Win your students' attention (or hearts) with Ted Talks!

Good Day everyone! How is your day? Hopefully it is interesting and satisfying.

We are in December 2015! Hello December~~

Today I will talk about using an interesting source to teach your kids. Be it, English, Science, History and whatever, you can use this source because to me, it is interesting and at the same inspiring. The tool that I am going to talk about is the TED Talks.

Have you ever heard of TED Talks before? You should! Especially as educators, TED talks makes me wonder and ponder upon things I never ever known existed. I found a lot of possibilities in the world through TED Talks. Before this, when I was down and sad I'd look up for my favorite song in Youtube and play it again and again. Now, I have TED Talks, instead of songs, I listen to talks.

What is TED talk?



TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world. TED is owned by a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation. Our agenda is to make great ideas accessible and spark conversation.(http://www.ted.com/about/our-organization)

What you should do now is go to www.ted.com , watch 1-2 videos and I tell you what, you will want to watch more. Go for the 11 most classic ted talks or the 20 most popular ones. I've watched them all.

So what I want to suggest here is, to use this as your classroom material. You don't need many complicated tools, just a laptop, a good speaker, your internet connection and the LCD projector. Then yous can show 1-2 talks with your kids, and collect their responses.
I'll give an example with what I did to my form 5 class recently. In one lesson of 2 periods, (80 minutes) I collected response of 2 talks. Yes, 2, I managed.
and then I showed them the second TED talk

You can make it a verbal response, or you can ask them to reflect, or put them in the person's shoes or whatever questions that make them response based on the talk that you show them.

The first talk is about a guy named Martin Pistorius ; After contracting a brain infection at the age of twelve, Pistorius lost his ability to control his movements and to speak, and eventually he failed every test for mental awareness. He had become a ghost. But then a strange thing started to happen — his mind began to knit itself back together. In this moving talk, Pistorius tells how he freed himself from a life locked inside his own body.  http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_pistorius_how_my_mind_came_back_to_life_and_no_one_knew

for this task, I collected the reponses verbally, through questions that I already written down like
- so who is he now?
- what were his feelings when nobody saw that he is actually aware of his surroundings?
- if your are his wife...?
and etc

For the second video, I chose this video
How the mysterious dark net is going mainstream ; there’s a parallel Internet you may not have run across yet — accessed by a special browser and home to a freewheeling collection of sites for everything from anonymous activism to illicit activities. Jamie Bartlett reports from the dark net. http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_bartlett_how_the_mysterious_dark_net_is_going_mainstream

For this talk I gave them a handout and told them to write a reflection on the talk. The questions for my reflection was specific : Do you support the emerging of the Dark Net (yes/no). Why?

I got so many logical responses from my boys. and it was overwhelming. They really put their heart on to this.


So the next day, I came to school like usual and came across the boys and they said "Teacher, which TED talk are we watching today?". A smile came across my face. "I couldn't be showing you TED talks everyday, could I? We need to work out on our novels for now. You guys can watch them at home on your own from now on,okay?"
(I'm sorry for the boys. The exam is taking a toll on them)So, try it teachers. I bet it could be good for you too :)

Here's one Ted Talk that could be interesting for you to watch. Enjoy!