WHY NOT SAVE THE WORLD?

Here’s a vision to transform the world. How can my middle school students find their role in solving the world’s problems? How can I make a global issue real for my students? How can I empower my students so that they see that they have a role no matter how small in solving the world’s problems? I don’t have an answer yet. But I am inspired by this wonderful story of how one man is changing the world.

You can see the video at http://dotsub.com/films/bankerto_1/

What is the true education, if not e-ducare (L: e = out;  ducare = to lead), the drawing out of the potential in a person’s soul?  And what is the soul, if not the set of gifts and talents that make each of us unique and precious.?  And how might this kind of education become the center of public adolescent education - to help our nation’s students make the journey out of the self-obsessed narcissism of youth through the challenge of taking on an adult’s responsibility to serve the world?

Like Mary Oliver, I don’t know - but I do know this, how to be still in the early hours of the morning.  How to sit with my heart mindfully in silence.  Shall we not as educators pay attention to the smallest details and recapture the wonder and awe that we had as children?  Shall we not teach our students the same?

Here is a link to Ms. Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day,  which inspired the title of this post.

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html

And here is the link to Parker Palmer’s Commencement Address at the Bank Street School of Education.  In this address, he speaks to the need for the care of a teacher’s soul.

 http://www.couragerenewal.org/files/Bank%20Street%20Commencement%20Talk.pdf

I’ve updated and reconfigured this post as a permanent page in my collection. You can see my latest thoughts on the role of Web 2.0 technology and the future of education by clicking on the tab labeled “FLAT WORLD” in the navigation menu above.

We live in a world hurtling toward the future. While I was sleeping (focused on creating what I thought would be a cutting-edge middle school biotechnology curriculum) the world of education was being transformed by innovative collaborations of educators across the globe with:

1. WikiSpaces allows teachers and students to collaborate on educational projects across the globe, an award-winning example is The Flat Classroom Project
2. Edublogs provides teachers with a free blogspace. An examplary blog for keeping up with the latest instructional technologies is The Infinite Thinking Machine
3. SlideShare allows you to share powerful educational presentations like the Shift Happens slide show shown above.
4. Google Presentations allows multiple authors to create dynamic presentations online, A collaborative Google Presentation on Using Google Presentations
5. DivShare provides unlimited storage for creating a repository of instructional multi-media.
6. FlashMeeting is for video conferencing with other educators across the globe. This free web-based tool also automatically archives your conversations for asynchronous review.

The following is a TeacherTube video on the same topic. It contains the same content as the slideshow, but provides more thought provoking questions for teachers, parents and school administrators.

Download Video: Posted by mcleod at TeacherTube.com.