Today, teenagers search YouTube for the answers to all their concerns and doubts, and they also do it when they need help solving equations or square roots. Fortunately, there you can find David Calle, a telecommunications engineer and teacher which explains mathematics, physics and chemistry in a very simple, enjoyable way and focusing on helping to understand these subjects.
He is a professor of face-to-face and online academy from Secondary to University, creator of the Unicoos educational platform, and has been nominated among the ten finalists to the Global Teacher Prize in 2017, in addition to being considered one of the one hundred most creative people worldwide by the Forbes magazine.
He has also published almost a year ago the book 'How much do clouds weigh?', Which deals with science through answers to everyday questions.
He has been recording and uploading videos on his YouTube channel for seven years, which already has more than 1.2 million subscribers and a content of more than 750 educational videos. His videos are enjoyable, agile and precise and help the kids understand what they have not been clear in class or have forgotten.
"I thought recording videos would be a solution"
When and why did you start recording videos?
"Unicoos is the means that my team and I have found to put our grain of sand to improve the world."I started making videos basically to continue helping my students when they needed it most, which is when they weren't going to the academy, thinking only of them. I didn't think about anything else. I didn't think I was going to have millions of visits, much less.
He detected that they needed help. There were many things that they had forgotten and I thought that recording videos would be a solution. But I was very embarrassed, I was panicking.
I decided that panic and shame didn't make sense and thinking of helping those kids who couldn't come to my classes, the same thing that I explained to my students at the academy, when I got home I recorded it on video in my attic so they could follow it too.
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What is the secret of the success of your channel?
"For them Youtube is their playground and it is where they are accustomed to finding any type of information. They have leisure and any type of content at their disposal."From humility, I think they are two things: passion and empathy. I try to empathize a lot with them, I understand them very well. I have 20 years of experience teaching with students of all kinds. That gives me a 'feedback' on what their doubts are, where they fail, what their obstacles are, and that is evidently reflected in the videos. How it serves and helps them, they share it.
My videos are not seen by students because their parents or their teachers oblige them, they see them because they want to see them and because they share them with each other. I think that is what has given the channel success, that they are not forced.
"The videos are there to add"
Do you think something is wrong in the classroom to go to YouTube to answer questions?
I don't think it's necessarily that way. Videos can add a lot to education and the work of a teacher. They do not have to be that something fails in the classroom, although sometimes it happens. Simply It is one more tool that is there to add.
What I do believe is that other things should start happening in the classroom: talk more with the students, work as a team with them, meet them, empathize with them. Finally being able to be more creative: tell them how beautiful science has, which are not only equations, tell them why a plane flies, what is a GPS ... So many and so many things we should tell you that unfortunately it is not in the didactic program and that would surely inspire them much more.
In Babies and more The most influential youtubers children with less than 13 yearsAre you for or against the use of mobile in class?
I am completely in favor of the mobile in the classroom. It cannot be that everyone in our daily work is always connected, and yet they are forbidden in their work. Turning them into calculating machines today makes no sense.
This new generation does not understand why it has to memorize when it has everything in the mobile, it does not understand why it has to calculate when its mobile has a calculator. We cannot close our eyes to that change. What we have to do is teach them to use the Internet in a responsible way, to look for information, to discriminate against it, to contrast information ... We are going to teach them that because it is what will connect them to the real world and will serve them tomorrow.
Explain why things
Children do not understand why they have to know how to make a square root, what do you think?
I am in love with mathematics, you have to teach them of course what a square root is, how an integral is made and how a derivative is made, because the process will structure their heads and it will come great. But it cannot be that there are children with 11 years with leaves with 50 square roots as homework and we do not tell them what a square root is for.
The derivatives, the integrals, which are used for everything that are the basis of science, physics, chemistry and a lot of other sciences, we do not explain why, and it makes no sense. When a computer or mobile does it in a second.
Where is the future of digital education going?
I hope that towards a fair integration of technology and humanity. Technology can never replace a human being, a video can never replace a teacher. The figure of the teacher is irreplaceable, but somehow you have to integrate both.
Hopefully in the future education will become something beyond an equation or learn a periodic table, and spend more to enhance in them skills such as resilience, teamwork, cooperation, respect, assertiveness, and that Be curious to learn.
A teacher is no longer the only source of knowledge and his work will succeed when get inspired by your students desire to learn and be better. If we talk to them, we know them and we can detect the talent that each student has in particular, we can help them to be happier.
Did you miss an exam?
"We must insist more on working hard, always from love and understanding, not from negativity."Yes, in second year of high school (before COU) the first and second evolution of mates. I signed up for the academy, a teacher put the batteries in and I ended up getting a 10 in the selectivity in mates. In the race I suspended five times physical, they almost threw me out and it took me a lot to learn the subject.
I was very unmotivated, I didn't understand very well what everything he was teaching me, that I later discovered that yes, that of course it is useful for something.
What are the next plans for Unicoos?
Continue generating content and we are with a new project called beunicoos.com, a new website where there will be not only math or physics and chemistry videos, but of all subjects. There will be the best videos we have found of history, language, economics, English, of all subjects.
Apart from these videos, we want teachers to have a useful tool to know which videos they have sent to their students, whether they have seen them or not, to be able to put questions related to those videos, upload their own content, communicate with them, Send them homework, share material.
How much do the clouds weigh ?: And other simple questions and their scientific answers (MISCELLANEOUS WORKS)
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