Media Critique
Junqi Huang (Kay)
TED Talks-Amazing tool for presenting ideas in class
Nowadays, it is the era of science and technology. One coin has two sides. On one hand, technology makes our lives more easier, such as we can communicate every where with our cellphones; we can pay various bill by a push of a button; and we can rely message more efficient with text and email; on the other hand, sometimes technology still has its cons. For instance, our personal information can hacked and be exposed to the cyber world. If the computer with important information is down, we might be hard to retrieve the information we needed. Nevertheless, as educators, we find that technology can be utilized as useful tool in class.
As I was in college, TED Talks seems to become a mainstream tool for teacher to present concept in the class. I remembered the first time I was exposure to TED Talks was in sociology class. The professor was presenting the topic of the bias of gender. In order to direct her students to form critical think in the subject matter, she showed us a short presentation, called “Killing us softly” from TED Talks. The speech impressed me. After watching the presentation, I felt like I accessed large amount of information from it in such a short time. Since then, I start watching some interesting presentations from TED Talks. When I watch speech from TED apps, I can also choose either to show the subtitles or not. For my understanding, reading subtitles while watching TV or video is beneficial for people to learn English, especially for the people who are at the beginner level. It helps people to understand the concepts better. Therefore, I believe the TED Talks is able to enhance students’ language level.
In a classroom, motivation plays an important role in students’ learning process. I believe those amazing speeches from TED Talks are able to grab students’ attention, especially for adolescents. Adolescents are energetic and on-going processing the knowledge from the world. TED Talks is divided into many categories. Every topic is related to the social factors and reveals the common phenomenon in the society. Each presentation is well organized and precise. In class, teacher can teach class by showing them one of related presentation; and then, lead them to think critically. According to previous class, we notice that teenagers are lack of concentration. However, the TED Talk only required a short amount of time to watch, which aids students to access the largest amount of information in the least amount of time period.
In general, there could be a downside for the TED Talks, but either playing an educator’s role or student’s role, I only see the advantage of the TED Talks. It helps students to open their mind and gain a deeper understanding of new concepts.
Hi Junqi,
I completely agree that TED talks are a great tool to use in classrooms. They are normally fairly short and therefore like you said don’t take up too much class time but they can be very inspiring. There have been multiple TED talks that I’ve seen that are really inspiring and after watching them, I personally feel motivated to change my perspective on certain ideas or to go out and do something. The subtitles are a great idea especially if there are ELL’s in the classroom and also there are TED talks in various languages as well, I recently saw one in Spanish, so it can be used for a variety of subjects and not just for language classes. If the subject is chosen wisely, I think that it can be a tool that will engage students and get them interested in certain topics.
Hi Junqi,
I love TED talks, yet I never really think to include them into my lesson plans. I think that is in part because I have the mentality that Spanish class should be all in Spanish, and since I teach beginning levels, the ones in Spanish may be too hard. But I think that you have a very valid point and using a TED talk in the L1 could also be beneficial as a motivating factor and increase students metacognitive language skills.
Hello Junqi.
I, too, am in total agreement with you. I have used TED talks in the past and they are fabulous because of many of your stated reasons: they are short, intelligent, have subtitles available, and in my experience, engage and motivate learners. I really think they are a goldmine because the students are interested in them and there a broad range of topics that are intelligent and accessible at the same time. There are also many socially conscious options to choose from.