Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Think Big


Last week in #GEN2243 we had the pleasure of speaking with Adam Taylor(AKA 2footgiraffe), a science teacher in Tennessee. Adam was the creator of the infamous SciStuChat, that allows students and science lovers all around to interact back and forth with real scientists online through twitter. SciStuChat has expanded internationally through the last five years and ended up with the interactions of over 400 scientists around the world which was pretty awesome if you ask me. Adam also gave us great tips on establishing our own PLN's which we've discussed a few times before on my blog. He mentioned using twitter lists as a tool and doing regular google searches to find people to follow within our major. We also got to try out LinkedIn which gave a lot of great connections on its own. Be sure to connect with me!






Speaking of speaking(punny, right?), I also got to check out a pretty great TED Talk recently. Author and educator Ken Robinson had a very thought provoking talk titled "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" that focused in on what we were lacking in our modern school system. The talk immediately made me think of the famous Albert Einstein(supposedly) quote, "Everbody is a Genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid." Ken explained further how he believes that the regular education system'; focusing on english, science, math, etc., is terribly outdated. He believes there should be just as much importance to learn subjects such as dance and art because in the modern day there are millions of jobs that focus on these subjects with a terrible stigma that they are lesser than what we are taught to know. Being a total right-brainer who has only felt a passion for art but felt the need to be ushered into a standard major and job, I have to admit, the speech brought tears to my eyes. It is a pretty silencing thing to think about the people who are out there that could have achieved greatness in something that they never got to realized they had skill in. That being said, the video gave me a sense of peace to know that there are people who are bringing this to attention and that ways of education are slowly but surely changing. Here is the video if you'd like to check it out. 




1 comment:

  1. Hi Alexa! It's so cool how you added the scroll box to show the tweets from this months #Scistuchat! I read through a few of them and I wish that I had had something like this while I was in school to connect me to professionals! Great blog!

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