TED-Ed video portal launches

Right now,  there is a gifted educator somewhere out there delivering a life-changing lesson. The TED-Ed team hopes that anyone who is passionate about education will help us find that teacher, capture that moment, and amplify it the way that it deserves to be amplified.

The folks at TED just announced a new initiative to benefit high school students, their teachers, and lifelong learners in general.

The TED-Ed YouTube Channel recently launched with a dozen shorter-that-10-minute videos in five playlist categories:

• Playing with language
• How things work
• Inventions that shaped history
• Questions no one (yet) knows the answers to
• Awesome nature

The plan is to discover hundreds of similarly inspired, mind-altering lessons by great teachers each year, to amplify them by talented animators and visualization artists, and to share them with learners around the world, in a rich and dynamic archive.

The release explains what the effort is not:

The wrong way is to imagine that we believe this to be some kind of grand solution. “TED claims its new TED-Ed videos will transform education”! Er, no. We don’t.

The right way is to see this as our reaching out to teachers and saying: Can we help?

And so, the curators at TED-Ed ask us to help them grow the archive.

They invite us to

• nominate an Educator
• nominate an Animator
• suggest a Lesson

I’d love to see some TL lessons in this archive, wouldn’t you?

Filed under: instruction, teachers, video