Week 11: TED Talks You Need to Share with Students

So I watched five inspirational videos from tec.com, and I have to say that they definitely have awesome talks. My personal favorite videos that I watched were the “Mathemagic”, “What Adults Can Learn from Kids”, “Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry Demo Sixth Sense”, “Chris Abani Muses on Humanity”, and “Learning from Sherman the Shark”. I see them more as being inspirations for the students to be able to want to learn or do something with their lives. For example, the Mathemagic video showed his love for magic through math. You heard me. Math. But it was so cool. He was able to do square roots of numbers in his head (even large ones at that), tell you what day you were born just by the date of your birth (if I was tell him my birthday, he would say that I was born on Thursday. By the way, I had to look it up so don’t go thinking that I’m a magician), etc. I got a hoot out of it since I didn’t believe anybody was that smart. He proved me wrong though. The way that I look at it is that if my students saw this video, they would be amazed, see how much fun it is, and would actually want to learn math. Another example would be the Learning from Sherman the Shark. The creator of the comic discusses his love for drawing as a kid and how he came to drawing sea creatures. As he was doing his discussion, I noticed that he talked about some facts about sea creatures (that sharks were around for millions of years, etc). Not only would this video inspire students to be creative but also teach them things if they were to draw real life animals by going out and studying them. I would show all these videos in my classroom and hope that they would be inspired to learn more in class.