We're Back!

I've been putting this video off for quite some time now, partly because it's been so long since I filmed a YouTube video for Learning Made Fun. So, I wanted this really finally polished, exciting, engaging video to relaunch the channel. But that's not really my style, is it? So, here's a true authentic Mr. Bradley learning made fun, rough, raw, and ready. Hi. We're not even going to edit it here. Hi. If you're new to the channel, my name is Mr. Bradley and I am an educator at heart. I've been working as a teacher for the past 7 years, but I'm also one of the founders of Learning Made Fun along with my wife Mella. Learning Made Fun is a YouTube channel that was born during the pandemic. originally created to make online learning a little bit more fun, engaging, and exciting for the students I was teaching, but it's since then grown into so much more than that. What we do is we bring you to the heart of the action where other boring educational videos are just animations or voiceovers. We're actually bringing you to the far reaches of the world. We're going on adventures, meeting new cultures, and connecting the curriculum with the real world, solving problems, talking about them, and just making it fun and full of life and excitement. And that's a core of what we are about. So, in this video, I want to just call out what's been going on the past few years, where we're at now, and what I envision for the future. So in case you don't know much about me and haven't really been following along, I've been working as an expat teacher for the past seven years. I started in Doha Qatar where I worked there for 4 years and got opportunities in middle leadership. It was a great experience and it's where the channel was born. After that I went to Vietnam, Hanoi and worked in a good school Nord Anglia that I had wanted to get into for a long time. Uh it was a fantastic opportunity for my teaching career. I got loads of experiences there. I served as a head of year and for two years I served as a steam coordinator. I got opportunities to do a regional event in internationally where they flew me back to Qatar and I got to do a workshop for steam in front of you know there was I think there's about 500 members of staff from around the world that had come to this CEOs and senior leadership team. was fantastic and then I got to go to other workshops while I was there. I got the opportunity to do the middle middle leadership program which is part of Nord Angle education in which I was allowed to learn about leadership. We did a week-long residential where they flew us down to Ho Chi Ming and I I think the whole thing equated to like a portion of a master's degree as well. Probably should know that. Anyway, that was a really good opportunity. And then just being a steam coordinator, I got to host workshops for parents and teachers. I got to do a well I I I created a an interchool competition where we invited loads of schools in Hanoi to come to our school to do a steam competition amongst all the students. I got to do competitions in the school yada yada yada. It was great. So on one hand, my career as an educator was flourishing and getting ready to take off. I think I might have been at the point where the next step was senior leadership. But on the other hand, this this other project, this learning made fun thing was essentially dying. So I had to kind of make a choice. And I think the choice I've made a lot of people might think is crazy. Senior leadership was I I feel like that was going to be the next commitment. probably would have been a long-term commitment had I explored that possibility, but I haven't. We've actually pulled the plug and uh taking the plunge to go back to Ireland and chase this dream. So why why why? Well, as an educator, you have some great opportunities to make these really special moments in the classroom. Good teachers that is will create will will spend hours pouring their hearts and soul and creativity and love for education and inspiring young children wanting to see them grow into their lessons into educational resources into just everything that they do. And it is a great thing. You get this this these moments these special moments in the classroom where you're working with, you know, between 20 to 30 students. When when teachers talk about going into education, they go into education for those golden moments. They're not going in for the admin and the paperwork and the endless meetings, they're going in for the moments like those that inspire and help young people. But those moments are lost. Teachers spend hours creating these lessons and these resources and they're moved department, they're moved subject, class, year group, or they just moved schools and maybe they're recycled once or twice and improved like they're supposed to be, but I've been in it for seven years and they just get lost. They just disappear into the abyss. And those special moments, they exist in that class at that time. and then they're gone. And I'm also very aware that, you know, there's lots of teachers and students out there that don't get those special moments. There's maybe teachers that aren't being supported properly. They might be thrown into a department that they shouldn't be in or something that they don't have the the skills for. Or there might be students that don't have a teacher that, you know, cares enough or is just burnt out. That's not fair that some some classes are getting it, some aren't. I come for I've I've worked in private international schools for seven years where you know the kids and the and the teachers are paying for it. It's how the kids and the the parents are paying for it and because you know there's a lot of money involved. Good quality teachers are in the schools but that's not the way it should be. Everyone has a right to good quality education. So that's what's in the back of my head and I want to change that. We're on a mission here. So our mission, we want to bring quality education to everyone. We want it to be accessible to everyone. And most of all, we want it to be relevant. No more cursive handwriting, Roman numerals. Guys, come on. It's 21st century. We want to connect things to the real world. We want children to see why I'm learning that. We want them to understand why I'm learning this to solve this problem. connecting it to 21st century problems, big problems, those global problems because essentially the children are the future. We keep asking ourselves what kind of future are we leaving for our students or for our children. We should be asking what kind of children are we making for the future. So that is the cusp of what we're here to do. Let's check in. Just a few just one month ago, we packed up our bags. We brought nothing but our suitcases and of course our lovely dog noodle and we came home to Ireland. No job, no car, no home in in the midst of a housing crisis and inflated prices. It was a humbling experience to say the least, but we have got there and we have uh persisted through that uh cloudy area of the unknown and we've come out the other side. So, we have a place a temporary place to live which we're very comfortable in and very lucky that we've had family to help us out with that because we can't get a mortgage until we worked in the country for quite a few months. We have a car. We got two cars actually. They're a little bit banged up. They make noises when they drive, but hey ho, they get us from A to B. And we have jobs. I have a job that's 3 days a week, which is exactly what I wanted. So now I can spend 4 days focused on learning made fun, getting educational content out there. Hopefully for the first time in my life, consistently with resources to complement them that are practical, hands-on, fun, interactive, gamified, and projectbased. connecting to 21st century problems so the kids can actually see I'm learning this to do cool stuff. That's it. I'm learning this so I can make things, build things, create, solve problems. I'm not learning it to pass a test. I'm learning it to do something with it. We should be focused on skills, not on memorization. I really would love to see the end of standardized tests, but that is now going into a goal that I have to maybe even change the educational world. So maybe I'm getting too ahead of myself. Let's just keep it small for now. So that's what's going on here. What you expect to see here is more videos, more content coming out regularly. And yeah, I just want to change the way we view education. What I've been working on recently is we're actually trying to renovate garage that my parents really kindly have offered up to us into a creative studio. We need somewhere to film somewhere permanent that's not just like in a bedroom like it was in Katar or in my kitchen. It's going to be an actual area just for shooting content for doing wacky experiments for creating artwork and maybe even podcasts down the line. I'm just getting it all out there. This is the vision. So, we're going to fill in that process, see how it turns out with the budget we have, which is pretty small. And yeah, while we were in there, I found like a a tally chart of when I used to study in my garage during my GCES. And it just made me think of how I used to view education when I was a student. And the way my family and even like people around me in my community viewed education even teachers when I was in school, education was viewed as this study chore that you had to do. It was like a sacrifice that we had to make for the greater good, for getting a job, for getting a career. It was like struggle now so that later good things come. But it doesn't have to be that way. Since I've become an educator, it's flipped on its head. Education should be fun, inspiring, creative. It should be about in, you know, engaging with curiosity, and that's what we want to do here. So, that's a long ranting raw video over. I hope it's got some of my brain dumping thoughts out there. And maybe you That's how raw it is right there. You can hear people outside there. So, that's what we're going to do. We've got family coming up the stairs. I'm going to end the video there. Stay tuned for more educational content on the way. This is the rebirth of learning not fun.