 Hello everybody, my name is Jeff Bradbury. I'm an orchestra director from North Brunswick Township High School and also the creator and founder of teachercast.net. For our topic today, I really wanted to focus on creators. Teachers that are out there creating amazing things outside of the classroom and how that's affecting the students inside of their classroom. And to get ready for the show today, I actually had a chance to talk to a lot of teachers who were podcasting, who were blogging, who were writing books, who were doing some amazing, amazing things. And then something strange happened. You see, I was having a conversation with somebody about this very topic, trying to get some ideas for the video that we're doing today. And he started asking me some questions, which is kind of weird as a podcaster to have somebody start to ask you questions. And they ask me questions like, well, how does the work I'm doing outside of the classroom affect what's going on inside the classroom? And so that got me starting to think a little bit differently about this project. A few weeks later, a few weeks ago, actually, I was at a conference called E-C-E-T-2. And I had a chance to have somebody come up to me and say, we're doing these TED Talk style things. Why don't you get up and tell your own story about how the work you're doing outside of the classroom affects the work you're doing inside the classroom? And I had about an hour to put it together. And I started to think, well, how does the work that's happening outside of the classroom affect the work that's happening inside the classroom? And it really started to get some pretty serious thoughts going on about how much the work that everybody is doing on the teacher cast network is actually not only affecting the students that I work with every day, but ironically, it's actually having a major effect on my life outside. So what I want to do for the rest of the video right now is I want to share with you the little TED Talk that we did at the E-C-E-T-2 conference. It really is one of these special, important things that we did a few weeks ago, and I hope you enjoy it. But it really does talk about the power of how does something outside of your classroom affect what's going on inside your classroom that then affects what's happening outside your classroom. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll be right back after the video. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. It's really good to see everybody today. I hope we had a good time. I hope we met some new friends. I hope we've made some new friends. I hope we've rekindled some friendships. Today I want to ask you a question. What if? What if faith actually exists? How many of you guys believe in the concept of faith? The concept that because something happens, something else is going to happen. And the concept that something here could not possibly have happened without that one spark. Let me give you a little bit about background here. Many of you guys know that I'm the proud father of Triplets. And I'd like to share them with you today. Would you like to see a picture? Yes! Here they are. This is Robert on the right, Christopher in the middle, and Sarah... Okay, so these aren't really my kids. But I want to tell you a quick story of how this got to be where it was. Really it all started back here. It started about three and a half years ago where in North Brown Victoria Township High School where I work, I had a lot of people coming up to me, much like they might come up to you and say, what are you doing with your phone? What are you doing with all of this different technology that you're using? How are you doing this stuff? And I wanted to come up with a way to help my teachers, help other people out, share some of the great stuff that's going on in my classroom, fast forward a little bit, and came up with this concept of teacher cast. This whole concept of I want to create a place, as we say, for teachers to come together much like we are right now and help other teachers. And so how do you do that? I have this motto that I teach my kids and the motto is basically, if you think you can or can't, you're probably right. You might have heard that one, that's Henry Ford. If you think you can do something, go for it. So leading into all of this, I was working with a guy out in California doing some podcasting and I thought, what if I came up with a concept where I can bring educators on to share their stories and to help out other educators. And so we had some teachers come on and I thought, let me up this ante a little bit. We had some administrators come on. Let me up the ante a little bit. We had some superintendents come on. Let me up the ante. We had the director of education from Iowa come on. Trying to figure out how to build this thing so that way we could help out as many educators as possible. I have this small philosophy. If you can help out one teacher, you're helping out about 30 students. If you can help out an administrator, you're helping out about 1,000 students. If you can help out a superintendent, you're helping out about 5,000 students. And then there was the day that we were doing a podcast and I got an email from somebody saying, I just listened to your show and it inspired me to go out and create at Camp Buffalo. That's pretty powerful. That is really, really cool. How do you up the ante even more? Well, you take it on the road and many of you guys might have been with me last year at the teacher's convention where we broadcast it out and had such a good time. So that's one story of why we're here today. I'm going to tell you guys the sentence I will never ever forget. We had a meeting with a doctor and the doctor said these words and I still end up today worrying about this. The doctor said, would you like to see them? What? Would you like to see them? Okay. This moment changed my life. This is the... Houston? Here we go. But I'm determined because if you think you can do this, right? Everyone says, how do you do this? How do you handle it? Well, if you think you can or can't, you're probably right. I just keep telling myself that. And then there's that moment that you go, is this reality or not? This is awesome. This is reality. And this is no more reality than these moments here. And you go, oh my goodness. Can we do this? Yes, we can. So I'm determined to have this place for teachers to help other teachers. I'm determined to keep helping everybody out and doing the ed camps and all of this stuff. And I've got a new mission in life. I've got some new things that are kind of a reality check, right? By the way, that's Robert down here. There's Christopher B. and Sarah's on top of the guys here. And so it wasn't too long ago at the teachers' convention that I was taking here doing my stuff and we were having a great time and we were doing all these wonderful things. I had to tell you, I was on cloud nine and then suddenly it happened again. My slides went the wrong way. My world changed. About four o'clock, get a phone call. You've got to come. Okay, not a problem. My wife was in the hotel across the room because she was at the convention with us. I said, yeah, I'm going to get packed up and give me like an hour. You've got to come. Now, how many of you guys remember that moment with Lucy and Ricky? The time has come. Then you have Fred and Ethel run into each other and I had always pictured that this is how it was going to be. I was going to be at school and I had to drive from North Brunswick back down to Pensauka and all this stuff. No. Reality is hitting you. Next thing I know, I'm ending up in a hospital going, oh my goodness, something is going to happen. Babies were due in February. When's the teachers' convention? Doctor, am I going to have to create some names for people today? Is it okay? Is everything going on? Fathers, you know exactly where I am at this point. Is everything going on? I didn't realize that that was the day that was going to ultimately change my life for even more. I didn't realize that was going to be the day that, oh my goodness, reality is hitting you. You'll notice I have my phone on me. You realize very quickly that stuff has to happen. You have to call people. You have to make sure people understand things. In my mind, I'm thinking, in the convention center in Atlantic City I have thousands of dollars of equipment. I have a hotel that has all of my stuff. My broadcasting booth is still out there. Oh my God, these strangers are going to take all of my equipment. What's going to happen? I made a couple phone calls and my friends at NJ just said, we'll take care of it, don't worry. But what about my hotel? I have to just focus on the babies. Just focus on what... Stop. Just focus on what's going on. So we go into the room and you know what you want to hear when this happens. You want to hear the... I'm expecting to hear three of these things. Instead, we have three responders that pop on out. They don't make sound. This was the second trimester before even their eyes opened up. Oh boy, what's going on? I'm still freaking out because of all of this other stuff and I'm still getting text messages. Just focus on your family. Then we get the call in the hospital that you don't want to get the call for. And that call was simply we have a problem. It's baby B at the time because we didn't have names. We weren't expecting this. This was three and a half months early. Baby B has some lung complications. We're going to do a procedure to basically put a straw inside of him and rip the air out so that way he has equal pressure. Can we do this? Yeah. Go for it. Didn't work. Around three o'clock in the morning to get another phone call. We're not working here. This is not good. We're going to call in for backup. Please call in for backup. We're going to have a helicopter from Dupont Hospital come and take your baby away from you and we're going to go fix them. So four o'clock in the morning these angels came and they took my baby away to save my baby. At that point in time this was the only picture that I had of baby B. My wife and I at that point in time said it's four in the morning. We should name it. We weren't expecting to. So hence little Christopher came into the world. The next few months were very, very busy. We were working. We were teacher casting. We were trying to support our kids. They were very tiny. They wouldn't let us pick them up at first. We're talking a pound and a half, two pounds. They were literally still cooking. They were translucent. We went through all of the incubator stages trying to make sure everything that works. All these different things. Every single place I went, people kept saying how are your kids? How are you doing? Can I help you? My school district in North Brunswick came up with the Jeans Day where they supported us. We had some teachers coming in and they brought us food and can I give you some hand-me-downs. All of these wonderful things were coming in. How many of you guys know TechSmith? TechSmith sent us this awesome, awesome care package with rattles of one season. All of these were just donating all of this wonderful stuff in time. If you've ever called me or TechSmith to say how are the babies, this is where we were. By doing teacher tests I had all these contacts in the press. We had a chance to be featured in the Sentinel and a few other places of how are you doing? Let me share this. These are Andrew babies. They were born at the teachers' convention. Somewhere around December we got a chance to hold them. They were still very fragile. They were about a pound, two pounds by that point in time. They were still having all the stuff going on. We didn't know what was going on. We just had to trust in our nephew and we had to trust in this. I had two babies in Atlantic Care Regional which is down by Stockton College and I had one baby in Wilmington and I was working in North Brunswick. But at the same point in time there was so much love coming back from Twitter, from social media, from the hashtag, from the EdCamp people, from many of you guys that were in here and we were able to somehow channel all of this stuff and to support our kids. These are pretty amazing pictures. Throughout all of this stuff many of you guys might know I was also doing grad school. So weekend after weekend I was driving down to Dupont hospital to spend time with Chris and his strength got me in through doing my online courses to get me my degree and so we were able to complete all of that. Him and I watched the Super Bowl together down there. We watched the playoffs. He was intubated from day one which means he had breathing tubes inside. He was intubated up until about the middle of February or so. It's amazing how much strength your community gives to you. It's amazing how much strength these little guys give to you. Here's a picture of Chris he shows the nose tubes and stuff like that. But as time was going they were getting bigger. We were growing as parents the community support was absolutely outstanding. Here they were probably in January, December or so. This is Sarah's on the left and Robert's on the right. Then came that amazing day where they actually called and every parent here has the same problem. They say you may take one of them home with you. This was February to 7th and so we packed up little Robert for the first time and we were so confused because what are we going to do? Now we're going to have a baby at home and a baby in Atlantic care and a baby in Wilmington and I'm working and throughout this whole thing the community support was great. And throughout this thing we were using technology like Remind. How many of you guys use Remind? We set up a Remind account and I just put it out on TeacherCast and said anybody who wants to learn about my babies and be updated sign up for this because it was my way of not dealing with Twitter and Facebook calls. We used Remind on this. These babies have about 250 people on a Remind list and anytime they sneeze the world knows about it. So we get my baby and I'm going I just need some help. I don't know what's going on I'm going to have all the stuff going. So of course what happens as soon as we take them home I get into an accident. Welcome to Parenthood. Now we have a few things happening. Sarah came home a few days later. My school district has been absolutely awesome. The one present that nobody can give you is time and my school district has been amazing with me. The people that I love the people that support me we call it our PLN. Some people call it a personal learning network. Some people call it a professional learning network no no we call it a parent learning network. We have a lot of things to be thankful and at the same time of course now I'm doing the podcasting and the broadcasting and I'm determined this is what it says here. It's a place for teachers to help other teachers. I'm really really excited to share with you a couple of these things. This is a picture of Robert from a few days ago. So he is now about 22 pounds. He's starting to crawl. We never know if we're going to find him under the couch or so. This is a picture of Sarah and she's doing some amazing things and I haven't, because of back the school night and stuff I haven't given her since Tuesday so this is kind of but I have three babies and Christopher was intubated up until about February. We had to make a very difficult decision. The doctor comes in and says this isn't working. You see you have to understand as being an intubated baby you haven't passed day one yet. What is day one for any human? Breathe on your own. So we had to make a tough decision. Do we keep them intubated which is pumping oxygen in to fill the lungs and as you may know oxygen is poisonous. So for a hundred and some days yes we're keeping our kid alive but in all scientificness we're poisoning our kid. We have to stop this. So there's only one way to handle things and that's you give them a tracheotomy. You put a hole in his throat and you help him out with that stuff. So I'm going to tell you the next picture might be a little weird to see. I apologize for it. So in May Christopher had a tracheotomy. After a few weeks he left Dupont hospital and instead of going to Wilmington he's now in a long-term medical facility for medically fragile kids and he's about 18 pounds now and doing really, really good. He's got a collar but he's doing really well and this is what they look like today. Not easy. I got to tell you. Chris is going to be where he is for the next two to three years and every time, even in here as soon as I walked in I had about five or six people that attacked me how are the kids and then they asked how am I doing which is really, really cool but throughout all of this stuff this PLN that we're dealing with has been an absolute amazingness. It dawned on me a few weeks ago that in my ability or in my commitment to making a place for teachers to help other teachers what I really started to make was a place for teachers to help out and ultimately save my babies. You see you have to understand when we were sitting there in the emergency room I had a bunch of teachers many of whom you know go into the convention center pack up all of my stuff and put it in my car I had a few other teachers go into my hotel and actually clean up our dirty laundry put it in a bag and put it in a car. I had Kevin Jarrett I got to tell you grab my keys from my actually he drove his car up to the hotel got my keys drove my car back down picked up everything and then I had teachers come and drop off my stuff this personal learning network was a place for other teachers to help me in my time of need. I'm sitting here thinking that if you need to learn an iPad I want to help you out for it. What I really wasn't understanding was I was creating this network so that way when I needed help it was there. The Azure Triplets are really really amazing and they're 10 months 10 and a half months old right now and they've got about 200 or so followers and that's important because that's more than my wife has but really when Barry gave me the opportunity to talk and he's like you can talk about anything we said it the other day what is fate? Does it exist? If I didn't create Teachercast and I didn't come up with this concept maybe I wouldn't be broadcasting that day maybe I wouldn't have had my kids in that hospital maybe my kid wouldn't have been in DuPont you never know I also go with the concept of do a good turn daily do something nice for somebody and we all understand the golden rule do on to others as you have done I encourage you guys as you move forward here and as you leave here think about a story like this good things are out there you never know what effect you're having on people and you never know how one moment of your day is going to automatically affect other things if teachers didn't say how do you use your phone this might not have happened and I might not be standing here with three babies that are alive I want to say thank you so much for being here thank you to everybody for supporting this and enjoy everything that you guys have it does affect what happens inside your classroom to your students and teachers but then you never know it actually might have an impact in your life back again outside of the classroom my name is Jeff Bradbury thank you so much for watching today and continue sharing your passions with your students