The innovative minds at TED have brought a new educational video website to the head of the class. Today, TED-Ed launched http://ed.ted.com, a site that features TED-Ed’s original K-12 animated videos with accompanying lessons and quizzes. On top of that, the site allows educators to create original lessons for any YouTube video, rendering the video on a new link where teachers can monitor student progress.
Each three- to eight-minute TED-Ed video comes with multiple choice quizzes, open ended questions, and a “Dig Deeper” section with further resources. The site is unusually user friendly—students can minimize videos on the webpage so they can keep watching while answering questions, and, if they get a multiple choice question wrong, the “Video Hint” automatically directs them to the exact point in the video where the question is answered.
Teachers, meanwhile, can monitor whether students have watched the video and keep track of their progress. All TED-Ed lessons can be edited to accommodate specific needs. “Our goal was to design a guided but also very flexible tool for teachers,” says Logan Smalley, the head of TED-Ed.
But teachers aren’t limited to the TED-Ed material, which right now includes about 25 videos covering topics from atoms to word choice. Educators can search for any YouTube video on the site, and “flip” the video to build an original lesson plan and create a unique URL, which can be accessed even if YouTube is blocked.