TED Ed — TEDucational videos

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) was first known for its conferences, attracting extraordinary speakers who told the people lucky enough to be in the room amazing, thrilling, and inspiring stories about the latest discoveries in science and the arts.  When those presentations became available online, they were wildly popular.  I’ve posted some of them here, most recently “John Carter” director Andrew Stanton’s discussion of what makes a story.

TED is now taking the next step by beginning to develop materials for students and educators.

Viewed one way, it’s just the release on YouTube of a dozen short videos created for high school students and life-long learners. But we’re committed to growing this archive to hundreds of videos within a year, and I thought it would be helpful to jot down a few personal notes on why we’re doing this… …because there’s a right and a wrong way to interpret today’s launch.

The wrong way is to imagine that we believe this to be some kind of grand solution.  “TED claims its new TED-Ed videos will transform education”!  Er, no. We don’t.

The right way is to see this as our reaching out to teachers and saying: Can we help?

Step two, coming next month, will be a major new section of ted.com offering tools for teachers to amplify the educational value of videos.