By Akane Fujimura
“I have to think of a conclusion for my speech. Tomorrow is the due date,” Casey Farrell said in Mrs. Webb’s language class. Mrs. Webb required all of her language arts students to complete this project called TED Talk.
“The point of TED Talks is to spread ideas,” Traven Apiki stated. TED is an organization that stands for Technology Entertainment and Design. The event TEDxHomer is independently organized by a group called TEDxYouth@Homer. This year Traven is one of the teenagers organizing it. They’ll have TED Talks during that event on July 26th.
TED Talks will be made by a speech and some visuals. The theme is “Let’s Play!” which can cover anything from snow machining to basketball. “You can even write about something completely different, stuff like math if they can talk about how it’s playful,” Traven said.
As Traven said, he wants this event to be very big and a lot of people to join in this year. To make it so, he approached Mrs. Webb with the idea because part of TED talk is giving a speech. Mrs. Webb is making all of her students do this TED talk in her class as a project. “It all fit in all of her curriculum standards for Alaska and what they need to do. Cooperate with other people, write a speech, give a speech, and just everything that is centered around language arts is incorporated in to this TED Talk,” Traven explained as the reason to why Mrs. Webb made it a requirement.
Nykkole Poindexter, taking Mrs. Webb’s class, gave her impression about her TED Talk, about costuming. “I’m pretty excited to present the project and it’s a kind of fun assignment. I hope Mrs. Webb will choose mine in her top ten she liked.” Those top ten groups will be picked by Mrs. Webb and will be judged by TEDxYouth@Homer people, including Traven, and they will choose the winner of this contest. The winner will be giving a live presentation across six different continents. As Nykkole said, she has prepared well for her TED Talk with a very good video, well written speech, and most of all she’ll personally be “dressed up in a costume!”