The TED Challenge

Its often hard to truly get to know students sitting in a classroom. The teacher often has the opportunity to share stories and incorporate personal passions into their lectures. In an effort to encourage students to get real with their interests, I added a TED component to their exams.

So anyone who is not aware of the TED revolution going on "ideas worth spreading" is in for a delight as I plan to share on this blog great stories of young people doing just that. In France earlier this year, I had a TED assignment where students were to find a TED video that inspired them and make a summary presentation of the idea they thought worthy of spreading. It was a marathon day of presentations that had me and the students on the edge of our seats. I will share some of the results in future blog postings throughout the summer.

Since that went so well, I added a take home part of the exam for my summer school students with a similar challenge to find and describe a ted talk. An amazing array of diverse interests across the technology, entertainment and design platforms had inspired my students. I will also pass on their favorite ted talks in the near future.

Everyday I am personally inspired by social entrepreneurs and I try to identify and support them in my community. This summer school we are devoted to clients from across sectors who want to become sustainable by developing double and triple bottom line ideas. In the spirit of that we are redefining for ourselves through debate and discussion the service these entreprises are doing to spread awareness for certain social issues not currently being addressed fully. One such issue is the use (misuse, undercapacity) of people of different abilities. Toward those ends, I share with you, as I did with my students in class today, my favorite TED inspired talk by Aimee Mullins at a 2009 TED MED conference: The opportunity of adversity

ZSEM Summer School - Entrepreneurship

From June 29 through July 16, 2010, I am honored to be teaching students form Mexico, France, Russia, Australia and Croatia at my home insititutions' International Summer School in Zagreb. Since not all students, have access to our WebCT platform, I will use this blog to communicate course info, assignments, links and tools to better understand entrepreneurship in many hybrid forms it takes.

In the first week of class, students were introduced to key concepts of entrepreneurship such as the background, ideas, marketing, operations, finances and results sought and achieved through the entrepreneurial process. They were also given the tools to embrace their own creativity and contributions they could bring to a team. Additionally, they were introduced to potential clients who are ripe for some infusion of entrepreneurial opportunities.

To supplement the learning in the classroom this week and to prepare for the exam next week I encourage students to visit and revisit the following resources:

1. Creativity exercises can be found at: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_CT.htm and watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlabrWv25qQ
2. Croatian Client web sites:
http://www.uriho.hr/, http://www.roda.hr/, http://centar-sraskaj-zg.skole.hr/, http://www.tedxzagreb.info/home/organizers.aspx
3. Marketing refreshers on different tools like the BCG Matrix can be found at:
http://www.marketingteacher.com/Lessonstore.htm
4. Entrepreneurship resources can be found here:
http://www.guykawasaki.com/books/Artprop.pdf, http://ecorner.stanford.edu/, http://www.fastcompany.com/, http://www.entrepreneur.com/and watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6MhAwQ64c0
5. For the take home portion of your exam you are asked to find an "idea worth spreading" from a presentation posted on http://www.ted.com

If you have any comments or questions feel free to post them.