This article originally appeared on 03.31.15
Kids can innovate, create, and imagine in ways that are fresh and inspiring — when we “allow” them to do so, anyway. Despite the tendency for parents to freak out because their kids are spending more and more time with technology in schools, and the tendency for schools themselves to set extremely restrictive limits on the usage of such technology, there’s a solid argument for letting them be free to imagine and then make it happen.
It’s not a stretch to say the kids in this video are on the cutting edge. Some of the results he talks about in the video at the bottom are quite impressive.
If you can’t or don’t want to watch the clip, here’s the quick version:
Many people think the Internet and technology are scary places for kids. But did you know about …
Martha, who is from Scotland.
She took pictures of her school’s lunches every day.
It reached a point where Jamie Oliver took notice and tweeted his support.
The school told her to stop, but after all of the press, instead they did the right thing and made changes to the lunch program. Yay, Martha! And she raised $200,000 for the food insecure.
(Yes, that’s Mr. Bean in frame 4.)
There’s Josh, who is in middle school in Iowa.
He decided to narrate Pokemon walk-through videos.
He’s so good at that, he walked into college with a six-figure income from the ad revenue of those videos(!!).
There’s Tavi, who created an online magazine called “Rookie” with her friends.
It has a huge following and has reached far into teen culture.
John created an app at age 15.
He sold it to Yahoo at age 17 for $30 million. Can you imagine?
Lauren decided to send a Hello Kitty doll 93,000 feet into space, and record it.
And she did just that.
And there’s a group of teens on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota.
An ABC News special portrayed their lives as pretty much based on drugs and crime. They made a video to show who they really were: kids with passion, humility, self-respect, love, creativity, and family.
All of these are kids are creating and innovating — but not in school. Rather, at home.
Schools are far too restrictive to allow kids to do things like these kids did, and that needs to change.
The final quote says it all for me. “Get out of their way and let them be amazing!”
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