TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

I recently had an interesting conversation with my friend, who also happens to be my boss. He's always reading interesting books. Mostly non-fiction, current event stuff, including politics and environmental issues. And an occasional biography. He mentioned to me a website he came across called http://www.ted.com/. Its a very interesting site that has an area called 'Talks' where people from all over the world are given 20 mnutes or so to share their ideas in front of a live audience and to the internet audience. Some speakers have been Al Gore talking about the climate change, Stephen Hawking, who spoke about his area of interest in space and Bono on his ONE campaign to fight AIDS in Africa and many others. You could spend hours on this site listening to these and other very interesting people. But the person who really stood out was Dave Eggers. A writer, teacher, magazine publisher and co-founder of a non-profit tutoring facility who cares alot about educating our nations children. His talk is called 'Once Upon A School'. Even though its been on TED for awhile, I felt like its worth mentioning. I could go on and on telling you about it, but instead I will put the link here and encourage you to take 20 minutes and watch his award-winning talk. Its interesting, thought provoking and entertaining. If you care about educating children, you will really enjoy it and what he and others have done to help students that normally might not have been able to excel in their studies.

One of the many accomplishments of these facilities is the publication of several books written by students who attend these tutoring facilities. The first book in the series was published in 2001 called WAITING TO BE HEARD. It's a collection of essays, poems, fictional stories and even personal experiences from 39 students speaking out against local, national and worldwide violence, from their point of view. I had a chance to flip thru this book briefly and I saw enough to know that I want to read it. I hope you'll take a minute to listen to the talk. I believe it'll be time well spent, especially if you're a parent.