Review on TED-ED

TED-ED an amazing educational tool

TED-ED is a free educational website for both teachers and students where teachers can create lessons by using videos or can customize lessons from a series of videos. Teachers can also use TED-Ed’s videos and lessons to supplement any subject. For English language teachers, TED-Ed helps them to create a listening task that can be used to test the listening skill of the learners. At the same, learners are benefited by practicing a listening task that develops their language skill as well as enriches their knowledge by providing them lots of information outside their textbooks. 

TED believes passionately that ideas have the power to change attitudes, lives, and ultimately, the world. This underlying philosophy is the driving force behind all of TED’s endeavors, including the TED Conferences, TEDx, TED Books, the TED Fellows Program, and the TED Open Translation Project. With this philosophy in mind, and with the intention of supporting teachers and sparking the curiosity of learners around the world, TED-Ed was launched in 2012.

TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative. TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Everything we do supports learning — from producing a growing library of original animated videos , to providing an international platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons, to helping curious students around the globe bring TED to their schools and gain presentation literacy skills, to celebrating innovative leadership within TED-Ed’s global network of over 250,000 teachers. TED-Ed has grown from an idea worth spreading into an award-winning education platform that serves millions of teachers and students around the world every week.

TED-Ed Originals are our signature content: short, award-winning animated videos about ideas that spark the curiosity of learners everywhere. Every TED-Ed Original represents a creative collaboration between experts. Such experts may include TED Speakers and TED Fellows, as well as educators, designers, animators, screenwriters, directors, science writers, historians, journalists and editors. These original animated videos, paired with questions and resources, make up what we refer to as TED-Ed Lessons.

The TED-Ed platform allows users to take any TED Talk, TED-Ed Lesson or educational video and easily create customized questions and discussions around the video. Users can then distribute these lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class or an individual student.

As a country, how can we better inspire our students — and support our educators? To explore ideas, TED, WNET, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting teamed up for a brand-new one-hour special, funded by CPB's "American Graduate: Let's Make It Happen." TED Talks Education was an exhilarating night of talks hosted by John Legend.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.

Our Mission: Spread ideas

TED is a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. On TED.com, we're building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world's most inspired thinkers — and a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other, both online and at TED and TEDx events around the world, all year long.

In fact, everything we do — from our Conferences to our TED Talks to the projects sparked by the TED Prize, from the global TEDx community to the TED-Ed lesson series — is driven by this goal: How can we best spread great ideas?

TED is owned by a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation. Our agenda is to make great ideas accessible and spark conversation.

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a non-profit media organization which posts talks online for free distribution, under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded in February 198 as a conference, which has been held annually since 1990 TED's early emphasis was technology and design, consistent with its Silicon Valley origins, but it has since broadened its focus to include talks on many scientific, cultural, and academic topics.

The main TED conference is held annually in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the Vancouver Convention Centre. Prior to 2014, the conference was held in Long Beach. TED events are also held throughout North America and in Europe and Asia, offering live streaming of the talks. They address a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling. The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can. Past speakers include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Billy Graham, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Bono, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners. TED's current curator is the British former computer journalist and magazine publisher Chris Anderson.

Since June 2006, TED Talks have been offered for free viewing online, under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons license, through TED.com. As of March 2016, over 2,400 TED Talks are freely available on the website. In June 2011, TED Talks' combined viewing figure stood at more than 500 million, and by November 2012, TED Talks had been watched over one billion times worldwide. Not all TED Talks are equally popular, however. Those given by academics tend to be watched more online while art and design videos tend to be watched less than average.

TED was conceived in 1984 by architect and graphic designer Richard Saul Wurman, who observed a convergence of the fields of technology, entertainment, and design (that is, "TED"). The first conference, organized by Harry Marks and Wurman in the same year, featured demos of the compact disc, co-developed by Philips and Sony and one of the first demonstrations of the Apple Macintosh computer. Presentations were given by famous mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and influential members of the digerati community, like Nicholas Negroponte and Stewart Brand. The event was financially unsuccessful; it took six years before the second conference was organized.

From 1990 onward, a growing community of "TEDsters" gathered annually at the event in California State University Monterey Bay, until 2009, when it was relocated to Long Beach, California due to a substantial increase in attendees. Initially, the speakers had been drawn from the fields of expertise behind the acronym TED, but during the nineties, the roster of presenters broadened to include scientists, philosophers, musicians, religious leaders, philanthropists, and many others.

TED Open Translation Project started in May 2009 and aims to " out to the 4.5 billion people on the planet who don't speak English," according to TED Curator Chris Anderson. The OTP utilizes crowd-based subtitling platforms to translate the text of TED and TED-Ed videos, as well as to caption and translate videos created in the TEDx program (with its technology partner dotSUB until May 2012, and recently with open source translation tool Amara). At the time of the launch, 300 translations had been done by 200 volunteer transcribers in 40 languages. In May 2015, over 70,000 sets of subtitles in 107 languages had been completed by (an all-time total of) 38,173 volunteer translators.

The project contributed to a significant increase in international visitors to TED's website, with traffic from outside the US growing 350 percent, 600 percent growth in Asia, and more than 1000 percent in South America.

Members have several tools dedicated to knowledge management, such as the OTP Wikipedia, Face book groups, or video tutorials.

This website is a great resource for both teachers and learners that engage the learners by providing well-produced contents as well as some of the best videos and animations. These contents not only present complex content in comprehensible ways but also work as a source of inspiration when they become frustrated. So, teachers have to design TED-Ed lessons based on the learners’ demand so that learners can enjoy it.

Teachers can choose three types of TED-Ed lessons. The first one is TED-Ed’s award-winning original lessons named ‘TED-Ed Originals’ that are represented by the collaborations of expert educators, screenwriters and animators. The second type of TED-Ed lesson is ‘TED-Ed Selects’ which are carefully selected by volunteer teachers and TED-Ed staff, and these lessons are created by other teachers or website visitors that involves adding questions, discussion topics and other supplementary materials to any educational video on YouTube. Another type of TED-Ed lesson is ‘TED Talk Lessons’ that are designed by using the TED Talk episodes where the famous persons have talked about different topics. These TED-Ed contents can be used as a lesson in classrooms and homes to introduce new topics to the learners in an interesting way.

TED-Ed website is designed uniquely to present video content that is user-friendly. Users can easily find out the video content according to their interested area by clicking on ‘View all TED-Ed lessons!’ from the bottom of the home page. Users can choose any lesson from these areas – ‘The Arts’, ‘Business & Economics’, ‘Design, Engineering & Technology’, ‘Health’, ‘Literature & Language’, ‘Mathematics’, ‘Philosophy & Religion’, ‘Psychology’, ‘Science & Technology’, ‘Social Studies’, ‘Teaching & Education’ and ‘Thinking & Learning’. Now teachers have to decide how these contents will be used for the learners because some of the video contents are inappropriate for the classroom.

           
However, each great lesson of TED-Ed is to reach and motivate as many learners as possible. At the same time, TED-Ed has provided an international platform where teachers can create their own interactive lessons for helping the learners.