The Power of Video

Karl Fisch was musing about how his "Did You Know?" video, which he almost did not show to his staff last August, has now been seen by over 100,000 people worldwide. Those of you who have seen it can attest to the power of combining text and audio in a digital format to the words of Friedman in "The World is Flat." Karl says,

To tie this back to one of the major themes of this blog, it's a different world out there. A world where anyone's ideas can quickly spread if they happen to strike a chord. Where you don't necessarily have to have a large company or a huge public relations effort to make an impact (although that still doesn't hurt). And we need to be preparing our students to participate in such a world, to understand both the positive and the negative sides of that. To help them learn how to live and work in a rapidly changing world, where a fairly simple PowerPoint presentation that I almost didn't even show to my staff has now been seen worldwide.

This is just one of the reasons that I believe our schools need to change.

Here is another version inspired by Karl's video called, "The Connected Classroom." It was created by Kristin Hokanson and presented at a Pennsylvania Educational Technology Conference last weekend. It is just as powerful and compellingly presents a need to connect our students to THEIR world, not ours.