A Mini-TED Talk: Ed Ted Talks in EPISD
Creating a Small Scale TED Talk as a Professional Development Opportunity
TED Talks are pretty darn popular, especially with educators.
They have become a staple of many a professional development (Let me show you the guy that starts dancing and then everyone starts dancing…and you should start dancing too!) session.
We decided in our district to try to create our own little TED Talk. We dedicated it to just instructional technology, and to call it ED TECH Talks.
It would be a day long professional development only for our district administrators. No teachers, not because we don’t love teachers, but because the administrators were still on duty, and the teachers were gone for the summer.
We decided on ten topics, including Project Share Texas, Instructional Technology Myths, Your Classroom as an Apple Store, the iPad as a Swiss Army Knife and more.
Each topic would have one speaker, and be only 18 minutes long, followed by a 10 minutes discussion period.
There were some things we decided to do for each talk:
- No direct instruction. In other words, we would not allow anyone to speak in a such a way that they are being told what to do. What we wanted to do was inspire, and to show administrators what is out there, and perhaps to move them to try something that they aren’t doing already.
- Each talk would be only 18 - 20 minutes. Each speaker had a timer and a time limit.
- No handouts.
- No one could be using electronics during the presentations.
We started by creating a short teaser video for our administrators:
We create a small website that had a schedule of the talks:
We then created a poster ands sent it out to each administrator to advertise the event.
The event itself was held in a large auditorium , set up theater style. We created a short video for the event that was designed to humorously remind people that they should keep their electronics off during the talks.
In preparation for the event, all of the presenters practiced their talks two days before the event, with my team acting as self critics for each talk. All slides were scrutinized and feedback was given to the presenter on style, content and even timing.
We then held the event as an all day staff development.
Here are some of the videos forom the event. (We had to re-edit some due to technical issues, but the content was not changed) There are at least seven videos in this playlist.
All of the posted videos are located here:
