Bill Selak Apple Distinguished Educator Class of 2017

Hi, I'm Bill Selak. I write songs. I make movies. I take photos, but most importantly, I reimagine learning experiences.

At Hillbrook School, our learning environment is our 14-acre campus, not just an indoor classroom. We build and launch rockets, and use iPads to capture slo-mo footage, and present the data in a Keynote slideshow.

We capture environmental changes over an entire school year through a sit spot study, deeply looking at small parts of our campus.

When we are in classrooms, we push the boundaries of traditional subjects. Students use Swift Playgrounds to learn to code, and develop computational thinking.

We have a week-long coding event each December where every student on campus spends two hours coding using apps like Swift Playgrounds.

Our photography elective at Hillbrook has evolved into an iPhoneography elective, where students shoot, edit, and publish their images… all on an iPod Touch.

We collaboratively create worlds in Minecraft, sharing globally through presentations at ISTE and our podcast.

In fact, our use of iPads is so transformative that educators from around the world are asking us for advice.

We host guests like the Ministry of Education in Singapore, and work with ed tech organizations to create things like the BOLD Classrooms conference, where we will take a deep dive into online lesson design.

We share our expertise beyond our campus through a school podcast on iTunes. Our school also presented at the NorCal Apple Distinguished School Showcase. On my personal podcast and blog, I talk about improving teaching and learning, and through my iTunes course I share best practices for teaching video in the classroom.

I share these practices at the higher ed level, teaching educators how moviemaking, music production, and universal accessibility can empower student voices.

I present at local and national conferences. In my favorite session, our group collaborated using Garageband to write, record, and publish a song... all in one hour!

The future is getting even brighter at my current school, where we are working on building a makerspace, podcast production studio, and moviemaking studio.

With Apple technologies, we can reimagine educational experiences, and I work to bring those experiences to life every day.