Leigh Charlton, News editor
@leighcourant
Speech is a powerful force, and communication skills are far more important than most realize. With a few well-chosen words, a person can spread life-changing ideas. The goal of NCHS’ TED-Ed club, a student division of the TED Talks, is to do just that- promote “ideas worth spreading.”
The club was brought to the high school this year by sophomore Eva Pace. At monthly meetings, she teaches her fellow students how to write and present TED talks effectively.
“Ted-Ed is a club that is based off of the TED franchise,” club president Eva Pace said. “TED started this community of youth students who have the opportunity to establish a club in their school. In the club meeting we learn to make animations and slideshows, how to write a TED Talk, and how to present it.”
The club was recently named co-winner of the Wilburn Fellowship in recognition of its ability to spread ideas and promote diversity. To honor its partnership with the Wilburn Fellowship program, TED-Ed is hosted their first-ever TED youth conference; the theme of which was diversity.
“This conference in particular is following a theme,” Eva said. “We are going to convey the Wilburn Fellowship’s message of diversity by speaking about our own personal experiences and coming together to help better understand them with people from all different backgrounds and ethnicities.”
“The Wilburn Fellowship has helped us shape our conference and given us the guidelines we needed to fully develop our idea,” sophomore and conference coordinator Cece Challe said. “My hope is that this conference provides kids with a forum to share their differences.”
The conference was held on Saturday, May 21 in the Wagner Room. The event provided Chipotle catering and opportunities to participate in intellectual discussion.
“We created a speaker’s list of the students who spoke from our club,” Eva said. “People got their food, they sat down, and we heard the first speaker present. After the first talk the audience discussed amongst themselves about what they took away from it.”
Tech integrator and former English teacher Hannah Magnan was very helpful in the process of planning for the conference.
“I have watched a lot of TED Talks, and I have worked on a couple of different social justice websites for different courses,” Ms. Magnan said. “I started to put together a TED Talks website, and as I got more into it I realized that it would be really cool to have all of the official TED resources. I started to create a TED club only to realize that Eva Pace was way ahead of me and had already started everything. The extent of my involvement has just been to make us official.”
Ms. Magnan has hoped that the conference was successful and had an impact on all of its participants. “I hope that people have an idea of their own power,” Ms. Magnan said. “It is a group of students who are coming together and sharing their best ideas, the things that they are really passionate about. I really hope that the action and the passion does not stop with the presentations, and instead that action and that passion translates to creating social change. I hope that these things that the students are presenting create those opportunities for everybody.”
