people were just the types of leaders that I like to admire and look at and people who are quite gentle and not over the top and outgoing and loud, but just gentle people who lead quietly and respectfully and give people time and will listen to them like they’re the leaders that I really kind of look up to. One was a boss of mine when I worked at Orchestra Victoria for a while, a professional orchestra in Melbourne. And it just happened to be the general manager there and and another yeah. Just a couple of people like that. I think I pictured them in my head when I’m trying to think how would I want this to work if I was being led by someone. So yeah, a few people there I guess. Yeah. My parents really are the most.

Debbie:
Yeah. That’s beautiful and lovely.

Katie:
Lots of fun. I have to say something funny about my parents and actually going to all those choir rehearsals and things. When I was little, because you don’t know a lot of words when you’re small, hearing a lot of choir pieces, I didn’t really pick up lyrics. Then later on in life I joined those chamber choirs and was singing at the age of 16, 17, 18, and up, was singing with people who were in the choirs back when I was little and I knew the music inside out and I just didn’t know the lyrics. Then I’m reading the lyrics and it was amazing how much I knew all the different parts because I had just crept in by osmosis.

Debbie:
You know what? That’s a real comment on where my head went when you were telling that story. It’s a real comment on what’s powerful for early childhood education. Like the reason you can sight read, the reason like for you, music was a language because you were exposed to it and those people who could not sight read, they were not exposed to it. I mean, by the sound of it, you were ultra exposed but it’s like having to speak a language when you’ve never heard it spoken and at a really young age. Yes, so important that we have music education for our young kids to just build that vocabulary of sound.

Katie:
It’s funny, even with my own boys, it’s nice, you know, you kind of think, oh, I’d be lovely if my kids ended up being musicians, but I never had that as a must do. I want them to just do whatever they want to do. My eldest plays drums and my youngest plays guitar, and he’s totally and utterly obsessed with music and playing and rehearsing. He practices, like I said, you are the dream student of your teacher because he literally gets a new piece and the next week he’s practiced it so much that he can play it fluently. I said, “What does your teacher say? He must be thrilled with you”. And he goes, ‘Yeah, I think so’. I really made sure to at least if they weren’t going to do lessons in all the things musically when they were little, I at least made sure that I sang to them all the time to everything we did. We sang all the time, and they both sing in tune really well. And Josh, the guitarist, his ear training skills are really good as well. They’re not like, oh my gosh, amazing. But they’re really good. They’re really strong so he comes home with his test results and I’m like, So?? And he goes 100%. I’m like, just as well.

Debbie:
You’d be in for it if they were doing okay.

Katie:
I’m constantly testing him, but in cadences at school today, mum. Okay, tell me what you’ve learnt. Which one? Perfect. Yeah. Okay. Which is the other one? Plagal. Yeah. Okay. Which chords? I’m constantly testing him.

Debbie:
Oh awesome. He’s so lucky to have you. I imagine that your kids are certainly something for which you are very grateful from, you know, the loving way you speak about them. What else would you say? It’s just a question I like asking people for. What are you most grateful?

Katie:
Yeah, I think definitely family, of course, always comes into it. Family and friends and my dog. Oh, I love the golden retriever.

Debbie:
I did see her in that back corner of the screen for herself, but she went out.

Katie:
She may appear, she’s a girl. Yeah. I think in my work life, I’m grateful for teachers that are just brave and give things a go. Like, I know that tech can be kind of scary at times, but the pandemic forced people into it, which is not also that good as well, because then you’re under stress and you’re like, you’re really freaking out about it. But just to take on something small that’s new and have a go and just give things a try. The thing I’m so grateful for is and this sounds silly because we all need to hear feedback about what we do like. So, you know, there are hundreds of people who visit my website every day, but, you know, there’s a tiny percentage of people who actually write and say, ‘oh, my gosh, I tried that thing and it was so good with my eight students or whatever’. I can’t say enough how important those things are to me, to hear, oh my gosh, I tried this and he’s a sample of my student work. HHe’s the best one that, you know, or the funniest example that someone made today. I just love hearing those and I think I’m shy to reach out to people. I follow online and email or comment on social media posts and stuff. I’m shy about that, but I force myself to do it. I’ve started really commenting on other people’s YouTube videos that I watch. I’m learning calligraphy at the moment, so I try to leave just a little comment. I watched so many videos and think, what a great video. How useful was that? They taught that thing so well. And I’m like, no, stop and leave a comment. Just, you know, ‘thanks so much for the video. What a great video. You taught that really well or this was so useful or I learnt whatever’, just silly things like that that I’m eternally grateful when anyone does that and I will always try and respond to their comment or their email and stuff. So yeah, thank you. If anyone listening this time, it does help. It gives you the sort of the impetus to keep going and continue.

Debbie:
You need that. Yeah, you need that, don’t you?

Katie:
You really do. The weirdest thing about podcasting is that you are speaking into an abyss. You are talking to yourself. When you record a solo show, you are literally talking to yourself and you have no idea if anyone’s listening. The only way you know is because you can see download stats from your host website, but they’re like unnamed people, it might tell you which countries they’re from and that’s all. You have no idea if people enjoyed it. Was it useful? The only thing you’ve got to go by was I had a lot of downloads for that topic, so I maybe I’ll do something along those lines again. Unless people actually, on social media go, ‘Oh, thanks for that latest podcast episode, it was really useful’. You just have no idea.

Debbie:
No. Well, we’ll put out a call to action. Yeah. Like get on there and review the podcast. Yes, it makes a difference. It does. It really does. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Thank you. All right. This is my favorite bit. Okay. This is we’re up to we’re up to my Nuggets of Fabulous which really I love. So you’re all time favorite resources, activities, songs, games, anything. You know, it could be what other people have given me, you know, a specific cannon or a book or a concept of how they approached planning.

Katie:
I have all of those things which, secret that I’m going to reveal that I knew about this question ahead of time and surprise, surprise. So, yes, I did. All right. It’s a combination of musical things and a couple of tech things as well. I was thinking musically, the thing that I love and so useful for, no matter what situation I’m in, whether I am needing something to teach in a choir or to use as an example in a tech workshop that I’m running is always things that involve ostinato and/or melodies that fit together or repeated chord progressions. It sounds ridiculous, but that is a whole category of music, you know. Any time I find like Mum and I call it, ‘Oh, that’s a winner’, you know, like when you find “the winner”, you just continue to use them all the time. I mean, there’s lots of winners in that category. The Lion Sleeps Tonight is one.

Debbie:
Oh, I was going to say the first one that came to me. It was the one you used when you did Loopy. One of the first things I saw you do live I think at the Maryborough. Is it Looper, the app?

Katie:
Yeah, really an app. It’s called Chords. You know, the one five, six, four chord songs or the what do they call the ice cream changes, you know, 1645 dah dah dah dah. That one also fantastic. There’s a song that Mum and Dad sang in choirs when I was that little tiny age, and it was an arrangement by someone they knew in England. It’s the song called Jean Harlow. It’s basically an ostinato. I literally used it on Saturday because we had a combined choir concert with the choir that I was involved with in Melbourne and they’re like, Oh, we should do an audience participation number. I’m like, Right, I’ll teach Jean Harlow so I taught the choirs before the performance, like an hour before the performance. I’m like, All right, here it is, done. Then I taught the audience and we sang it. Literally the base line goes. (singing) Mama gonna walk. Mama talk. Yeah. Mama gonna walk. Mama talk. Yeah. And forever and ever and ever. And then there’s pa. You can do it in harmony. (singing) Mama gonna talk. Mama gonna walk on that talk. Yeah. And then there’s a melody that fits over the top. You can sing the melody in cannon and then the second verse, anyway. It’s just so good. Like, it’s so easy to do that. I use a lot. I’m looking for those all the time. Another one I’ve used, a clapping game, I really like with technology too. Like if I want to demonstrate how you could use some sort of tech tool or how do you could design a unit of work which involves technology, it’s not a tech unit, but it’s a musical unit that happens to have some technology involved in it. I like to find something. I saw years ago, I think it was some YouTube video, the clapping game, boom, snap, clap. I learnt it and I’m like, Oh, this is really good because boom snap clap uses three sounds, which you can then relate to the drum kit parts like the bass drum, the snare and the high hat. You can learn the clapping game, you can make variations on the clapping game, you can do body percussion variations on the clapping game. Then you can talk about the drum kit and then you can say, you know, which of the parts of the clapping game relate to the parts of the drum kit in the pattern? And then we can take it onto some kind of software and recreate it in the software using the parts of the drum kit which we’ve learnt about fit with the parts of the clapping game. And then we can add a rap over the top or a song over the top. There’s so many ways that I’ve used just that simple clapping game. I think it’s good to think about what you already do in the classroom and then maybe think about ways that you can weave other other things in, like maybe tech related stuff. So boom, snap, clap. There’s a thing called groove pizza. I’m pretty sure you know that one already online drum pattern creator but that’s my progression is we learn boom snap clap, we make the pattern in groove pizza and then we add a rap over the top and record our voices. So just a simple progression but super useful but tech things. I’m going to mention three tech things just really briefly. I won’t mention all the normal stuff like Chrome Music Lab and Incredibox because everyone knows those already. So three things that people might not know about if you want to do, this could be you yourself personally as a teacher to teach something or just for fun because it is fun. Or if you want to do this with students, you know, everybody wanted to do like the multiple of yourself on the screen videos singing different parts of a song playing or whatever. It’d be five of me on the screen, one of me singing the bass line and one of me singing the middle part and one of me singing the melody or all that kind of style. More than eight months ago, maybe there’s a new online such browser based, so it works on older classes. Easy Virtual Choir is the name of this software resource, you can go there and sign up for an account because that’s how you save things. Sign up for account. It’s free with a lot of things you can do. The only limitation is if you want to do a virtual choir thing with like 50 kids on the screen at the same time, that’s when you need to pay some money but if you want to use it for yourself or do small ensemble stuff, it’s a great teaching tool. You can teach all the parts of something with you in different squares at the same time, all playing the different parts. Anyway, it’s a fantastic free tool.

Debbie:
Thank you.

Katie:
Lots of fun. And it synchronizes things for you. So there’s less involved than doing it all manually in a video. You don’t need to know video editing software at all. You can just record in this app and it will kind of take care of things for you. So go play with that too briefly. Doctor musik. It’s music with a K at the end, not a C, doctor musik. This guy, he’s based in the States I think, but maybe originally from somewhere else. I can’t believe I can’t remember. Maybe Canada. He’s made a website which has a whole series of free games on it, particularly for elementary/primary students. Fabulous site, lots of really cool things. There’s a star for style note naming thing, which is robots. You build robots by getting notes identified correctly and there’s lots of other games on there. So go and check that out.

Debbie:
Lots of fun.

Katie:
The third one I’m going to tell people to check out is Google Arts and Culture. If you’ve never checked out Google Arts and Culture before, which is a whole website that Google has. It’s like curated collections of images and videos and all sorts of things, audio stuff, all curated. It’s kind of like an online gallery. Actually multiple galleries and museums have contributed to the contents of this website, including the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, have contributed a whole heap of stuff to this website and then a lot of their content is curated into collections and which are all the same. For instance, they have a video game music theme, they call it. You go to that page and there are examples through time that you can play for your students of all these video game themes over time. It has all this text in between which tells you about what was happening and when this was developed and the composer and stuff. Then there’s links that you can follow to go off to read more about this composer and watch this video. It’s all done for you so if you’re doing a video music unit, it’s there. Do not be spending hours on it. No, don’t. Or at least take bits and pieces from whatever. There’s a West Side Story collection as well.

Debbie:
It does sound a little bit full of rabbit holes, though.

Katie:
It is and so what you can do. Here’s my tip. This is not set up people, by the way, here’s my tip is that you need to make sure you’re logged into your Google account when you’re on that website and you click the favourite button. When you see something, click the favourite button and there’s a little love heart on something. Then when you log in the next time there’s a favourites menu, you go there and you can see all the things you’ve saved because no kidding, that’s exactly what happened to me. I’m like, how do I ever find anything again? There’s so much stuff on here. Like, it’s amazing. But how? Well, wait, it looks like a favourite spot and so I just made sure to favourite. Now I can find things easily. It’s just all there. Good experiments that you can play with like the Chrome Music Lab collection of experiments starts off in a sort of sandbox type environment, and some of the experiments are on this website. Some of the things that are not in chrome music like for instance, so there’s like a whole Kandinsky unit of work if you want to talk about art and music and synesthesia and colour and shapes and whatever, there’s a whole heap of sort of information and resources around that. Then you can go to the Chrome musical avenues, the Kandinsky creation tool in there. Go check it out.

Debbie:
Oh, well, okay. Okay. That’s so much. I’ll just listen to this episode a couple of times. It’s all right. That’s what we can all do. All right now. But we’re coming to the end. The last two things that I like to talk about when I’m having a chat with amazing people like you. Now, I don’t know how much you feel this in your view of music education, but certainly from where I am, we’re definitely feeling the pinch of the decline of music education, the diminishing of programs. I just think we need to be working towards preserving our programs and telling people how important what we do is, to children and their general development. So do you have any advice for us around advocacy?

Katie:
Absolutely. I think it’s such a great question. Actually people may not really realize it, but I think technology can help a lot with this. I’ll start by saying that like I deal a lot with teachers in the United States. That is the bulk of people inside my community, visitors to my website, it’s 60 or 70% from the United States. Australia is actually about 4th or 5th on the list of people who are in my community and on my website and stuff. I can tell you that over there it is the same. They are fighting for maintaining their jobs, for their job to exist at all, to not be reduced down in hours or pushed out. Many of them have ended up on a cart instead of having a classroom of their own and some of them just have to deal with that because that’s just the way things are. Particularly during COVID, unfortunately, because they had to spread people out, the music teachers lost their room, ended up on a cart, and now a lot of them are like, ‘Are we ever getting that back again? Who knows?’ So it’s everywhere. It’s funny because I’ve had a teacher on my podcast, Shawna Longo is her name, she’s in New Jersey. I don’t think we intended to talk about it, but we ended up talking about advocacy because so much of what she does is advocacy for her program through the technology side of things. She’s the first teacher I’ve met who I think you have to be a little bit business like about this side of things. You need to take the emotion away and just make yourself really visible. You have to promote your program, as in make it visible to people all the time, because she knows that the more she puts her stuff out there, her and her students works and what she does as a teacher and her performances and everything else, she knows that the more visible she is, the less likely she’s going to be ‘the one’ to be pushed off the cliff when the push comes to shove. What are they going to do if they’ve got Shauna and all the parents love what she does. They’re like, oh, my gosh, see that? Did you see that video that you know, the fantastic things that Shauna is doing with their program? Shauna does press releases. She does actual proper press releases. I’m kind of like wow, I don’t know any other music teacher that does that. She goes, yeah, I think that she may be lucky enough to have because in the States it’s all about districts. So, you know, there are multiple schools that make up a district and it might be that their district has, I can’t remember like a media person, but even if they don’t, you can download a press release template from any like hundreds of them, just google. She does a press release and she’ll send that to the local paper and then they come and do a little article. I mean, we’ve all done that with our local, I don’t know if you call it the Leader newspaper up there as well.

Debbie:
No, we have just the local rag.

Katie:
Yeah, don’t wait for, like, the epic musical that you only do every two years. Do it for all the things like, oh, my gosh, the grade six is composed using, I don’t know, whatever, just do something. The way that I think technology can really help is you can use things like a video of your students performing. If you can’t do that because privacy, there are like three other things you can do to still have a video of your students performing. One is that you cannot show anything of the students just have a slide show and the audio of your students. If you’re permitted to do that, that’s one way you could get around. Or you could have the students and they might be blurred out. It varies from state to state and country to country, but some places you can just blur the student’s faces out. You could video them from an angle which only shows hands. I’ve done videos or photos with hands on an iPad screen playing back or creating music or performing something. You video over the shoulder, the back of the head of the student or just the hands. And so I make videos, share them on social media. Canva is fantastic for this, get into Canva. They’ve got all the templates set up, so you’ve got the perfect size and shape for different platforms and you can make videos on there. My other friend Amy, who helps me in the community, she actually does a lot of advocacy for her program, too. And, you know, she’s crafty. You’ve got to be a bit crafty.

Debbie:
Yeah, you do, don’t you? You got to be sneaky, in a good way.

Katie:
Yes, in a good way. So every single day she uses Seesaw with her students. It’s learning management system particularly for young students. The thing about Seesaw is that the students are all in there as part of her class set up. This would be instead of using Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams, Seesaw is what she uses. The benefit of Seesaw is that parents can be invited to the app and they can only see their own kid’s work, so they can’t see everyone’s unless Amy is able to share a class project, and in which case all the parents can see it. She shares stuff every single day. She’s like, ‘Here’s what grade one did today. We composed a melody using So and Me, and we recorded it in the Seesaw app and we drew a picture to go over it, whatever is, you know, the notation’. She shares that to the parents, something like that pretty much every day. She has parents who are in the queue at the post office, you know, watching what she’s doing in her music program. She has such high visibility with the parents that you’re ensuring yourself against being kicked out or reduced or whatever it is. It’s not a foolproof thing, but I just think it can really help. One other thing I’ll say with technology posters on the wall or in the corridor and use a QR code in Australia, we all know what QR codes are now. There’s a QR code, you can set it up so that there’s a poster of let’s say the notation that the student has composed and you can stick a QR code on the poster so that when a parent passing by scans that QR code, it will be an audio file that they bring up on their phone and audio file of the student playing or singing that notation that is on the wall. you can go, Do you want to listen to my composition? Scan here. And they can scan the QR code and there’s the thing. So continually making your stuff visible, I just think is such a good way to help.

Debbie:
Fabulous ideas. Love it.

Katie:
Oh, I feel like this could be a podcast episode of mine coming up.

Debbie:
No, absolutely. You’ll get major downloads. Yeah, do that one.

Katie:
Have I done that already? I better check to make sure I haven’t already done one.

Debbie:
Look, there’ll be more to add. Do, like, you know, episode version two, the sequel.

Katie:
Yeah, yeah. That will be. It’s always more.

Debbie:
Oh, good heavens. I have so loved talking to you and reconnecting, it’s so good. I just feel like there’s so much more but we are going to finish with my get on your soapbox. All right. Let’s just assume the world is listening to you. Like, there could be one person tuning in, but let’s pretend. Let’s pretend the world is listening to you. It’s the most important thing that you want to tell everybody.

Katie:
This is a really funny one for me because I spend most of my life holding back what I really think because….you know what I mean.

Debbie:
Well, because you don’t like swearing? No, no, no.

Katie:
No, it’s more that I don’t know how to explain that properly, but I think I’m going to bring this back to technology and something that I’ve thought about for a long time. I say this with with love to everybody listening. I feel like with teachers in technology there’s, and this is not every teacher by any means, but a lot of teachers approach technology from a victim standpoint like, ‘oh my gosh, my computer just did this thing and it’s lost all my work’. Like, hang on a minute. I don’t actually say this, but this is what I’m thinking. Hang on a minute, so your computer actually kind of like had a tizzy because you’ve got too many files on it. You haven’t cleaned it out for a long time. It’s running really slowly now. It just said, “you know what, I’m done with you. I’m really tired and I need to shut myself” and now you’ve lost work. And you did not back up.

Debbie:
Yeah. Who did not push that little saved button?

Katie:
Yeah, exactly. Did you save, did you back up? So I just feel like and it’s not always that example, but there’s a lot of ‘oh my gosh, technology’s just, I just can’t do it because, you know, I am this victim’. I just think people need to be a bit more proactive about their technology. And actually, one of the episodes I’m recording today for my podcast is, it’s a tough love advice episode about things that people just like you need to back up your stuff, but have you actually backed it up and do it? You have to do it regularly. It’s not like one and done. It’s not one and done at all because you’re going to cry. So just do it regularly and don’t be a victim. I think it’s backing up, it’s reading messages on the screen before you click blindly click, okay. Like, you know, the computer’s telling you if you click this button, I’m going to self destruct. Okay? Oh, my God, I didn’t mean to click then. Did you read the message? No, you didn’t read. Just Google things like, you know, the whole I come across a lot of teacher who, it’s easier to just ask someone the answer to something. I don’t mind that, that is my business.

Debbie:
Well, yes and no, Katie. When in doubt and even if you’re not sure what you’re really asking, you should see some of the things I have typed into my Google search bar. I will type something like ‘how do you change the font thingy in whatever?’ because I won’t know the terms to use.

Katie:
But that’s okay, you’re not being a victim. Yes, exactly. That’s I’m saying. Yes, just Google. Google anything. Google string of words. I often don’t type a sentence. My boys type sentences. I don’t, I type a string of words that I think could be potentially somewhere on a web page that’s going to help me. I will type ‘canva font cursive not working’, I don’t know, just a series of words. I think people don’t do that enough and I can’t even say it’s a generation thing. I think a lot of people go, ‘Oh, I’ll just need to ask my teenage child or the nearest, you know, grade nine kid or whatever’. But, you know, we can Google too, or YouTube, just go to YouTube, do the same thing, type of string of words, at least see if you can find something and then you’ll find something. You go, ‘Oh, that looks like it. Oh, is that what the terminology is? Now I know what really to Google.

Debbie:
Yes, exactly. I love it. I tend to be a bit too polite. I sometimes do this, but I go. I’ll type like a whole sentence. What do you think if… No, no. I’m with you. We really need to see technology more as what it is. It’s a huge assistive tool. It’s not there to hurt us. Let’s use it to our advantage. Like you were just saying with the advocacy. What a potential tool of power, take advantage. I love your soap box. Don’t be a victim.

Katie:
Go back up your stuff. Please. Oh, my gosh. Please back up your things.

Debbie:
Oh, guess what I’m going to do as soon as we press stop? Yeah.

Katie:
You’re not alone. Don’t worry.

Debbie:
It’s all on Google Drive but I really need to put it in on the hard drive, too, don’t I?

Katie:
Yeah. In my podcast, I’ll tell you why you need to do another proper backup in addition to the Google Drive thing.

Debbie:
Yeah, okay. I will. I will. Hey, Katie Wardrobe, it’s been absolutely awesome and thank you so much for giving me your time.

Katie:
Thank you for having me. It’s been lots of fun and I hope we get to see each other in person.

Debbie:
I hope so, soon.

Debbie:
Thank you for joining me for this podcast. Don’t forget that you’ll find the show notes on crescendo.com.au/podcast/007. Also, you can find the transcripts there so you have all of the detail that you need if you’ve found this podcast useful. I’d really love it if you share the link with a colleague. Remember, all I can be is the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. We’ll meet again. I hope we will. Bye.

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