Review on TED-Ed

TED-Ed is a wonderful teaching and learning platform. This tool is completely free and fun. It provides videos on special topics that help engage and provide additional information. Both teacher and student can use TED-Ed to teach and learn through video lesson. TED-Ed is a very user friendly tool and the instruction is so organized that user can easily explore it.

TED-Ed provides ‘Series’, ‘Clubs’, ‘Patrons’, ‘Shops’ and  ‘Nominate’ sections along with ‘Lesson’ to explore. The lesson format consists of a lesson title, a written introduction (‘Let’s Begin’), a series of multiple choice or open-ended question (‘think’), a place for additional resources to encourage further exploration (‘Dig Deeper’) and an interactive class discussion (‘Discuss’). It provides practices on listening, reading and writing skills through these lessons.

In order to create lessons you must open a TED-Ed account, which requires an email address or Facebook account and password. In order for students to save their work, they need to have an account as well. Any learner who does not have a TED-Ed account can also practice learning. Once you ‘publish’ the lesson you can share the link with whomever you like TED-Ed allows you to easily browse videos by subject area or enter a url of any YouTube video you’ve found.  

After login to your account, you can see your dashboard, which will include all the lessons you’ve created or begun to create, as well as lessons and discussions you’ve participated in. You can also control settings and notifications in this area.

The video lessons take complex topics and simplify them through engaging animations for students. In addition, teachers can import a favorite educational video and create a lesson within the online TED-Ed module.

Teachers can also provide feedback directly on the TED-Ed lesson page, while reviewing the students’ answers. On clicking on the ‘Give Feedback’ the student is sent an email that contains a link to the teachers’ feedback.

TED-Ed goal is for each great lesson to reach and motivate as many learners as possible. With this new technology and tools it offers teachers can maximize time in class and create great lessons which are interesting and engaging.