All are teachers, all are learners.

Good  and rainy morning everyone!

In today's entry I'll like to share with you this inspiring video about education. This clip is done in TED talk format. These are short presentations about interesting topics. In this case, education is the main focus. There are many TED talks about education, but I found this one unique because the presenter is a teacher herself, and she starts the talk based on her experience with one student that did not want to attend her lessons. He hated school, he said.

Sadly, nowadays this is the case of so many students, and as teachers we should try to do something to fix that. It is no conceivable that, for instance, the distribution of the classes remains the same after 20 years of education, and the same for the methodologies used. Society has changed, our students have changed and so should we. 

Firstly, we live in a world made of technology. We wake up at the sound of our alarm, we cook using cooking robots, we talk with friends who live miles away thanks to our phones, and before sleeping we check our social media and email. If technology can be so useful and helpful for our everyday life, why do not we apply it in our lessons?

However, as Kayla Delzer says, we should not use technology for the sake of using it because then, our lessons would be the same but more technologic. Instead, we should leverage the advantages of technology. In spite of making our students read a history article, lets make them do a WebQuest about the topic they have to study; in spite of making them study the characteristics of an epic poem, lets make them compose an epic poem; lets make them elaborate their own project about a topic they are interested in. For these tasks, they can use technology in order to help them find information. 

We have to transform our classes, our methodologies, make them interesting for our students so they come to class wanting to learn something new. As teachers we have to change our minds, be aware that we do not know everything and we never will. We are there to teach our students but we can learn something from them too. Actually lots of things. As Delzer proposes, a good task is making them learn something so that they have to teach it later to their mates and even to the teacher. In this way, they feel they are contributing to other people's learning, they are not there merely to listen and absorb information. They can be something more than a recorder sitting on a table, because, as students, we have sometimes felt like that: we only listen and reproduce.

Living in the 21st century means something more than being surrounded by technology, it means knowing how to use it, but using it properly. We can use social media to teach our students. They can do lots of activities such as Skyping people from other countries to learn new languages and knowing new cultures, they can play ludic games, watch interesting videos, make WebQuests, look for information in to order to produce their own projects. There is a wide variety of ways of making their learning process more interesting and appealing to them.

Finally, I would like to highlight something that Delzer says at the end of her presentation. Society and education change, they get transformed all over the years, but there is something essential in education that always remains and that we should keep in mind, despite of the changes in society: 'relationships between students and passionate teachers always remain.'