Learn Interesting Stuff Every Day With TED-Ed Videos

The TED Talks video website has always been a must visit for anyone to understand what’s happening in the world of ours. A few months back TED added another leaf to their widely popular service. Ted-Ed is specifically for educational videos and rich resource for both educators and students. As TED believes, ideas have the power to change attitudes, lives, and ultimately, the world. So it is with education, and it is a part of its continuing mission to spread ideas.

YouTube is choc-a-bloc filled with videos and many channels which are educational in their theme. So, where does TED-Ed fit in?

TED-Ed value, probably, lies in the fact that it is much more carefully curated than YouTube. TED-Ed is a platform for quality videos and a meeting place of great educators and cool designers who can bring the lessons to life. But more than that, TED-Ed allows any teacher to come to the learning website and use the videos to create customized lesson plans around the videos. The videos are free to view and share.

Videos are neatly arranged by Subject. Similar videos are arranged into a Series. The best ones get a place on the Featured list.

The Most Innovative Feature of Ted-Ed – Flip a Video

The educational videos on TED-Ed are not just videos; they are complete lessons in themselves. Each video has five multiple choice questions, short answer questions which ask you more from you, and other resources which supplement the lesson.

Now, as every student and teacher has a different approach to learning, TED-Ed has introduced a feature that allows one to turn a video into a customized lesson that can be assigned to students or shared more widely. A teacher can add context, questions, and follow-up suggestions to any video on TED-Ed or YouTube. This innovative method of learning your subject is called Flip A Video.

How is Flip A Video useful as a learning aid?

Flip A Video is a tweak to a teaching method called Flip Teaching. This allows a teacher to create his own lesson and give it to a student before he enters the class so that the student is more familiar with what is going to be taught. This in turn gives teachers more time in class to focus on other parts of the topic and teach more deeply.

To use the Flip This Video you have to be logged into the site. Here’s how a particular video lesson page looks:

You can give a new title to your lesson, give a fresh context for the video, add or remove questions, and end the lesson with additional resources. The final step involves publishing and sharing it with your students.

The best thing is that you can use any video from YouTube and turn it into a lesson for your students. Remember, YouTube has its own YouTube for Schools channel.

This is a very thoughtful initiative from TED-Ed. It is spreading its wings and taking flight. The implications could be widespread – you can not only teach traditional subjects but also take up lessons on hobbies and crafts, or anything else for that matter. TED-Ed is completely free and without any restrictions.

Pay TED-Ed a visit.