Transcriber: Helen Chang Reviewer: Denise RQ
You guys know what TED is.
You know what TEDx is.
I'm really excited today
to tell you about TED's newest educational initiative: TED-Ed.
I'm going to tell you about how we are making a new form of content,
and about the powerful tool that houses that content.
And I'm going to tell you three stories
about how that tool is being used in the world.
TED-Ed is an open nomination platform,
and what that means
is that anyone in this room or anyone around the world
can nominate a great educator.
Our team goes through these nominations,
and if one pops, we work with that educator to record
a three to four-minute lesson in audio form.
We also work with hundreds of animators from around the world
to bring that audio to life.
So those two creative streams are married,
and the final product is a TED-Ed original lesson.
We have 80 TED-Ed lessons to date.
They have been viewed over 11 million times.
This is an example of the effect of one of them.
This is a teacher named Aaron Reedy, he is a biology teacher in Colorado.
He says, "Seven years as a teacher
I explained sex determination in animal kingdom to 1,000 students.
Three days with TED-Ed, I've explained it to 13,000!"
His TED-Ed lesson has now been viewed over 850,000 times
in over 100 countries around the world.
Pretty incredible to see an educator's voice go global.
But what do we do with that content once it's made?
I'm going to show you a video walk-through of the TED-Ed website.
So, a TED-Ed visitor reaches the home page
- these are some of those TED-Ed original lessons that you can see;
they can watch them right from the home page -
and we arrange these lessons in two ways.
One is by series.
It's meant to be a thematic organizing of content
to show that knowledge is in fact interdisciplinary.
We also arrange it by subject,
so that a teacher who is using the tool can find a video
related to what they teach quickly.
We are going into an actual lesson here.
This is one by Adam Savage of MythBusters' fame.
Obviously, you can watch the lesson.
As you're watching it, you can engage with these learning applications on the side.
The first is a quick quiz.
If you get an answer right, it tells you.
But if you get an answer wrong, more importantly,
it gives you immediate feedback in the form of a video hint.
There are open answer questions for deeper thinking,
as well as "Dig Deeper" materials, a combination of text and links.
But the real power of TED-Ed is in this "Flip This video" tool.
No learner and no classroom is the same,
so we give the power to basically customize the lesson around the video.
You can change the title,
you can add context based on the learning objective,
you can obviously keep or add new multiple choice questions
as well as open answer questions, which I'll show you right here.
And then, of course, you can edit the dig deeper materials.
You can also keep or exclude any of those.
So when you publish a lesson, this is the key,
it's rendered on a new and unique link,
and because you are the only person with that link, as you share it,
you can track everything that happens to that lesson.
You can see who watched it, what questions they got right or wrong,
and everything else that happens.
But the really powerful thing is
that you can use this to create a lesson around any video on YouTube.
Here is one on photosynthesis.
Just randomly searched it, "How to do a push up."
These are YouTube search results,
and you can create lessons around these videos.
If you are a computer science teacher, "Writing HTML."
So, the possibility of TED-Ed as a tool is as infinite as YouTube itself.
We launched this beta site in late April,
and we've had the privilege
of analyzing the millions of interactions that had been happening on it since.
I'm going to tell you three stories about how that flip functionality is being used.
The first is how I would've used it when I was a teacher
to capitalize on a very whimsical, teachable moment.
One day, when I was a special education high school teacher,
I was teaching a study skills class.
My students were not paying any attention.
The class was completely derailed.
The reason was, the night before,
this bomb has dropped in my hometown, Athens, Georgia.
A UFO has been seen in the skies.
One of my most gregarious students swore that he was the one who saw it.
So, no one was paying any attention.
Please note the "trusted source" emblem on the top of the article.
We'll talk more about that in a second.
(Laughter)
If TED Ed existed, I would have used it to create a lesson
that capitalized on all this attention related to alien life.
So this is a video made by Jill Tarter,
TED prize winner, who works for SETI,
which tries to measure the odds of intelligent life
happening outside of Earth.
I would have flipped this lesson, and here is how I would have done it.
First, I would have changed the title, so that it related to my class.
I would have called it, "In Athens,"
and I would use all caps, for dramatic effect.
(Laughter)
My lesson objective is to actually talk a little bit about the math behind this,
but also to question that trusted-source badge in media literacy.
So, I'm going to change the context to something like this.
And then, I'm going to add a question.
Now, this question that I added is meant to make students really think.
So, "If that UFO you guys saw is real, how does it change the Drake equation?"
which is what that video explores.
So to answer that question, they have to really understand
what Jill Tarter's saying about the Drake equation.
Lastly, I'm not going to use TED-Ed's suggested dig deeper materials
because I want this to be about media literacy.
So I'm going to change it to question that article
and employ some critical thinking skills.
So, I published the lesson.
You can see that 25 of my students have taken it.
This is what it looks like when they do.
As they engage with the lesson, the class roster builds down the left.
I can see how many questions they completed,
I can see how many they got correct on the first attempt,
and the total number of attempts.
If I click into any given students,
I can actually see how they got a question wrong.
So, I'm going to talk to this student about guessing,
and make sure that they understand why it isn't A, or B, or D.
Another way that the TED-Ed tool is being used is teacher as curator.
Remember that you can flip any video from YouTube, not just TED-Ed lessons.
I'm going to show you an example, a lesson on average speed
that one teacher from Massachusetts has created around the video from ESPN.
(Audio) Man: So let's see what you clocked.
(On stage) Logan Smalley: If we can have the volume up.
He hit a high of 15.9 mph!
Normally, you are not supposed to accelerate at the end.
You are supposed to be decelerating.
How about here? That's you and Tim Tebow.
You knew Tebow was going to show up.
You knew that. Look at this. That's you against Jacoby Ford.
If you keep hanging in there you'll catch him.
That's you with a 3-yard head start against Jacoby Ford.
Now, we're giving you 5 yards, OK? Five yards with Jacoby Ford.
Here he comes! Now, how about ...?
Rich Eisen: No, don't do this to me.
Colleague: You and Terrence Cody.
(Video ends)
(Laughter)
LS: The big guy still wins.
So, obviously, your brains are now primed to appreciate the nuances
of average speed and everything that extrapolates from understanding that.
That's what this great teacher did.
But he didn't have to make the video.
He built the lesson around the video that the ESPN had built.
So, where does this lesson live now that it's created?
The answer is on a new area of the website called "Best Flips",
it's where teachers who are creating lessons can nominate those lessons,
and TED-Ed gives those lessons exposure for the next teacher or student
to come along to the site.
The last way that TED-Ed is being used, that I'm going to talk about today,
is this awesome experience where the student assumes the role of a teacher.
It happens in a lot of ways.
I'm going to let an example speak for itself.
Please meet Ellen.
(Video) Ellen: Hi. I'm Ellen.
I'm going to show you how to sew a bag by using a sewing machine.
It's really simple.
To start sewing, you'll need a sewing machine,
a pedal, a stool,
a right amount of material,
a pair of scissors, a pintle of pins...
(On stage) LS: And a template. Bing!
(Laughter)
So, this question stumped myself and my staff, and lots of people
who have viewed this lesson.
But if you were to watch the whole six-minute video
that Ellen created about her passion for sewing,
you would know the answer to this.
So I encourage you to do that.
But the point is that thousands of people have watched this video,
because Ellen's Dad happens to be a writer for Wired UK,
and he included a link to Ellen's video in an article he wrote about TED-Ed.
I think the important thing, the one we are so excited about
is Ellen took the time with her Dad to create this video
to compose the lesson around it.
And now her relationship to this knowledge via being shared with thousands of people
has completely transformed,
and I think that's something
that will stick with her for the rest of her very, very many years.
So what's next for TED-Ed?
I showed you some of the learning applications.
These were very basic tools.
But we actually plan to develop quite a few.
I don't have time to go into each of them,
but think of that side material, that sidebar,
as an application environment,
where the opportunity to create as many applications as we can is there.
We're going to make best flips.
This is the creator of that football lesson.
We're going to make best flips; officially, they are now flippable.
So, basically, Greg here has done a little bit of work
for the next teacher who comes along and wants to personalize that lesson
for his or her target audience.
Lastly, we are going to create something that allows Ellen to create series
and really educate people about
all the incredible discoveries that she has made about sewing.
I want to leave you with this.
There is no rule that says education has to happen in a classroom
between teachers and students.
I think that probably the best teachers, who run the best classrooms,
those classrooms would look like a micro-cosmos of the real world.
So, there are 1,200 of people at this TEDx event.
There are in average,
six or seven TED-Ed events that happen every day around the world.
Phenomenal statistics.
What would happen, this is the question I want to leave you with,
what would happen if everyone in here
took the time to create a TED-Ed lesson worth sharing?
What would happen if everyone out there took the time to do that?
How would it transform global education?
I don't know the answer to that, but my staff is really excited
to work towards discovering what that answer means.
I think that the next teacher or student that participates in TED-Ed will be, too.
Thank you.
(Applause)