Ted Ed is a platform for creating coherent, meaningful lessons around a digital video. A youtube, hulu, or other video can be housed on the Ted Ed platform, and paired with comprehension and analytical questions about the video content, organized links to further avenues of student exploration, and discussion boards. Educators can track student responses, whether or not the student registers as a TedEd user.
What Can You Do with Ted Ed?
The process is simple: find a video you want to use (Ted Ed even has a search tool that searches multiple online video platforms for you), upload it, and create context, comprehension and analysis questions, collections of further digital learning opportunities, and discussion boards. It’s simple, and cleanly organized. The tool requires almost no modeling-- it’s pretty close to plug and play-- educators could create a lesson together in a matter of minutes-- a couple of pages of instruction in an email could get teachers off and running, or in ten minutes of a faculty meeting, a group of teachers could build a sample lesson together.
Student Exploration and Empowered Student Learning
One of the interesting fields in a Ted Ed lesson is the “Dig Deeper” field, which allows teachers to provide context and links to other web resources-- images, articles, museums, etc. It provides a simple, un-intimidating way for students to begin their digital journey beyond the video itself and your own questions about it. The discussion field could be easily designed to then ask students to summarize what else they’ve explore, to post new resources they’ve found for their classmates.
Student and Teacher Participation: Possibilities and Cautions
It would be simple for students to take this tool and create their own lessons-- to have them think about what knowledge a student should gain from a video, what questions a student should ponder, what resources they could add, what discussion questions they could pose. Students could use teacher Ted Ed lessons as models for their own Ted Ed lesson.
In turning Ted Ed into a tool for student content creation, however, teachers should take care to tread lightly. The Ted brand, particularly the Ted Talk brand, has been criticized for flattening and simplifying deep intellectual concepts, so that the talks appear more inspiring, turning intellectual lectures into American Idol where ideas are valued because they are “awesome, inspirational and unchallenging.” The Ted brand has even been the target of some pretty acute and astute satire:
All of this is to say that the Ted Ed website will nudge students toward creating their own content, becoming part of the Ted Ed world, a world that encourages them ask “How can their idea change the world?” Then upload their video to youtube, under Ted branding, to share their idea with “friends, family, and the entire world.” The language here is very much the language of problem-based and project-based learning: students are to be “inspired”, they are to “explore” and “share globally”, and there are plenty of images on the Ted Ed website of hip students actively empowered and leaping with love for their learning and sharing:
I think any educator would want to approach “branded” learning activities with caution, especially brands so often accused of simplifying complex questions in order to prioritize creating the sensation of insight at the expense of the thorny complexity of real learning.
Similarly, the Ted Ed website pushes teachers toward the Ted Ed Masterclass website, which flatters their “brilliance” and “innovation” while urging them to “surface” their school or district’s ideas through buoying power of the Ted brand.
Ted Ed Transformations and ISTE Standards
There is a real utility to Ted Ed-- the platform makes creating lessons for flipped, blended or remote classrooms relatively painless. There are ways, as I’ve outlined above, to push students to develop as technologically competent students in ways outlined by the ISTE standards. Using the simple tools of the Ted Ed platform can help them build the foundation to become knowledge constructors (ISTE Student Standard 3) , particularly, seeing first a model from their teacher that collects videos, asks questions, curates further research, and then being pushed to curate their own research and digital sources. A Ted Ed lesson could then be a jumping off point for students to begin thinking about ways to creatively communicate (ISTE Student Standard 6) their own learning.
The process could also be a lesson in responsible digital citizenship (ISTE Student Standard 2), as students begin to ask themselves what their digital identity is and who controls that. When setting up a Ted Ed lesson, teachers have the option of requiring students create their own Ted Ed account.
Talking with students about that choice, and talking about what their identity as learners is, independent of the Ted brand identity, can be an important lesson, too.
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