You Tube Videos

The video I liked the most was, “Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?”


The three videos, “Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?”, “A Vision of Students Today”, and “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Using Us”, all had one thing in common: they talked about students. The first video was my favourite. Sir Ken Robinson was an amazing speaker, one that kept your attention and had lots of examples to back up his claims, for example, the story he told about Gillian Lynne, the choreographer from the musical “CATS”. When she was younger, she had trouble in school, and a doctor, instead of telling her mother she had a learning disability or to put her on medication, told her to enroll her in dance lessons. She might have never had the career she had if her talent for dancing had not been indulged.

In schools today, instruction is not designed for learners like Gillian. Many, not all, classrooms consist of a teacher lecturing at the front of the room, not allowing for kinesthetic, musical, or any other types of learning besides auditory and sometimes visual to occur. There are so many students who need to have hands-on learning, or learning through music and art. Teachers can incorporate many of these into their lessons and reach all types of learners when planning their instruction. For example, they could take a science lesson and include group work to be completed at stations.

This would give the students a chance to interact orally, move around, and the activities can be things like, creating a song to teach the scientific process, a game where they have to race to see who can order the steps of the scientific process first, and an activity where the students choose which sentence belongs with which step of the scientific process. Technology can also be incorporated into the lesson to allow for differentiation, such as making an interactive power point game that deals with matching the steps of the scientific process to their definition. It can include graphics and have the questions can be read aloud.

The second video, “A Vision of Students Today,” dealt with the issues students of today deal with. A teacher had his students take a survey about their habits in class and outside of class. They came up with different figures that were sobering. Only 49% of students read their textbooks and many students had spent over $100 dollars on textbooks that they had never opened. It also talked about the large class sizes and how the chalkboard where the information is written is so far away.
This video alludes to making instruction more accessible in college classes.

When planning their instruction, professors should choose books that would be helpful in the student’s actual career and helpful in learning the objectives of the specific course. Also, making power points available online helps so the student has the information in front of them as well as on the blackboard. Using video clips and having group assignments also helps to keep student’s attention and can provide information that might not have been available to the student before. Technology would be integrated through the video clips, power points, and also having discussions online or a Twitter or Facebook account to post changes in assignments and other updates.

The third and final video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Using Us”, was about how today’s internet is user friendly. It also talked about the internet being so easy to use, and that we need new legislation to regulate certain online activities. When planning instruction, teachers can certainly utilize the different technologies of free blogs, You Tube, Facebook, free website hosting, and many more ways of posting information on the web for learning purposes. The addition of these different websites and methods of learning make classes more interactive and interesting, especially online classes.

Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide?

This video is of author Amy Tan discussing her perspective on creativity. My favorite point she brings up is that uncertainty allows for new ideas and creativity to emerge forward as there is no definite answer as to what might come. It’s a great one to watch to get different ideas on where creativity might come from.