TED is an organization and a website with a collection of over 450 video lectures by some of the most notable academics, businesspeople, researchers, politicians, and scientists in their fields. Each lecture is only 18 minutes long. A small non-profit organization dedicated to getting the news out on the power of ideas, they have attracted such large names as Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Jane Goodall, Bono, Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking, and Steven Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics.

While each of the lectures, which can be streamed for free from the website, is educational, they are also inspirational. Since each of the lecturers is spending less than twenty minutes to describe their life’s passion, and because each of the lecturers is a superlative expert in their area of study, the lectures are as exciting and simply presented as they are educational and informative. For this reason, they might best be used at the outset of a curriculum, to introduce a topic, a theme, or an area of study. For instance, as a teacher begins a portion of a science curriculum on outer space, she could show Carolyn Porco’s TED speech, which asks the question, Could there be forms of life on one of Saturn’s moons? The lecture is fascinating, but also presented in simple enough terms for most high schoolers and certainly for college students. Alternatively, there are also many education-related lectures on TED that teachers or administrative staff might watch for their own edification.

Renowned mathematician Arthur Benjamin delivers a lecture suggesting ways to make math education more effective and less stressful. In two separate lectures, Sir Ken Robinson and Elizabeth Gilbert both discuss broad changes they would like to see made to the education system in order to foster students’ strengths. Whether for classroom use or for school staff’s personal use, TED lectures educate with the kind of gravitating and inspired videos that are just unavailable in most pre-packaged curriculum-driven video series. Find TED online at http://www.ted.com.

Ted Wujec on 3 Ways The Brain Creates Meaning

School calendars contain important events that should be integrated with the family or personal calendar. Calendar tools like Tandem for Schools allow parents to sync the school calendar’s events with a personal web calendar like Outlook, Google Calendar, Cozi, or iCal. This eliminates the need to manually enter events into a personal calendar for parents.

However parents can’t just buy Tandem for Schools if they like the convenience of a comprehensive web-based school calendar. It has to be purchased by the school or district administration. That is why Intand (the makers of Tandem) in partnership with Cozi have developed a site for parents to vote for Tandem if they would like their school to consider Tandem as a calendar management solution. Parents can visit the site to vote and learn more about web-based school calendars at http://www.schoolcal.org.

From the Cozi blog:

If you wish you could magically have school calendar dates appear in your family calendar, you’re not alone! In fact, that’s the top choice of most parents when asked what type of calendar they’d most like to integrate directly into their family calendars. Imagine how much simpler life would be if you could automatically add school vacations, teacher conferences and early dismissal days right into your family planner.

Some schools already make calendars available to do that, but most schools don’t yet. That’s why Cozi is eager to introduce you to School Calendars Now (www.SchoolCal.org). School Calendars Now is working with parents to encourage schools across the U.S. and Canada to publish their annual calendars as Internet calendars (known as iCals) that can easily be added to the calendar programs parents use most, such as Cozi.

In this interesting presentation from the TED Conference, mathematician Arthur Benjamin makes the case that statistics should be at the top of the pyramid of the high school mathematics curriculum. He argues that it is more useful in everyday life and he points out that if American’s understood statistics they may have avoided making poor decisions that led to the financial crisis. What do you think? Are his points valid?

Christopher D. Sessums discusses the paradox of learning in the digital era, which is that the internet makes learning both more individual and yet more social. For more on this see the following post from Christopher D. Sessums blog.

The World Wide Web is more than a collection of websites. “It is also what emerges out of the collection of and interconnections among the sites that constitute it, producing software or websites that re-imagine what is possible technologically and socially.” (Thomas & Brown, 2009, p. 37) This emergence of interconnections has resulted in what we might refer to as the digital era.

However, there is a paradox associated with learning in the digital era: Learning may be at once more individual, shaped to one’s own style, eccentricities, and interests, yet more social, involving networking, cooperation, and collaboration (Weigel, James, & Gardner, 2009).

Unfortunately, in an environment of standardized testing linked to school funding, the implementation of new digital media in the classroom along with constructivist learning principles may be considered too risky, thus the innovative aspects of new digital media becomes shelved if not ignored altogether (i.e., the relevance gap).

As evidence grows concerning the knowledge, skills, and competencies gained through engaging new digital media, conventional notions of “school as the ideal locus of the full range of learning” are being overshadowed (Weigel, James, & Gardner, 2009, p. 9).

“If schools do not take seriously the positive and negative potentials of digital media for learning, they risk becoming increasingly irrelevant to the lives students lead outside of school and to the future which they are being prepared” (Weigel, James, & Gardner, 2009, p. 14).

What will change schools?
If a successful learning practice depends upon “an independent, constructivistically oriented learner who can identify, locate, process, and synthesize the information he or she is lacking” (Weigel, James, & Gardner, 2009, p. 10), then systemic change and widespread adoption requires

• informed leadership (Fullan, 2007);

• all stakeholders (teachers, principals, parents, community members) to be aware of and familiar with the innovations associated with digital learning (Ellsworth, 2004); and

• schools must adopt digital learning wholesale today (not tomorrow) (Christensen, 2008).

To those who read about and engage in the new digital media, what, in your opinion needs to be added to this list? What steps are you taking? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or in your own Web space.

This article was republished from Christopher D. Sessums blog and is licensed under the Creative Commons 2.5 license.

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