Class, it's time to learn

I love when I can share the great work done by the students in my school.

I came across a tweet announcing a student film contest sponsored by the White House.  It asked them to create short (less than 3 minute) video describing how technology has changed their school and the future for education.  I didn't see it until mid-January, but I immediately shared it with our video production teacher and his advanced students.  Two students stepped up and got their video shot in 1 day, edited in 2 days, and submitted a few hours before the deadline.  It looks fantastic and I hope they get the chance to have it shown at the White House film festival.

It's Official!!!

I am sorry to be slow in updating this blog, but I wanted to formally write that we are an Official TED Ed Club!!!  It has been an amazing journey so far and it is only going to get better from here.

So now that I talk about what we are doing without putting the word "PILOT" in front, what does that really mean for the club?  Actually, not much is going to change.  We are still going to be a Community Impact Club (I think I need to copyright that phrase), but rather than having meetings centered around discussions, the students need to start putting their ideas into action.  The discussion format is being dropped by TED Ed so we are shifting to a presentation format--basically the students are required for creating their own TED Ed Talks.  My club is composed, primarily, of students who don't really talk much in class--great workers, just not stand-up/take control types--so I am particularly interested to see how this all develops.

We are also taking on a more formal training method to our meetings to get the students ready to give 10 minutes talks about what they are passionate about.  I have made modifications to the Idea Book that was given to all advisors so that it would work better to our club and my methods as an advisor.

Because we have grown so much over the past few months (7 students at our first meeting, 40 today) I decided to mix things up.  Each student was assigned a seat and given an index card with their name on it.  On the back they were to "Draw a picture of something they are passionate about."  We then discussed within our small groups what we drew and then a few members shared with the group as a whole.  Here are some of my groups' passions:

Some members have approached me in the last couple of weeks about projects they wanted to start so we shared their ideas and the videos that inspired them.  In the planning stages, we have:

1.  Gangster Garden--We are going to build a community garden for the purposes of not only feeding the community, but also improve the quality of the food provided by the school.  We also talked about using the food as a fundraiser for some of the other projects and reinvesting in the garden (possible greenhouse).  I think our biggest step was that everyone agreed to plant seeds and take them home to germinate as a way to get the garden going before spring arrives.

2.  Dumpster Diving for the Homeless--one student saw a talk on YouTube about a man who was collecting non-expired food from dumpsters behind supermarkets and was living completely off of this food.  After doing some research he found that supermarkets actually have a policy of throwing out the food rather than donating it to shelters simply for the ease of disposal.  He also found that clothing stores will shred clothing rather than donating them because they can't thrown them away if they aren't damaged.  We are not dumpster diving, but it will include trying to convince a lot of stores (supermarkets, bakeries, bagel shops) to change their policies to help those less fortunate.

3.  Look Up More--The first video we saw as a club was by Charlie Todd.  One of his projects was called "Look Up More" which basically focused on getting people out of their own head and to take a look around.  So, inspired by this photo

we are going to hang a variety of objects that catch the sunlight (cocktail drink umbrellas, small prisms, tissue paper flowers, etc) from the ceiling in the atrium outside of our media center.  The ceiling in that area is about 30 feet above the students and has large windows with a fantastic amount of sunlight streaming through.  On the floor we are going to put LOOK UP MORE in the hopes that student stop walking through the halls in a trance.

I will update again after our next meeting.

Small Update:  I forgot to post the pictures of our tentative plans for the projects.  We identified what we needed, who needed to be contacted, and where we wanted to do the project.  These pictures were taken with Google Glass.

Piloting a TED Ed Club

Back in June, I stumbled across this website on Twitter from TED Ed.  I show TED Talks in my chemistry class, occasionally for chemistry, but mostly just to expose my students to innovative ideas and a different perspective on the world.  A few days after submitting the survey, I received an email from TED telling my that I have been selected to be one of 25 pilot clubs from around the world.

There were 2 choices for the type of the club:  Discussion or Presentation.  Since I received the email on the first day of summer vacation, I chose the discussion format.  I figured that we could treat the club similar to a book club, but we would be watching videos instead of reading chapters from a book.  I sent an email to every student I had had over the past 2 years and a few colleagues posted it on their class Edmodo sites.  In the end I had 12 students sign up.  We met in the public library, classrooms, and a Panera.  The discussions ranged from creating situations of absurdity, alternative fuel sources, what constitutes beauty, and a theory of everything.  The discussions went in every direction and it was amazing to hear what the students had to say.

The most fascinating aspect of the club was the type of student who came to the meetings.  Almost all of the students are those that you might classify as "wallflowers."  They are excellent students who would prefer to sit quietly in class and complete their work rather than answer questions or have any attention drawn to them.  However, pull all of these students out of the classroom, give them a non-school related topic to discuss (that actually interests them), and suddenly they won't be quiet.  Our meetings ran over time every time because the discussions were so interesting.

So fast forward through the summer and we were selected to continue our pilot through January.  While I really enjoyed the discussions, I couldn't see us meeting for another 5 months and continue with the same format.  I was on a family vacation in Portland, ME and my wife starts eagerly pointing at the wall of a restaurant where I see "Before I die..." painted on top of black chalkboard paint.  Then, along the wall people wrote in things they wanted to do in chalk.  Apparently, this is based on the TED Talk by Candy Chang.  And that's when the lightbulb went off.  All of the newer TED Talks have some sort of profound message, what if we create student-driven projects centered around this message?

One of the concerns I have is that my students are going through school without really knowing the people in their classes.  I wanted to create a project that not allow students to feel connected to others around them, but also increase school spirit (something we are really lacking).  Today was our first home football game and our fans are called the MiddSouthNation.  So I printed out 3000 of these stickers

and starting at 6:30 in the morning, members of the TED Ed Club started handing out stickers to every member of our school:  parents, students, staff, cafeteria workers, custodians, bus drivers.  We also contacted our Touchdown Club to get the giant inflatable South Eagle mascot for the front entrance.  Have you ever seen kids getting excited to be at school at 6:30am??  Me neither, but these kids sure were because they were engaged in something meaningful to them.

So the MiddSouth TED Ed Club has become a community impact club.  Our purpose is to use the profound messages from TED Talks to create student-driven projects that help our community see the world just a little differently. Every student wasn't wearing a sticker and many didn't really understand what we were doing.  But, the staff were smiling a little more today than yesterday, several hundred students were more involved in school than yesterday, and we increased attendance at the football game.

I can't wait to see what our next project entails.