During Christmas vacation I have a tradition of doing something different professionally. I hole up in the basement or in a coffee shop and work on a tangentially professional activity. Last year I wrote an article. This year that activity required a video and part of challenging myself was to create the video in GarageBand. I loved it. Apple's own tutorials are a great place to start. I think they hit the nail on the head with the real power of GarageBand: their first four tutorials say it all: make a song, capture a performance, create a podcast and score a movie. These reasons made it powerful for me. Atomic learning (which our teachers can access at school) also has great tutorials, and a digital storytelling guide. How will you empower student expression with GarageBand? I might have the confidence to share my project after March 1.A note to my out of district readers. Every week we offer Tech Tips and Treats on Wednesday. It is an optional short introduction or reminder of a technology available to teachers and students followed by brainstorming how the technology could be used to enhance learning. A recent survey of my faculty showed a need for an online component to the training, which seems obvious but before was limited to some little trafficked moodle pages. Since then we have been trying to expand options for teacher who prefer to explore on their own. This post is one of those opportunities. As often as possible the meetings are aired and archived at our ustream channel.