TED Project Reflection

TED… I have mixed feelings about it. While I agree that it was far better this year than last year, I still had a few problems with it.

This year’s Google sites were an improvement over last year’s wikis. They were easier to navigate and felt more polished. I also liked how we actually met with our groups before the presentation date. However, even more group meetings definitely could have been beneficial. Of course, I realize that it is a bit complicated to organize a meeting with almost 120 students. A lot of the problems with this project came from the lack of work ethic among other grade levels. I guess my group was rather lucky in that, even though some of us did procrastinate, we all got the work done and we distributed and followed through on equal amounts of work. I also can’t complain about devoting too much time to the project. I spent about 4-5 hours on the project and most of that was research time.

The problem I have is that I really didn’t learn anything from the presentations themselves. Any actual learning took place when I watched all the videos for the first time. I felt that the student presentations were too much simple re-wording of the TED videos. Sure learning other “academy-like” people’s ideas on how to solve problems could be useful, but wouldn’t academy discussions to explore how to find solutions be more beneficial? Shouldn’t we be learning problem solving critical thinking rather than how to extend off the views of others? I really don’t know, I’m not a teacher, but I just know that I am unsatisfied with the actual value of the project.