Friday, July 15, 2011

Review: TED Talk by Sugata Mitra's new experiments in self-teaching

My second daughter wrote this review of Sugata Mitra's new experiments in self-teaching:

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I recently watched Sugata Mitra's TED Talk about his experiments in self-education. He starts his talk by mentioning how good teachers don't go to the unpleasant places they are needed. Several years ago he went to a isolated place in India and imbedded a computer. They found that children will learn what they want to learn. He found that the children could figure out how to do things like use the computer, play games the internet, record music, and so on.

Arthur C. Clark said, "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be." and "If children have interest then education happens."

Sugata Mitra continued to find groups of children figuring out how to use computers and at the end of two years they had begun to Google their homework.

He did another experiment. He got a group of children in India and said there is some very difficult stuff on this computer it's in English try to figure it out. He was excepting to come back test them and find that they had gotten a zero and say, "Well I guess they're some things you need a teacher for. (The stuff on the computer was Bio-technology. He was surprised two months later to discover their scores had gone up from zero to thirty present. He had a friend implore the grandmother method and the children's scores had gone up to fifty present which is the average in schools with a teacher.

Surta Mitra then tested this method in a class in New Castle. (His method being to give groups of children a computer and asking them to answer a question.) He came back two months later and found their testing scores remained just as good.

This TED talk made me think, what if my sisters and I could use this method to learn? It certainly seams effective in groups. I hope we try it out.
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It is a fun video and worth watching:

1 comment:

essay writers said...

Thanks for the video