Translator: Fatma Abdeldaem Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Teachers are heroes.
I think we can all agree this, right?
(Applause)
They spend their lives devoted to spreading great ideas,
and they spread them to the people who need them most.
I mean, it's hard to imagine work that matters more
or that is more scandalously underpaid, unrecognized.
So at TED
over the last couple years, because they're doing our core mission,
we've been wondering how we can help empower teachers?
And this is a task that's made a little harder
by the fact that teachers do so many jobs in one:
Mentor, cheerleader, disciplinarian, alternative parent.
I mean, just to take two of the roles that are perhaps the most important.
So,
teachers are instructors,
they stand up and they explain,
they transfer knowledge, if you like, into those receiving minds,
and they are coaches, giving one-on-one attention to individual kids
to activate that knowledge.
But these are such different roles,
you can see the difference if you ask:
What's the ideal class size for teacher as instructor?
Well, if you prepared a lesson,
and you're going to share it in a powerful way,
you've put thought in it.
You want your class size to be as big as possible,
you want many kids to hear it.
But as a coach,
every child's needs are different.
So, just a small peer group is the most that you could possibly handle;
you want a tiny class size.
There we go, that worked.
That means that if you look at the constraints on an instructor,
really it's one of scale.
And for a coach, the issue is time.
How do you find the time to give each of those kids the attention that they need
to really bring the best out of them.
So, in our new initiative,
we set ourselves the task of giving something
to each of these types of teachers often contained in the same teacher.
What can we give the instructor?
Well, our goal in our new initiative called TED-Ed
is first of all is to give an instructor a classroom the size of the world.
One of the most thrilling things about TED these last few years
has been seeing how one person's words,
one wise person's words, can ripple out across the planet.
We know that there are thousands, probably millions of teachers out there
who have an amazing lesson in them
that deserves to be heard not by the 30 kids in their class
but by millions of kids across the world.
We want to give them that platform,
and we want to give them something else as well.
A magic blackboard.
If you're a great teacher and you understand a subject well,
if you could make your blackboard show anything that you could imagine,
would that help you explain the subject better?
We think it would.
So, that's why we're offering to teachers
a small army of remarkable animators, filmmakers, visualizers
so that they can take their lessons
and convert them into films that will really get kids attention
and get inside their brains and spark curiosity.
So, we're starting to assemble this archive of short animated films;
they're kind of like TED Talks, but not really, they're animated.
So they look a bit like this.
(Video) "There's more to a symbiosis than one species feeding another.
In the case of the Clark's nutcracker, this bird gives back.
Nutcrackers can gather up to 90,000 seeds.
What they don't go back and get, those seeds become whitebark."
"Today, planes can transport viruses to any country on the globe.
In February 2003, for instance, a doctor arrived in Hong Kong.
Within 24 hours of checking into room 913, 16 other guests had been infected.
He was harboring a new animal origin virus called SARS."
"He calculates the speed of light, and he did it with one of these.
This is a toothed wheel.
It's got a bunch of notches, and it's got a bunch of teeth.
This was Fizeau's solution to sending discrete pulses of light.
He put a beam behind one of these notches.
If I point a beam through this notch at a mirror five miles away,
that beam is bouncing off a mirror and coming back through this notch."
So what's exciting about this is that these videos scale.
You know, soon after putting out one of them,
a teacher who had paired with an animator tweeted:
"I've spent 10 years teaching sex determination,
and in that time have communicated it to about 500 kids,
and on TED-Ed, in three days I've reached 13,000."
Now, I just checked that number and it's 48,000.
And that video you just saw by Adam Savage has been seen by 750,000 kids.
So this scale is really exciting.
We know that when it's done right, video can carry a surprising amount with it.
It really can carry explanation. It can actually even carry inspiration.
It can make the difference between not giving a damn about a subject
and deciding that you actually might want to devote your life to it.
And since we've launched this,
to our delight, more than 1,000 teachers,
and more than 1,000 animators have offered their services to continue this.
So we're going to build an archive.
We're planning to have about 350 videos online made this way within a year's time,
and beyond that, who knows, thousands, we hope and believe.
(Applause)
Thank you.
What about teacher as coach?
Video instruction alone isn't enough.
You know, kids learn by doing.
So how do we address this core problem of time?
Can you expand classroom time?
Think about a teacher as a coach.
They're having to attend to the needs of perhaps 30 kids,
and already they've got this huge classroom requirement
of having to stand up and teach and give a lesson.
How much time does that leave?
But what if you could take the teaching time
and move that out of the classroom,
move that into the home.
This is why people have got excited about this idea of flipped teaching.
In this model,
a teacher can take either themselves on video, their lesson,
or videos from the world's most brilliant teachers, wherever they can find them,
and assign them to their kids as homework.
The homework actually happens before the lesson.
So kids can learn at their own pace;
the slower kids can rewind several times until they get it.
That opens up all of class time for doing things that teachers are excited about
in terms of peer-to-peer learning, learning by doing,
interactive exercises, one-on-one coaching and so forth.
It's a really transformative picture.
So we set ourselves the task of trying to give teachers some tools
to make it really easy for them to try out flipped teaching,
and that's what our site Ed.TED.com does.
Here it is.
On the surface, it's this archive of some of these animated videos
anyone can browse through and take a look at.
They're grouped into series that are meant to make learning sound exciting.
"Questions No One Knows the Answer To,"
"How Things Work," "Inventions That Shape History."
But as a teacher or a student,
you can also browse through them in more traditional subject categories like this.
Here's our science videos, for example,
and that Adam Savage video was one of them.
When you watch the video, you're not just looking at a video,
it's contextualized.
There are now, while you're watching it,
you can take a quick quiz, multiple choice questions.
If you get them right, that's great.
If you get it wrong, you can click,
and it will take you to the right point in the video so you can get it right.
There are open-ended questions that you can answer
and other resources that you could look at.
But here's the key, this "Flip This Video" button
because this is the magic button that allows teachers to take control.
They can create their own version of the lesson;
they can contextualize it for their own kids, headline and their own context.
They can sort out which questions they want to have in there.
They can add their own questions,
and then when they're ready, they press the magic "Publish" button.
When they do that,
they have their own page on the internet, their own URL.
Here's the moment.
It's coming up, this is big.
This is empowering.
Publish!
You can share that now on Facebook or Twitter,
or email with your kids, whatever way.
You can track how they respond to each of the questions,
so you can see in one place -
Did they watch the video? Did they get it right?
But here's the really big news.
You can do this not just with our videos,
you can do this with any video that's on YouTube.
So you can search for a video you yourself recorded,
(Applause)
put your own questions on there and set up a lesson however you want.
Teachers are doing this; we've noticed that kids are doing this.
Kids are becoming teachers
and telling us that they're learning more by teaching than by anything else.
What's really happening here is that we're recruiting
a small army of teachers across the web
to act as co-curators with us,
to find the best educational materials that there are online,
and to turn them into powerful lessons that we can all share free with the world.
Where that leads, I don't know.
Everything TED has done in the last few years
has happened by throwing the keys to other people.
That's how our Open Translation Program happened
that took TED into 85 languages.
7,000 volunteer translators did that working in pairs.
That's how TEDx took off;
we didn't think it was going to be like this.
We gave people a free license,
suddenly to our amazement, there are five or six events like this,
maybe not quite like this,
almost as good as this, happening every day somewhere in the world,
it's mind-blowing.
What could an army of teachers do?
We don't know, we cannot wait to find out, because this is a big deal.
You know, as we think of the future,
we're all scared by this prospect of 9 billion, 10 billion people coming,
and we think of them as hungry mouths coming to munch away our beautiful planet
and take away our future.
But if instead we could think of them as empowered creative minds.
If we could think of 2 billion new brains coming online,
that could be the resource that our planet needs to make a better future,
that kind of changes everything,
and it all hangs on this thing.
Whether we can teach, whether people can learn.
For the first time in history - and this truly is amazing -
we're very near to the point where every kid on the planet, pretty much,
is going to be connected, is going to be able to summon to their phone
the world's greatest teachers in the subjects that matter most to them.
How amazing is that!
This means that we have the chance for an unprecedented experiment
in human potential,
and where that potential takes us,
who knows, but it's a thrilling endeavor.
I know that many of you in this room
share the dream of contributing to this endeavor.
It's an honor to be on that journey with you.
Thank you all so much.
(Applause) (Cheers)