Kepner's About Me (Ed Tech 202)

I have come a long way to finally decide on my career choice. I have been involved in theatre since junior high and am now majoring in Theatre Arts. My potential outlook on my teaching career is to be a  high school drama teacher. I've had many great experiences from my high school days and one of my goals is to take those experiences and heighten them for my students. I believe that my teaching on theatre can really help students branch out from thier "shy shell" and to start critically examining their environments and to be mentally in sync with one another.

I didn't exactly start out with theatre thinking I was going to teach it. I wanted to do theatre because it brought out the best of me. Being engaged with other people on stage in another world that we created is somewhat surreal. As I was growing up, that's the thing that helped me branch out my emotions. I would create alternative universes to live in and to wrinkle out my real world situations. Like any other kid, I just wanted to play. This is very similar now as a theatre major. As I perform on stage, I want to play with others to create a definite space between reality and fantasy. With teaching this form of art, I want to be able to teach my students to realize the importance of theatre and performing as I am now.

With all this in mind, I don't know exactly where to start when it comes to teaching. I am still wondering how you can teach theatre in a manner where the students can get something out of it, even if they don't want to continue with it like I am. There are real world advantages that can come out theatre. So does this make theatre essential and relevant in the classroom today? I really think so. I want to explore the possibilities and become the best teacher I can be.

David Kepner

Snoopy Rules

   This year was a great and final year at Idaho arts charter school. I have gained many friends and good knowledge within these 5 years at this school. As a senior, I must have a project that focuses and expresses my main art. To express this, my friend Mac and I did a musical named "You're A Good Man Charlie Brown". This show was a success in many ways.                                       

     At first, our senior project started before our junior year ended. That's right, fully prepared and nothing to worry about. We casted each character and  gave them each a script to look over for the summer. Giving the hope that they looked at it, we started our senior year with a bang. We already, Mac and I, asked Columbia high school for really awesome props since they did show before. What we got from them was a huge coach and snoopy's big red dog house. If you didn't know, this play is based off the comic "Peanuts" from charlie brown cartoons. Mac played Charlie Brown and I played Snoopy. Two seniors playing the main parts sounds fair I think. We had our whole advanced drama participate even if they were a main role or just a fun character to fill the stage. It really was a fun show to do.         
     Some complications though made it a success. People were new to singing so Mac had to go through with them many times to get it through their head. The music could get a little complicated. But, as that sorted out, I created blocking and choreography for the show, with some acting tips. All the actors did great and we celebrated all the way through all 6 shows. It was great fun but most of all, it was inspiring. 

My New Toy

    Well it is pretty amusing that I'm my using my new toy to type this blog. I just recently got a new macbook pro 13 inch with thunderbolt capabilities. Thunderbolt is a new port for only the macbooks and is the fastest port in any computer, period. It also has many things to be excited about.

    For one, this computer is super good at what it does. It is super fast in every little thing it has. (not to mention that this model is not the fastest hardware).  When it comes to the internet, bam! It is already to go and running. Whenever I want to download a game or something, it downloads right to my desktop in a shortcut form. That leads to my next cool thing. Macbooks give an awesome user friendly feeling. Everything you need is right at your finger tips and with a touch or a click, you get what you want with extremely fast loading time.

       The app store from Apple is the biggest and most used app store in the world. Over 10 billion apps have been downloaded from the app store. That is saying something. The next cool gadget is the track pad. Now, i think this is one of the coolest inventions on a laptop. People don't know exactly how to use it and get angry so they just quit. When you find out all the tricks it has up its sleeve, you'll be begging for more. I'll give a few examples. When your browsing safari and you have a lot of windows up, simply run four fingers down the track pad and all the windows will show in a smaller size for you to see at all what your looking at in safari. This is a simple and effective way to switch pages or even delete the pages you don't want. Now, your probably thinking oh I can do this all with tabs. But, what you don't know is is that the macbook uses its tab functionality with the "command" button. With a press of the command button and the letter T, you got yourself a new page. Cool? Wrong. Very cool.
      The last cool thing I'm going to be talking about is iMovie and GarageBand.With iMovie you can create movies with little videos you've made with a camcorder or your iPod and iPhone. In a nut shell, you can add them all together and add whatever music you like to it. Also, creating title themes to it make this free app oh so much enjoyable. Garageband is the next awesome app. With this you can create music from scratch, edit songs to fit your personal needs, do all the instruments you want however you want them, and most importantly, share it all. With all this said you probably need a very cool picture to see what I mean. Here you go.

My Spring, Winter Weather, Break

     My spring break is not that much to be excited about. When school got done on that friday before spring break, I was relieved to have a week and a half off. All I did was go home and play video games or hung out with my friends. The thing I was excited about though was getting my greedy hands on the Nintendo 3DS on March 27. I have been waiting for this thing since last summer. Once I got it, I was playing with it non-stop it seemed like. My eyes started to hurt because my eyes weren't use to the holographical double images made to trick my mind which made everything so in depth and surreal.  

     So, after getting my hands on this baby, I have been doing other things like hanging out with my girlfriend. I have basically been seeing her everyday for all of spring break. It was nice to have someone to hang out with for a while each day instead of being stuck at home doing probably nothing. Near the end of spring break, I saw an awesome movie called Source Code. It's based on a guy who is in this source code which goes back into time for the last 8 minutes of someone else's life before the train they were on exploded. He keeps going back into those 8 minutes trying to find the bomb and find the man who is behind all this. There were many twists and turns so it came out as a very good movie. Overall, my spring break would not have been exciting with these few things I just explained.
  
   

My Art Days

I told you all about me basically. I told you I love video games, to sing, act, drum, and dance. So I'm going to tell you about my recent life that contains all these aspects in my recent memory. I recently bought a game called Killzone 3 (amazing game by the way if you like killing people...virtually of course). I have been playing it a little but that amount I have played is awesome. I have been playing it with my Playstation Move a lot. It's used for a more realistic shooting experience by pointing at the screen acting like the controller is the gun. Very fun indeed. I have recently been in a show called Alice In Wonderland where I played as the mad hatter. It was very fun to play him cause' I got to act really crazy and somewhat smart at the same time. I loved Johnny Depp playing him in the movie so I took some of his ideas and threw it together with mine. A good experience overall. To go with my singing, I just got back from Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival where we sang and had professional critiques. Talk about awe inspiring performances by Victor Wooten and Manhattan Transfer. When it comes to dancing, well I can't dance right now because I tore my ACL snowboarding. So that's that. Drumming on the other hand, I have been preparing for a audition for the Blue Thunder drum line. That's some pretty tough stuff. So all these events are my recent memories from the past weeks. I hope you enjoyed reading them.

Aspect Of Life (About Me)

The aspect of my life is fairly simple. I love to be outgoing , friendly, funny, and sometimes adventurous. I am interested in a few things. One is video games. I cannot live without video games, or thats what I think. I have been around them since I very little. The Legend Of Zelda series has been around with me since the beginning. The first game I played was A Link To The Past and then after that, it was Ocarina Of Time. It was my favorite game of all time. It was a huge deal. The guy in the little green tunic was my hero. I had to take sick days from elementary school to play it. Another important aspect in my life are my talents. I love to act, dance, drum, and sing. I started drumming in 6th grade in elementary band. I thought being a drummer would help me pick up the ladies. Even though that didn't shape up, I stayed with it and am still with it today Theatre is another crucial part of my life. Starting in the 8th grade, I fell in love with it. I watched many movies during my junior high days and also loved to pretend to be the hero in the story. I started off being a russian character in a play called "You Can't Take It With You" named Kolenkov. When my family saw the play, they said I lit up the stage with my presence and style of humor. Without my family's support, I wouldn't be trying to start a career with it.
My final life aspect is kind of silly, really. But true. I started dancing on my schools dance team during my sophomore year in high school and enjoyed it a lot. I also joined choir, which was not me at all. The only reason I started dancing and singing was because of Justin Timberlake. He showed how to be 'cool' without making a a complete fool of myself. It was almost like he wanted me to look up to him. I was made fun of because back in day, he was thought of as a "wannabe black rapper dude" or whatever. That didn't stop me from making him my idol. Boom.