Mr. Winkle did you know?

Mr. Winkle Wakes

Mr. Winkle woke up after one hundred years. He began to explore the world. He went to different places and noticed how they had changed. He had never heard of the technology that he was seeing before him, and he was very confused. The only place that had not changed much from what he had remembered was a school. There was not as much technology in the school as there was in the office building and the hospital.

This video really made me think about how I would like to change schools and make it more advanced in technology. This video will make me strive to help show students how to use various forms of technology so they will be familiar with all kinds of technology. This video also shows how schools are far behind many other businesses and need to catch up to the rest of the world with technology.

Did You Know? 3.0

This video presented numerous facts about the world. According to the video, China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world. One in eight couples that got married last year met online. There are approximately 540,000 words in the English language, which is about five times as many as there were during Shakespeare's time. It is also 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. There are over 200 million registered users on My Space, which if that were a country would make it the fifth largest country in the world. There are over 31 billion searches on Google every month, but in 2006, there were only 2.7 billion per month. The amount of new technological information is doubling every two years. The top ten in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.

This video really hit home with me. The facts that were presented amazed me. China, whose native language is Chinese, will soon have more English speakers than anyone else in the world. I see now people are looking to the Internet to find their "significant other", which was taboo not so long ago. Information and the English language itself has grown exponentially through the years. Social networks have become the norm for people to connect with others. The video showed me that people have become dependent on Internet searches to look for information. The thought of technological information doubling every two years is somewhat scary, because everyone will have to continue to learn about new advances. In education, we will have to prepare students for jobs that are not available now and technology that is being developed at this time.

Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity

In Ken's video he mentioned a few thoughts that showed how eduction was killing the arts. He mentioned that everybody had an interest in education, whether they were teachers or not. He said that people look to education to help them grasp what will come in the future. He mentioned that unpredictability is extraordinary because we cannot predict the future, but we can prepare for it. Creativity should be just as important to eduction as literacy, because creativity will be needed to change the world. He stated that kids are not afraid to be wrong. He also stated that if you are not prepared to be wrong, then you will never come up with anything original. Schools have made it seem that if you make a mistake, it is the worst thing for you to do, which is educating people out of creativity. The topic of what is learned is like everywhere in the world; math and language are at the top of importance, then humanities, and last but not least arts. Then the arts are divided in order of importance; you have art and music, then you have dance, which is not correct, since dance should be equal to music and art. The arts are what aid creativity.

This video really made me think on how I need to keep creativity in mind while I teach. I love the arts, and I think that students can use the arts to express themselves. We need to encourage students to be creative and show them that it is okay to be wrong. The way inventions are made is by creativity and the chance that one could be wrong, and the product not sell. Since I am a dancer, I know what he is talking about on how all education is prioritized, and even the arts too. The schools I have attended had music class and art classes, but there was not a dance class until I got to high school, and you could only take dance one semester. I used dance to cope with stress and other frustrations, and it also taught me to be creative. I will use this video and my personal experience to help keep creativity in school and not discourage creativity.

Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts

This video was about a class in Camilla, Georgia. The teacher used technology to connect students to the world. She stated that students do not have to use only paper and pencil to learn, and if they did use only those, only few would succeed. She did not have to be in front of the class all the time; she used students to present things to fellow classmates and to her. She taught the curriculum, but changed the way she taught it to interest the students. The class she taught also showed students how to use new software, blog effectively, and collaborate with others effectively, which helped them become comfortable with technology. They used programs like "Digi Teen" and "Flat Classroom Project" to empower the students to work with students around the world.

This video showed me that you can use technology, and that it is not hard to incorporate it into the curriculum. It helped me to notice that using technology can help interest students in the curriculum as well. I plan on hopefully using some of these ideas when I finally get into a classroom. I want to use the idea of letting the students present what they learn and how they learned to do things to the class, which will make me smarter and hopefully help students on comprehending the subject matter better. I want my students to be prepared for the technology that they are going to run into when they get out into the real world. The idea of speaking to others around the world is amazing.