Ted+Talks

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This video is hilarious!!! I had to pause it several times because I was laughing so hard. While funny it makes some very valid points. As a visual person who grew up in the time of blackboards and chalk dust where very little written during a lecture, I loved when Power Points came along and gave me something to look at while listening. However, all the fancy “stuff” is just distracting. While it was not about Power Point directly, I loved his analysis of font choice. media type="custom" key="7463177"

“Frank sent us!” That made me laugh so hard I cried! Sir Ken has some great thoughts about schools and creativity. I consider myself creative. Yet, I am amazed at how the simplest things I do have the ability to wow people. I have had people tell me they could never knit yet it really is one of the simplest things on earth to do. After all if it was hard I wouldn’t be doing it! I think it is sad that creativity has been wrung out of schools. The most profound point he made was that people were directed away from art and music because they were things that most people don’t make a living at when they grow up. Yet, everyday kids are playing sports hoping to be the next Jordan or Namath. Very few people playing sports “make it” but no one is saying don’t play football it isn’t a career. media type="custom" key="7463157" This video makes a great connection between people’s historical views and current views. It is easy to forget that things in our everyday life such as radio were once upon a time seen as the end of civilization. The point of this TED Talk was that current technology inspires creativity. What amazes me is the time and effort that people are willing to invest in creating stuff to put on the internet. No matter what topic a person can think of, chances are excellent that someone somewhere has already thought about it and created a blog or video about it! People create this stuff because they are passionate about the subject. So I think the big question is how do we inspire our students to care about our content and produce the same caliber of work in our classrooms? media type="custom" key="7463179" “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. “ - Abraham Lincoln The call for education revolution desperately needs to become more than just a call but a battle cry. The sad part is that those that should be yelling that battle cry the loudest are in most cases the ones standing firmly chained to the dogmas of the past. One thing I have noticed about the world at large is that most people are happy or at least satisfied with their own child’s teacher. However, teachers and schools on the whole they are not so sure about. This gives teachers and the education system as a whole a bad name. Walk into any school and start talking to staff, parents and students and in short order it will become crystal clear who the “bad teacher(s)” are in that location. Everyone seems to know who they are but it seems that firing a bad teacher is harder than getting rid of a government entitlement program. Schools today are very different than when I was in elementary school. While some of the change is good some of it isn’t. People like to preach about having high expectations for students. Yet, at the same time, we have a no fail policy. To me those two things are mutually exclusive. People like to be all warm and fuzzy and make students “feel good” about themselves by not letting them fail. The direct result is that students wind up in high school with reading skills at a third grade level. How can a student who is barely past the level of Dick and Jane (showing my age) hope to be able to read and understand Shakespeare? Short answer he can’t. So we adapt the text, water it down and spoon feed it to the student. A revolution is needed. Someone needs to draw the line in the sand that says here and no further. This line cannot be crossed until these skills are mastered. Education’s goal should not be to make students feel good about themselves but rather, to prepare them for the world. In the real world people succeed and fail based on their abilities. No one wants to go to the doctor that learned how to do open heart surgery by reading and looking at the pictures in the graphic novel adaptation of the medical textbook. media type="custom" key="7678113" This very short video makes a good point. Technology has to be a tool to enhance and let students "get at" learning. In many classrooms an expensive projector connected to a computer is displaying the very same information that a marker and an overhead did twenty years ago and a piece of chalk and a chalk board was displaying even before that. We are adding new technologies but failing to up grade our practices to go with it.