When I suggested to Chris Anderson, the creator of TED Talks and now TED-Ed, that he might want to reconsider using the term "Flip" for all his teacher-created videos, he looked puzzled. Flipped classroom, or flipped video in this case, refers to the practice of doing homework in class and watching the instruction at home. I explained, that the power of video doesn't have to be relegated solely to work that happens at home. Instead, these videos can be powerful in school learning tools as well.
He asked why teachers and parents wouldn't want to watch these great videos for homework. I explained that there is a growing movement against homework among parents, educators, and students. Kids already spend about 6 hours a day with academic pursuits chosen by other people. More and more people feel time at home should be chosen by the child and his/her family.
When we do this we empower and trust families to decide what they want to do when they leave school. Instead of homework, they may want to:
Showing posts with label TED Talks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TED Talks. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Flip your classroom and more with TedEd videos
Guest post by Shawn Rubin
TedEd is a a new resource from TED talks with a focus on the flipped classroom model. The idea behind TedEd is that teachers can take the best of YouTube or create their own videos then flip them, which means adding titles, directions, questions and links to other resources.
These videos then live on the TedEd website. They each have their own unique URL and can be sent around to the general public for viewing and learning.
The beta version is quite useful for teachers looking to enter the flipped classroom space. Educators should note that there are a few missing features that will hopefully be addressed in the future, but until then, users should note that you don’t have the ability to create or edit the “Quick Quiz” section when you flip your lesson and once you flip your lesson you cannot edit it any further.
TedEd is a a new resource from TED talks with a focus on the flipped classroom model. The idea behind TedEd is that teachers can take the best of YouTube or create their own videos then flip them, which means adding titles, directions, questions and links to other resources.
These videos then live on the TedEd website. They each have their own unique URL and can be sent around to the general public for viewing and learning.
The beta version is quite useful for teachers looking to enter the flipped classroom space. Educators should note that there are a few missing features that will hopefully be addressed in the future, but until then, users should note that you don’t have the ability to create or edit the “Quick Quiz” section when you flip your lesson and once you flip your lesson you cannot edit it any further.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Preparing students for success without tests and textbooks
In this TED Talk by South Bronx teacher Stephen Ritz we see how this innovative educator took a nontraditional route to lead his students to success. In his story, you will notice that when the focus is moved from subjects to students the results are amazing. You will also not see a single test or book report anywhere in sight. As his recent TED Talk reveals, Ritz believes that students shouldn't have to leave their community to live, learn and earn in a better one. Ritz and his kids grow lush gardens for food, greenery -- and jobs. He is bringing generations of students successes they have never imagined while also reclaiming and rebuilding his community where they have grown more than 25,000 pounds of vegetables.
Rather than decorating class walls with the traditional carrots and sticks (grades and test scores) Ritz’s walls are edible generating enough produce to feed 450 students healthy meals. His students have gained the skills that have lead them to become the youngest nationally certified workforce in America traveling far and wide earning a wage and for some opening their family’s first bank account.
Watch the video below to discover out how one educator is growing a movement that is changing lives and rebuilding communities. Like what you see? Visit the student-run Green Bronx Machine Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/green.BX.machine
Friday, July 20, 2012
TED-Ed: Great delivery & creation tool, falls short on global collaboration
Chris Anderson addressed an audience of innovative educators at this year’s Building Learning Communities conference to discuss the launch of the TED-Ed platform. He shared that the great power of technology was its ability to facilitate amplification, specialization, and collaboration. TED-Ed knocks the ball out of the park on two of the three.
Amplification
An extension of TED’s commitment to sharing ideas worth spreading, TED-Ed’s commitment is to creating lessons worth sharing. This in turn amplifies the lessons by the best teachers to students across the globe. Below is an example of a video which this lesson was created around.
Amplification
An extension of TED’s commitment to sharing ideas worth spreading, TED-Ed’s commitment is to creating lessons worth sharing. This in turn amplifies the lessons by the best teachers to students across the globe. Below is an example of a video which this lesson was created around.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Removing Versus from Our Ed. Reform Dialogue
by John Clemente
TED talks are often an incubator for iconoclastic thinking - the talks in general carry the message think out of the box. And so it comes as no surprise that the TEDxNYED conference speakers last weekend delivered a message that runs counter to the current big trends in education- There is a national movement towards developing common standards. There are incentives for states to lift caps on charter schools. States are building complex electronic assessment systems to track and analyze standardized student test data.
The speakers at TEDxNYED emphasized their ideas are at odds with these trends. They spoke of how the classroom environment needs to be redesigned to foster collaboration and self-directed student learning; how we need to shift from standardized assessments to portfolio assessments that focus on the creation process. They spoke of how we need to co-opt gaming/fantasy culture, social media and incorporate real world problems to engage students in learning; how broadening the curriculum (not narrowing it) is critical to preparing our children for tomorrow's world.
Many of the talks were inspiring and that kind of thinking needs to be more prominent in the national education reform conversation.
But...
All of the talks stayed inside the box with regard to how we dialogue about education publicly. It is a well-worn war paradigm... whole language vs. phonics... core knowledge vs. critical thinking skills... Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader... good guys vs. bad guys metaphor of your choice...
This paradigm doesn't work in the best interests of a child's education. When I was a teacher, my 6th grade students in the Bronx endured changing reading programs 3 times in 5 years. Switching philosophy in a reading curriculum is good politically- those in charge get a clean slate and time to implement their new initiative. But it is disruptive to the child’s learning experience. When we switch from whole language one year to a phonics focused program the next, students lose consistency; something all too familiar for the students I taught.
Michael Wesch said something that resonated on this chord for me. He described his experiences studying the people of Papua New Guinea. Instead of putting people on trial, they put the failed relationships between them on trial. We need to shift our national education dialogue this way. There should be less finger pointing, wagging and gesturing in our dialogue, and more hand holding, shaking and slapping with an emphasis on building relationships and making connections between ideas that people often rush to say are inherently at odds. We should view all of the current innovative ideas –including those that carry the banner of “market-based reforms” and those that are of the “school 2.0/21st Century” ilk- as a patchwork of thinking that it is our responsibility to weave together.
The thought leaders that spoke at this conference need to be assertive in the way they connect their ideas to the thinking of the people carrying forward reforms with a focus on accountability and standards. There will be common standards, there will be more charter schools, there will be a bigger emphasis on standardized assessments. All of this will happen whether they choose to engage with them or not. While there is reason to be leery, there is also tremendous potential for good in these trends. I suggest we all weave our solutions to that quilt.
There are nascent innovative projects like School of One, a project to rethink human capital in the school context and utilize technology to personalize student learning, that would benefit greatly from the thinking of the speakers at TEDxNYED. I implore these innovators to knock on the door and invite themselves to sit at the table to make connections between their ideas and the reforms rapidly taking root. This challenge is perhaps more difficult than setting the course for education independent of the accountability movement; but it is also a much more worthy cause. Otherwise, for these provocateurs, the echo of their voices will continue to fade into the background- lost to the next generation of leaders.
John Clemente is the Director of Educational Services at Teaching Matters
TED talks are often an incubator for iconoclastic thinking - the talks in general carry the message think out of the box. And so it comes as no surprise that the TEDxNYED conference speakers last weekend delivered a message that runs counter to the current big trends in education- There is a national movement towards developing common standards. There are incentives for states to lift caps on charter schools. States are building complex electronic assessment systems to track and analyze standardized student test data.
The speakers at TEDxNYED emphasized their ideas are at odds with these trends. They spoke of how the classroom environment needs to be redesigned to foster collaboration and self-directed student learning; how we need to shift from standardized assessments to portfolio assessments that focus on the creation process. They spoke of how we need to co-opt gaming/fantasy culture, social media and incorporate real world problems to engage students in learning; how broadening the curriculum (not narrowing it) is critical to preparing our children for tomorrow's world.
Many of the talks were inspiring and that kind of thinking needs to be more prominent in the national education reform conversation.
But...
All of the talks stayed inside the box with regard to how we dialogue about education publicly. It is a well-worn war paradigm... whole language vs. phonics... core knowledge vs. critical thinking skills... Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader... good guys vs. bad guys metaphor of your choice...
This paradigm doesn't work in the best interests of a child's education. When I was a teacher, my 6th grade students in the Bronx endured changing reading programs 3 times in 5 years. Switching philosophy in a reading curriculum is good politically- those in charge get a clean slate and time to implement their new initiative. But it is disruptive to the child’s learning experience. When we switch from whole language one year to a phonics focused program the next, students lose consistency; something all too familiar for the students I taught.
Michael Wesch said something that resonated on this chord for me. He described his experiences studying the people of Papua New Guinea. Instead of putting people on trial, they put the failed relationships between them on trial. We need to shift our national education dialogue this way. There should be less finger pointing, wagging and gesturing in our dialogue, and more hand holding, shaking and slapping with an emphasis on building relationships and making connections between ideas that people often rush to say are inherently at odds. We should view all of the current innovative ideas –including those that carry the banner of “market-based reforms” and those that are of the “school 2.0/21st Century” ilk- as a patchwork of thinking that it is our responsibility to weave together.
The thought leaders that spoke at this conference need to be assertive in the way they connect their ideas to the thinking of the people carrying forward reforms with a focus on accountability and standards. There will be common standards, there will be more charter schools, there will be a bigger emphasis on standardized assessments. All of this will happen whether they choose to engage with them or not. While there is reason to be leery, there is also tremendous potential for good in these trends. I suggest we all weave our solutions to that quilt.
There are nascent innovative projects like School of One, a project to rethink human capital in the school context and utilize technology to personalize student learning, that would benefit greatly from the thinking of the speakers at TEDxNYED. I implore these innovators to knock on the door and invite themselves to sit at the table to make connections between their ideas and the reforms rapidly taking root. This challenge is perhaps more difficult than setting the course for education independent of the accountability movement; but it is also a much more worthy cause. Otherwise, for these provocateurs, the echo of their voices will continue to fade into the background- lost to the next generation of leaders.
John Clemente is the Director of Educational Services at Teaching Matters
Friday, March 5, 2010
Spend Saturday with the TEDxNYED Education, New Media and Technology Webinar
TEDxNYED is operating under license from TED, organizers of the immensely popular TED Conference, an annual event where some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to share what they are most passionate about. In the spirit of "ideas worth spreading," TED has created TEDx, a program of local, organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. ted.com/tedx.
TEDxNYED is independently organized by New York educators. At TEDxNYED, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connections. Individuals have been invited to share their insights and inspire conversations about the future of education. Attendees of the conference will participate via networking sessions where they will educate one another and, in the spirit of TED, help spread these ideas. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.
TEDxNYED presenters include: Gina Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Ning, one of the world’s most popular social networking websites; Amy Bruckman, leader of the Electronic Learning Communities research group at the Georgia Institute of Technology; Andy Carvin, Senior Strategist at NPR’s Social Media Desk; Dan Cohen, Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; Jeff Jarvis, author of the recent book What Would Google Do?, blogger at buzzmachine.com and Director of the Interactive Journalism program at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism; Henry Jenkins, Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinema at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism; Neeru Khosla, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the CK-12 Foundation, which aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market; Lawrence Lessig, pioneering creative commons advocate, director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School; Dan Meyer, acclaimed high school math teacher and blogger in Santa Cruz, CA; Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism at NYU and press critic; George Siemens, Founder and President of Complexive Systems Inc. and author of the book Knowing Knowledge; Mike Wesch, dubbed “the explainer” by Wired Magazine, a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture; and David Wiley, Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University. For more detailed bios please visit http://tedxnyed.com/speakers.
The emcee for TEDxNYED will be my friend and colleague Juliette LaMontagne, a Leadership Coach for the Asia Society International Studies Schools Network and part of the NYCDoE iZone.
HOW TO WATCH TEDXNYED
TEDxNYED will be webcast live at www.TEDxNYED.com starting at 10am EST on Saturday, March 6, 2010. Join the conversation on Twitter using our hashtag #TEDxNYED or on our public Facebook fan page at facebook.com/TEDxNYED.
Follow TED on Twitter at twitter.com/TEDTalks, or on Facebook at facebook.com/TED.
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