Reinventing the Encyclopedia Game <-- Take a Listen

I can't believe how many interesting facts I just heard in 10 minutes after listening to a podcast by TED talks.

I opened up my iTunes, searched TED talks under the podcasts tab, found the education category and began my search. Turns out there are over 100 different podcasts in the education category alone so I filtered my search by looking at the popularity of the posts. After clicking a couple at random I stumbled across a podcast titled "Reinventing the Encyclopedia Game" by Rives.

"Reinventing the Encyclopedia Game" starts out by talking about the Britannica ending its print editions. The speaker used to play a game where he would flip open a page, find a fact on that page and from that fact go to a new page and start the game over until the string of facts leads you back to your original topic. The game has changed from print version to online version so the speed of the game has almost become instant (depending on the strength of your internet).

I think this would be a great podcast to show students because it shows students the power of the internet, it exposes them to information and interesting facts (obviously would have to check reliability or validity) and also because this can be a lead in presentation to a teaching strategy called hyperlinked writing.

Hyperlinked writing is where students research a topic and create a document. In the document they hyperlink key words or ideas to the websites where they found the information, from that they can find other information that is related to the original topic.

I am really glad I watched it and I suggest anyone who is remotely interested to do the same!