Guest Blog: TEDTalks in the Elementary Classroom

We are excited to share the following guest blog with you from 5th grade students in Boulder Valley School District sharing their TEDTalk journey! Be inspired by their enthusiasm, engagement and passion for learning! Thank you to Kelly Marcus for sharing this work with us.

--The BVSD Ed Tech Team

Check out the examples below--then read the incredible blog from our 5th grade students!
Pangolins
Anne Frank
Drones

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ED TECH BLOG:

TED TALKS

By: Addison, Elina, Roxy, and Yvette

                                                          

       We are in 5th grade in Boulder Valley School District. We use chromebooks everyday for writing, reading, science, math, well, it’s throughout our entire day. About 90% of our work is done with our dear friend, Google.  Recently, we did Ted Talks, which were based on our research reports. We were all very excited when it was time to begin the process of making our Ted Talks.

The first step to this process was choosing what topic we wanted to research. It took many days to determine what was Ted Talk worthy. Then, we started to do a thorough research on the topic of choice. We found interesting facts and put them into categories. For example, Roxy did a piece about pangolins, Addi did a project about Anne Frank, Elina did one about koalas, and I did a piece about snowy owls. Next, we learned how to organize our notes into a five paragraph essay.     

After our class finished writing the choice research project, our teachers introduced Ted Talks to the class. To get it started, we watched a few Ted talks on online. We brainstormed what good TED Talk look and sound like. At that point, we were ready to take on the world of TED. We used notecards to organize our thoughts and information. We used Each notecard modeled one of our paragraphs. Countless times we heard, ”Make sure that you are not writing paragraphs on the notecards but notes.” Writing key points will help you have a conversation with your audience. Making eye contact, speaking loud enough, and making sure that your information make sense is key to making a great TED talk. Once we finished writing key facts down on the notecards we needed to practice. One student in our class practiced over 30 times. After practicing, we were ready for a live audience. This is where our good friend Google joined us. We did a Google Hangout with Mr.Lehmans 3rd grade class. He stated making TED talks requires confidence. Boy, it sure does.

There was a great amount of work that went into making these TED Talks. Isabelle in Mrs. Marcus’s 5th grade class says, “At first it was a little nerve-racking, but when is was said and done, it was so much fun! ” It took about 4-5 weeks to finish the whole project and it was all a lot of pleasure and we hope to do something like it again!