I am a progressive educator, a podcaster (EdTechTalk.com/21cl), a blogger, and dean of faculty of JK-11 school (building a high school) in New York City.
Yesterday Nicholas Kristoff of the NY Times wrote an opinion piece about paying teachers more. I was interested in the topic, so read the piece. It is worth reading, but is not the point of this post. At the bottom of the article I found this little blip of text (see the image). He has a blog, a Facebook page, a YouTube account, and a Twitter account. This is clearly the modern journalist's toolkit, and I might argue that it's the modern educator's toolkit, too.
Salman Khan, of Khan Academy, builds videos which kids can learn from. They're about adding, subtracting, algebra, calculus, history, and more. His first idea was just to post helpful videos for his cousins. Then, thousands of others kids and teachers started using his videos. Realizing the energy behind them he kept developing content, but also wisely started to build an infrastructure that could enhance how students use the videos.
The data sets he shows are pretty powerful. I do think we have to be careful about data. Jonathan Martin at NEIT2010 did a great job of talking about being data informing, not replacing, judgement.
I think his ideas around using game mechanics are incredible. I have been to so many talks about gaming for education where finding the right balance between play and education has been the discussion. Someone on a panel I was at said 70% play, 30% game. That seems like the oddest approach, and I think Khan's merit badges and other structures are a much better look at ed tools might use gaming structures.
Khan Academy is exciting stuff, and some of my teachers have been engaged in producing their own videos. We're going to see there "the flip" might take our students.
Audre Lorde's seminal piece about using patriarchy to upset patriarchy (read it below) is stirring in me as I think about how we as educators need to think about diversity of attendees/presenters at educational innovation conferences like TEDxNYED. On Saturday I found myself reconnected to a familiar conference past time...where are all the people of color?
So I called for a lunch meeting to fire up a new idea of addressing the issue. I thought, let's create a diversity scorecard. In my mind the scorecard is a little widget that conferences would put on their site that would show their "diversity grade." This initself is a somewhat preposterous idea. As an informed person, I know that you can't give diversity a grade on an A-F scale. It's too complicated. But, knowing who is present is a start to dialog. And in fact, it forces you to face the reality of who has access to the space. So, over 20 minutes after a wonderful lunch dialog with some smart folks, we banged out a survey dealing with identity of those at TEDxNYED, and here are the results thus far (or see images below). @bkolani, one of the TEDxNYED curators said that he would include the survey in the post-conference e-mail, that so that will help get more data. There is much work to do on this, and if you're interested (and capable) of helping me build the diversity scorecard widget, do let me know! My programming skills just aren't up for this one right now.
Kiran Bir Sethi's TED talk about empowering young people to change their local community was beyond inspiring. Her kids changed the town they lived in. She wrote up the strategy, translated it into 8 languages, and distributed it all around India. The result? Over 40,000 schools working for real change all around India.
For those who don't think that educational change can scale, Kiran Bir Sethi shows you that it indeed can. Want your school to be a part of this? Join the Design for Change contest.
Thanks to TEDxNYED for bringing this video to my awareness.