I thought it was very interesting when viewing these videos through the eyes of an up a coming elementary school teacher learning to use technology to reach out to communities. I feel that the video by Derek Sivers directly relates to my experience in the classroom with my third grade students. The author relates failing to working out in the gym and a vegetable. He states that you don’t go into the gym with muscles you have to work out everyday to break down the muscles to grow stronger, and a green vegetable grows while a ripe vegetable rots. You need to be changing and going through experiences in order to grow. This relates to education in the classroom. I feel many students are afraid to fail.
There is a phrase in teaching called “permission to fail”. As a teacher you should not give your students permission to fail, meaning it is okay to fail and accept this. The teacher needs to let the students know that it is okay to fail but that is not the end goal, instead the student needs to learn from this mistake to be stronger in the future. This concept scares many students I feel, and I need to strive to create a classroom environment that students know if they fail that is okay but you will grow stronger from this in the future. This is how you grow as students, these years are the years when you fail and learn from your mistakes as students.
The video by Shannon Deegan was very interesting about how Google allows 20 percent project for employees to work on that interest them. This directly relates to the 20 percent project that I was able to complete in my EDUC 578 class. Google allows employees to work on a project that interests themselves for 20 percent of the time. Many times these projects spark innovation in the video and lead to main projects that Google as a company campaigns for. An example of this in the video was a team of engineers who had a passion for astronomy. They worked on the Google maps that locate areas around the world on Google and thought “What if we turned the maps to the sky’s?” to track space locations. This turned into Google sky, which allows people to point their phones to the sky, and it will tell them what they are looking at. I thought this was so cool and amazing!! This is an example of innovation and how it is sparked.
When thinking about education and the classrooms I am in I think many teachers can use this idea. I completed my 20% project in a fifth grade classroom in which they created a art project that was their own and they reached out in the community to plan and implement the project. They researched using technology how to make the art and saved videos to help teach them how to do the art. I feel that giving students in the classroom 20 percent of their time to pursue an interest and innovation can be eye opening!