Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

8 TED-Ed lessons for Halloween

Fun topics keep students engaged in learning, and what better way to pull students in than framing a lesson around Halloween?

From vampires and ghost ships to bats and pumpkin facts, it’s easy to craft lessons for students in all grades. Elementary school students can learn about famous ghost stories and share their own spooky stories, and older students can learn about some of the real-life historical events and rumors behind some of today’s most loved scary tales.

If you’re new to TED-Ed Lessons, you’ve just stumbled onto a great resource. Educators can build lessons around any TED-Ed Original, TED Talk, or YouTube video through Ted-Ed. Once you locate the video you wish to use, use the TED-Ed Lessons editor to add questions, discussion prompts, and additional resources.…Read More

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TED-ED clubs give students a platform for sharing ideas

The clubs are fashioning the next generation of TED speakers one big idea at a time

One of Mitzi Stover’s biggest challenges as a teacher is convincing her students they have a voice. Stover teaches speech and English at North Torrance High School in a working-class area of Los Angeles where kids seldom travel or even leave the neighborhood.

“Their world is very small geographically,” Stover said during a recent presentation at the CUE 2016 national conference in Palm Springs. “And teenagers are already so dismissed most of the time.”

From her years of teaching, Stover knew that having students delve into their interests and personal experiences was one of the best ways to develop their passions — and in turn their public speaking. But presenting to the same classmates they saw every day was decidedly low-stakes and hardly helped her convince students they had a voice, let alone a global reach.…Read More

New video series explores the science behind superheroes

TED-Ed—the education arm of TED, whose mission is to amplify the voice of great teachers—has added a new six-video educational series called “Superhero Science,” which poses the question: “If superpowers were real…”

Each of the six free animated videos explores the scientific fallacies of a different superpower—speed, strength, invisibility, body mass, immortality, and flight—with voice-over work done by James Arnold Taylor, the voice of Fred Flintstone and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Leonardo, among other roles. Each lesson was written by Joy Lin, a high school science teacher from Austin, Texas.

For instance, did you know that if you were invisible, then you wouldn’t be able to see—because no light would reflect off your retina? Or that, if you had super strength and actually caught a falling damsel in distress, you’d do more damage to her body than the ground would?…Read More

How TED-Ed is helping to amplify instruction

Anderson said TED-Ed offers teachers a “magic blackboard” that pairs them with animators to create a six-minute video of their best lesson.

Technology can extend a talented teacher’s reach to thousands or even millions of kids around the world, said Chris Anderson, curator of the nonprofit TED project—and during an education conference in Boston, he described how the newly created TED-Ed website is doing just that.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, is a global set of conferences created to disseminate “ideas worth spreading.” Its open-access website, www.ted.com, publishes TED Talks in video format for anyone to watch.

TED has launched a version of the site for education, TED-Ed, that includes a number of useful tools designed to help educators incorporate the videos into their instruction.…Read More

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New education platform from TED could help power ‘flipped learning’

Each video on the TED-Ed site is tagged to a curriculum subject and is accompanied by supplementary materials to help teachers and students use or understand the video lesson.

TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading big ideas through a series of conferences and a free video platform, has continued its expansion into education by launching a brand-new TED-Ed website with tools to help teachers use video in the classroom.

The new platform allows educators to customize videos with follow-up questions and assignments, TED says—an initiative that could help power the “flipped learning” model.

This is the second phase of TED’s expansion into education, following the launch of a TED-Ed YouTube channel last month with several educational videos. (See “Free video lessons offered by leaders in innovation, thinking.”) Five weeks after its launch, the channel has attracted more than 2.4 million views, 42,000 subscribers, and more than 3,000 comments, TED says.…Read More

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Free video lessons offered by leaders in innovation, thinking

If the idea is approved, TED will send over a portable recording booth.

In the vast realm of dogs hugging baby deer and toddlers laughing hysterically, it’s not always easy finding online videos that have a deeply profound impact—that is, until Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) entered the market, providing “ideas worth spreading.” Now, TED is venturing into education with TED-Ed.

TED, a global set of conferences owned by the private nonprofit Sapling Foundation, usually gives speakers 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can. Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Malcolm Gladwell are just a few notable speakers who have presented at TED.

In the spirit of “ideas worth spreading,” TED launched TED-Ed on March 12 with the intent of making available the “mind-altering lessons that happen in classrooms every day” to everyone in the world.…Read More

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