Ta Da it's 'TED-Ed'!

TED-Ed:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED-Ed, TED’s youth and education initiative, is an online library of short, award winning animated videos about ideas that spark the curiosity of learners and also celebrate the ideas of teachers everywhere. This is a free educational and interdisciplinary global website which contains creating lessons worth sharing. The approach to education is an extension of TED-Ed’s mission of spreading ideas about art, music, science, technology, literature, language, mathematics, social studies and several things.

  

TED-Ed needs sign up activity to create a new account (as teacher or learner or other) even user can sign up with ‘Facebook’ also.

After that, users can access the whole website and also can assess the lesson plans, materials and exercises of other peoples. They have the options of watch, think, dig deeper, discuss and throughout the process they have enriched by the particular idea. Moreover, they can customize this lesson by creating and sharing a new lesson based on this one. Mainly, TED-Ed does teaching and education, thinking and learning.

                                

                                                                                                                                       

TED-Ed for English:

TED-Ed uses engaging videos to create customized lessons on language learning for English language, literature from which learners can autonomously improve their English at home. There are more than 1,400 official TED talks on the website, offering high quality and engaging practice for English language. It can help students improve, not only their listening skills, but also their pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and writing.

Some TED talks can help English language learners in a various ways.

Talks about language- some TED talks are given by linguistics and language teachers. TED talks feature content that can increase English language knowledge and teach more about linguistics.

Simply listening- it is helpful for improving the vocabulary, comprehension and pronunciation skills by simply listening to a native English speaker.

TED transcripts- transcripts are available with TED talks so learners can read along with the spoken word. They can easily understand what’s being said and also can learn the spelling of the word.

For English learners, the coolest thing is that all presentations are in English or with English subtitles and they are free and available to anybody with internet connection. One of the best learning tools for ESL students. It gives the golden opportunity not only to develop the English language, but also to improve the quality of information, entertainment and revolutionize the life. It also helps to expand the perception of whole world. 

  Five great talks for English learning-

·         James Geary: Metaphorically Speaking

·         Tim Doner: Breaking the Language Barrier

·         Erin McKean: Go Ahead, Make Up New Words!

·         Jean-Baptise Michel & Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we Learned from 5 Million  Books

·        Stephen Burt: Why People Need Poetry

  How to Make English A Part of Your Life:

  There are several links of funniest videos for English teachers and learners-

•  The World’s English Mania (Jay Walker) -4:34
• Schools Kill Creativity (Ken Robinson) -19:29
•  The Linguistic Genius of Babies (Patricia Kuhl) -10:18
• What Our Language Habits Reveal (Steven Pinker)
• www.fluentin3months.com.
•  Dreams From Endangered Cultures (Wade Davis) -22:05
•  Smash Fear, Learn Anything (Tim Ferris) -16:21
•  Don’t Insist on English! (Patricia Ryan) -10:35
•  Txting is killing language. JK!!! (John McWhorter) -13:48
• The Joy of Lexicography (Erin McKean) -15:54
•  Massive-Scale Online Collaboration (Luis von Ahn) -16:04
• Greatly improve your English with Duolingo
•  Metaphorically Speaking (James Geary) -9:30 

  Challenges for Teachers in the Classroom:

Teachers have to provide latest ideas or thinking and they can build a better school or classroom by reinventing the education. But they have more challenges too. For instance, they have to explore regularly the TED-Ed’s growing library of educational resources. There are several Ted Books also and they should know the every tiny detail about TED to face the classroom. There has an online blog site where teacher can communicate with students or learners and also can provide the own materials or exercises. There has options to create own lessons or change others’ lessons. Teacher can use it, tweak it or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed. So, teachers should be more attentive and also should aware of the idea of the lesson in front of class. Teacher might face the problem of less interaction between teacher and students, students and students in the classroom.

For instance, I have learnt about a new topic ‘Epigenetics’ from TED-Ed and it is an awesome feature; by going through it I have gathered some new information & experiences.

Finally can say that TED has an ocean of spectacular information that will transform the way we look at the world, and if possible then we can see that also why their slogan is “Ideas worth Spreading.”