You can see last night’s PBS Ted Talk On Education here. However, those talks were edited down from their originals.
Here is where you can see the full unedited versions (including a written transcript) of the talks by these speakers:
Ramsey Musallam: 3 rules to spark learning
Malcolm London: “High School Training Ground”
Pearl Arredondo: My story, from gangland daughter to star teacher
Geoffrey Canada: Our failing schools. Enough is enough!
And I’ve embedded Bill Gates’ full talk (You can get the transcript here) on his plan to videotape every teacher in the United States — at a cost of $5 billion:
Here’s my Washington Post piece on what I think of his idea:
Hmm. Every student has an iPad in a classroom of 24 students and the teacher has her own laptop. In many districts across the country this is not the case. Ithout familiarity of technology because of its daily use, and without ease of access to technology to later evaluate video, this ambitious idea will fall flat. We need to focus on the foundation in schools across America before we build the classroom above it.
Maybe we should work on providing every classroom proper bandwidth to support streaming rich content, give every student and teacher access to a network that allows for great content and teaching to happen everyday and then while doing all of this, have great support structures in place to help those teachers who are not as comfortable with using technology do it well, including playing back of video they might not be comfortable setting up and recording in the first place.
Without doing this, this great idea will simply fall flat on its face as many beofre it have done.