Margarita Kosior explains how TED talks are used as Teaching content with TED-Ed

We are rapidly moving away from a world of information scarcity to a highly networked world, where information is in great abundance. The Internet has enabled all of us to become active learners and to connect with the growing community of educators who share ideas on teaching and learning. TED is a platform that supports the growing community of educators who share ideas on learning through inspiring talks.

The TED website promotes ideas worth spreading in the classroom, so that they influence young people, help them gain a different perspective, change their attitudes, spark their minds, and ultimately reshape the world by achieving a growth mindset. In terms of their linguistic competency, students are exposed to real discourse in which language comes alive and words acquire a deeper meaning. 

TED talks are a brilliant resource for listening and speaking classes at (upper-) intermediate and advanced levels for young adults and adult learners in the ELT classroom, but also a springboard for meaningful discussion with Business, Psychology, Computer Science students.   

 

With TED-Ed, these talks can easily become teaching content.TED-Ed is a website for teachers and learners that features talks and animated lessons, based on TED Talks. It is a platform that allows anyone to flip a TED-Ed video, TED Talk or any other YouTube video and create a new, customized lesson. You can take a tour to learn the step-by-step process of creating an online lesson (referred to as "customizing" a lesson).

"Customizing" a video allows you to turn a video into an online lesson that can be assigned to students or shared more widely. You can add context, questions and follow-up suggestions to any video on TED-Ed or YouTube.

All you need to do is to create an account. This will allow you to store your flipped lessons and get data and statistics on student progress. You can also customize any lesson available on TED-Ed. From the YouTube menu option, you can flip any YouTube video. You can watch a tutorial   on how to use the TED-Ed platform and create your own, amazing customized lessons online. 

 

My personal experience with TED-Ed helped me realize that my lessons do not have to look like this anymore…

 

… but they can look like this and be available online, can be shared, on the TED Ed platform.

And my students, and not only, can have access to them at any time.

Margarita Kosior

Lecturer at English Studies Department