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TED-Ed

TED-Ed is a free educational website for teachers and learners.

Within the TED-Ed video library, you will find carefully curated educational videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed platform.

However, This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson around the video. Users can distribute the lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student.

 

The biggest potential for using TED-Ed is to help in ‘flipping’ your classroom. The flipped classroom approach has been used for years in some disciplines, notably within the humanities. Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson promoted the use of this approach in their book Effective Grading (1998). They propose a model in which students gain first-exposure learning prior to class and focus on the processing part of learning (synthesizing, analyzing, problem-solving, etc.) in class.

To ensure that students do the preparation necessary for productive class time, Walvoord and Anderson propose an assignment-based model in which students produce work (writing, problems, etc.) prior to class. The students receive productive feedback through the processing activities that occur during class, reducing the need for the instructor to provide extensive written feedback on the students’ work. Walvoord and Anderson describe examples of how this approach has been implemented in history, physics, and biology classes, suggesting its broad applicability.

You can read more about this technique by visiting the CFT teaching guide on the subject.

Pros

  • Videos are short: three to eight minutes
  • Includes multiple choice quizzes, open-ended questions and a ‘Dig Deeper’ section.
  • When a student answers incorrectly, a ‘Video Hint’ directs them to the point in the video with the correct answer.
  • Custom lesson plans receive a unique URL where teachers can track student’s viewing and responses and their plans can draw from any video on YouTube.

Cons

  • Quiz questions are accessed independent of the videos, meaning they can answer them all before even watching the video.
  • Not everyone is a fan of this type of instruction. Read a critical review of TED-Ed, The Problem with TED Ed, by Shelly Blake-Plock

 

 

Platforms

  1. Animoto
  2. Audacity
  3. Flickr
  4. iMovie
  5. Lectora
  6. PowerPoint
  7. Prezi
  8. Screencasting: Screencast-o-matic
  9. Screencasting: Debut
  10. Video Conferencing: Google hangouts
  11. Video Conferencing: Skype
  12. YouTube