TED Talks Education - Podcast Rankings and reviews

While doing research on adolescent behavior I started looking into various podcasts on education. The one thing that caught my attention in “TED Talks Education,” was the episode [Why students should have mental health days.] I then started to take a deeper dive and found many episodes pertaining to mental health and motivation which are both of great interest to me. While I have found many inspiring TED Talk episodes in the past, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the episodes in this podcast were either irrelevant to education or had a speaker who bragged about making a change without saying how. However, don’t let my opinion on those few episodes keep you from enjoying the many that are both inspiring and follow the education theme of the podcast. My two personal favorites were [Creative ways to get kids to thrive in school] and the one I mentioned earlier about student mental health. Both had a focus on mental health and how schools could work to improve it by allowing days off for it and working with students with behavioral challenges rather than disregarding them. They also had an emphasis on teaching students how to identify what their feelings are, how to manage them, and how to advocate for themselves. Another episode I found inspiring was [How teachers can help students navigate trauma.] From this episode I received what I believe is the most important lesson I will ever learn as a student teacher: don’t assume you already know the ending to your students story. I find this to be an incredibly inspiring message about not stereotyping our students which is the reason why I rate this podcast five stars, and will continue to use it personally, as well as suggest it to others in the field.

I decided to go with the style of TED talks for a few reasons. The first being it's very familiar and easy to use. Second, in most podcasts you don't see the people talking, you usually just listen to them while on TED talks you get to see the people talking and see and feel the emotions and expressions during their talks. There are a few things that I found to be very memorable. Such as when one of the speakers said to raise our kids to give them the tools to solve the problems we want to solve. Meaning the problems we see in our society we raise our kids to fight those problems. The speaker goes on to talk about how parents who don't want to talk about hard things to talk about often make the kid figure out those things on their own which can be very dangerous especially if the kid is using the wrong things to learn from. Another speaker came out and talked about how she used to love dirtbikes but they were illegal to own at her age in her town so she got really big into science and in class she blew her eyebrows off, glued someone to a chair, and even made stink bombs in class. And the teacher just chopped her up for being the “ bad kid” when they were overlooking the talents she had. AT the same time the only thing I didn't like is a lot of the speaker's rambling off and telling stories that have nothing to do with the overall point they're getting at. Overall I would give this podcast a 4 stars out of 5 because it brought up some very good stories that a lot of people can relate to and also talked about things everyone and society can work on to improve.

I've learned a lot for Ted talks. They have a spectrum of issues covered from a variety of perspectives. I just wish I could give it more stars than only 5!!