Blog Post 2

Did You Know 3.0 by John Strange

“India has more K-12 Honors Students than ALL of the K-12 students in the United States.” This statement, taken with the fact that India does have a higher population, is still shocking. I did really like this video though, because it is tailored towards our class and the things we read and deal with. This video got the point across that we are always doing something with technology. It is forever at our fingertips. Even I’ve become more aware of the amount of time I spend on Google or on other class related websites. It’s interesting to see.

I did take time to watch the original. I feel this time around there were several things I did not catch. For instance “it is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.” This just seems so shocking to me. Granted, things did travel by word of mouth as opposed to being able to hop on a computer and Google something. However, because we are so connected at any given moment, there is no excuse to be living in your own world. We should know what is going on around the world or even in just our community.

Mr. Winkle Wakes

The more I watch this video, the more it really begins to bothers me. It shows just how behind education really is in a technological standpoint. If other fields can make these advances, then why did it take so long for education to catch up? It shouldn’t be like that. If anything, we should have been the forerunners in this advance. The children we educate will become the doctors and lawyers and officer workers that Mr. Winkle witnesses using technology. Shouldn’t their first taste of technology come in a classroom where they can learn and grow?

As much as the video bothers me, it also slightly intrigues me. Here you have this little character that awakens from a slumber and sees how different his world has become. There are computers and breathing machines and telephones; nothing he knows to be normal. How many Mr. Winkle’s existed when technology first began advancing? I think educators who chose not to use technology in the classroom could be called a Mr. Winkle as well. Why make your students suffer because you just don’t want to learn?

Sir Ken Robinson: The Importance of Creativity

“My contention is that all kids have tremendous talent and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.” “My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.” These are two of my favorite quotes from the Ken Robinson talk on creativity. One thing that he does very well is mixing the humor with the seriousness of his talk. I especially loved the bit where he talks about Shakespeare being in someone’s English class. He then goes on to say that there is a hierarchy within every single public education system in the world. First are math and Science, then humanities, and finally the arts. He doesn’t just target the European or American education systems; he targets all of them. In his view, it is designed for people to be steered into the subjects that will be useful as opposed to the subjects like arts. Robinson says that intelligence goes hand in hand with creativity.

I enjoyed this talk as much as I did the first time around, mostly because he is so adamant about the use of creativity in the classroom. The best part of the talk is when he talks about the dancer, Jillian. Back then, she is taken to a dance school and sees people just like her, who have to move to think. Nowadays, just as Robinson said, she would have been put on medication and told to calm down. This rings so incredibly true, because instead of finding creative outlets for overactive children, we instead have them tested for ADD or ADHD or some other learning disorder when, in reality, the student could just be bored. A medication isn’t always the answer, especially in the case of a classroom. If people just took the time to figure out students, instead of jumping to a conclusion, students would be so much more better off.
A Day Made of Glass 2

Firstly, I’m sure something like this would scare Mr. Winkle as much as a normal desktop computer would or a machine that kept people alive. In fact, I felt a bit like Mr. Winkle while watching this video. Is something like this even possible? Could we have this technology at our disposal in the next fifty years? Maybe even less? Just imagining the possibilities for a classroom with this sort of integrated system excites me. This should be the direction our education system is moving, if only because we can as a whole benefit from it exponentially. Something like this, with the glass tablets and wall-to-wall touchscreen, gives the words ‘hands-on’ an entirely new meaning.

The medical portion of the video was just as neat. Mostly because you can be in one location and a specialist halfway around the world can help you solve something. This sort of thing could be so beneficial to everyone, not just certain countries or people. Also, everything was incredibly energy efficient. Even the elementary school shown had an energy usage graph on the wall. I think that would make people stop and think about their carbon footprint and the way they help to shape the world.