Multimedia Monday (on Tuesday!): Vaccines and the Gates Foundation

Whoa, have I really gone a week without posting here? For some reason I feel like I've been busy, but I haven't really.

The topic in my advanced class this week is "Giving Away Billions," aka philanthropy. How to make it interesting? An impressive doodle to a short talk by Bill Gates on the importance of vaccines, that's how!

My oldest class declared this video "not funny," while my youngest class thought it was awesome. "Wow, he is really good at drawing!" and "So fast!!" were comments I heard a lot. So, your mileage may vary.

Before I played the video, I explained that this was Bill Gates talking about how to help children in places like India and Africa. I asked them to tell me what he thought was the best way to do that.



It's worth it for you, the teacher, to watch, just to get a handle on the amazing things vaccinations can do. Since this video was produced, Polio has now been eradicated in India (in that in 2011, there were no new cases): that leaves only Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
With science, we've already eliminated smallpox and we're well on the way to eliminate polio. That's pretty heavy. 

As always, you can find other neat videos (for classroom or personal consumption) on my Multimedia Monday tag. You can download them with YouTube Downloader HD.