I’ve written about TED before but things have changed! I’ve been thinking for a little while that it would be worth sharing what TEDEd can offer teachers and schools so do read on, there’s some really great stuff available.

Ted-Ed offers teachers the ability to use nearly 140,000 lessons (and counting), created by other teachers around the world or build your own around any YouTube video. It is aimed primarily at a high school audience but is often very valuable for those at the upper end of primary.

Let’s take a popular example created by a TED-Ed user, a teacher. Have a look at Why Do Some People Go Bald? (sore topic).

You’ll see this is broken down in to 4 sections which I’ve looked at in a bit more detail below.

WATCH

This is simply a section within this lesson that lets you watch the YouTube video you’re lesson is based around directly within the page and of course you can view the video in full screen with just a click and then come straight back into your lesson. In our example we see a fun and engaging video that really brings to life why some of us are blessed with shiny heads and this video sets us up nicely to look in more detail at the topic.

THINK

So this is great and so useful! In our example we can see a number of questions that are related directly to the video and get us thinking in more detail about some of the topics within the video.

If you are using a lesson that is already in TED-Ed then you will see a series of questions that you can use in a flash within your class. This is great for engaging the students and recapping the main points and lessons from the video you have just watched.

If you’re creating your own lesson, you can add a number of questions to achieve the same goals.

DIG DEEPER

The Dig Deeper section provides additional resources and other TED-Ed lessons that are related to the lesson you are using. This is a good option if you’re looking to give students additional work to research related topics and most of the lessons within TED-Ed offer a useful range of additional resources.

DISCUSS

Probably one of the most exciting features of TED-Ed is that your students can engage in discussion with students from all over the world and read comments from those also using that lesson. How brilliant to be able to create your own lesson and discuss the details of the topic with other students in different schools!

You can also see within this section whose lessons are actually in progress so that you can engage people in realtime.

Our example is based around a couple of simple questions that very much draw the students into an in depth discussion and maybe brings out topics that are peripheral to the main themes.

OTHER OPTIONS

TED-Ed offers a number of other options within your lessons which really add to the experience. You can create lessons based on existing lessons on the site, share lessons socially and widen the responses and engagement and go really deeply into ‘Series’ that take a group of topics and cover everything in detail.