TED-Ed, the newest of TED’s initiatives is committed to creating lessons worth sharing. It has an extensive library of lessons where carefully curated educational videos are available. The platform allows users to easily create customized lessons around educational videos.
Users can share their TED-Ed lessons and measure their impact on an audience. TED-Ed offers a great platform for teachers who can flip the original TED-Ed videos to create flipped lessons or create lessons about YouTube videos to use in their classroom. It harnesses the talent of world’s best teachers and visualizers by providing them with new tools that facilitate learning and make it more effective.
The TED-Ed website is becoming dynamic by bringing in new and advanced features that make it an even powerful tool for teachers to use in the classroom. The first phase of TED-Ed initiative launched by TED introduced a series of a dozen short animated YouTube videos created for high-school students and life-long learners. The initiative was also an initiative for teachers to collaborate with TED to create more effective video lessons that can be used in classrooms. The second phase of the TED-Ed initiative is designed to enable teachers to create unique lesson plans around its video content. Many new features have been introduced with the new TED-Ed site which is the second phase of the TED-Ed initiative by TED.
Here are some amazing features TED-Ed that teachers should know:
- TED-Ed empowers teachers with free tools to create lessons for use in the classroom. The platform allows them to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson plan around it. Teachers can tailor video content to enhance the way students learn and interact with curriculum. They can take a video done by another teacher and give it their own voice. They are not restricted to flipping the featured TED-Ed videos and can also create a lesson from scratch using any video from YouTube that permits third party embedding, which a majority of them do. Teachers can then offer these lessons for wider distribution, and the best of them will be subsequently featured on the TED-Ed site for others to make use of.
- Each video featured on the site is mapped via. Tagging to the traditional subjects taught in school. Users can browse for videos by subjects. Popular subject categories include Arts, Literature and Language, Business and Economics, Health, Mathematics, Philosophy and Religion, Social Studies, Psychology, Science and Technical subjects and Thinking and Learning. Search can also be done by Series, which offers a collection of related videos and Best Flips, which are the exceptional and featured user created lessons or flips.
- Teachers can customize their video lesson to make it more engaging using the new features that TED-Ed offers. One such feature is Think, using which teachers can add questions around the video, which can be multiple-choice questions with time coded video hints or open answer questions that invite thought provoking written responses.
- Using the Dig Deeper section, teachers can expand upon the video with articles, references or links to an application or even their own blog. In this way, teachers can extend the lesson and get the students thinking beyond simple questions. It encourages students to research and study in depth about a particular concept or topics that interest them. Teachers can use the Dig Deeper question to tie the online work back into the classroom.
- The Discuss feature lets teachers create discussions around crucial topics and those which are of particular interest to their students. Here, teachers can open a new discussion, view old discussions and create new ones. Discussions can be guided or open. They not only help teachers and students grasp hard concepts but also help connect the wider community to each other.
- Lessons can be shared via. Email or social websites. When teachers share their video lessons with students, they will be to watch the video and engage with the content and questions provided on it by the teachers. Teachers can track how many students answered the questions and how many discussions are created and all the other stats about the lesson right from their TED-Ed account.
- One of the most powerful features that TED-Ed offers is the ability to track and measure various forms of engagement within each TED-Ed lesson over time. All tracked progress is reflected in the ‘You’ section of the site. As a learner, you can track all of the multiple choice answers, written responses, or discussion topic responses that you save to any lesson that you have viewed, started, or completed. For educators, ‘You’ section keeps track of any lesson you have started creating or that you have completed and distributed to your learners. Your work is constantly saved, so if you started creating a Lesson but didn’t have time to publish it, you will find it waiting for you in the ‘Flips in Progress’ section the next time you log in.
- Teachers can also provide feedback directly on the TED-Ed Lesson page, while reviewing the students’ answers. On clicking on the ‘Give Feedback’ the student is sent an email that contains a link to the teacher’s feedback. If they follow the link, there is a space provided for them to respond to the feedback, in which case the teacher will receive an email letting them know that they have responded.
- The newly launched TED-Ed Community, a new section of the website that allows teachers and students to share their ideas and ask questions that relate to TED-Ed and to education at large. Here you can find the educators and animators behind the original TED-Ed lessons, brainstorms, collaborative lesson pitches from teachers around the world, curated lists of suggested videos to flip and much more.
TED-Ed’s goal is for each great lesson to reach and motivate as many learners as possible. With this new technology and tools it offers teachers can maximize time in class and create great lessons which are interesting and engaging. Explore TED-Ed to see many of its new features and utilize its potential as a great classroom tool. Share your views on the context in the Comment Box below.
