From communism to the threat of cats: This week’s TED ConversationsTED Conversations is a unique space where any member of this community can get feedback on an idea, pose an interesting question, or start a debate with their fellow TEDizens from around the globe. This week, dozens of new conversations were started. Many of them were about issues brought up in our first television special, TED […]
Meet the three new TEDGlobal speakers, and a few others making the newsWe are excited to introduce you to three new speakers who’ve been added to the program for TEDGlobal 2013, themed “Think Again.” First, jazz-pop singer Jamie Cullum will take the stage to perform during session 10, “Imagined Beauty.” Just last week, Cullum released this nerdily adorable video — shot in one continuous Steadicam take — […]
The secrets of TED’s (award-winning!) designIt is, indeed, a monumental day here at TED Towers. We’re winners! Or, as June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, described this morning’s news of our winning the 2013 National Design Award for corporate and institutional achievement: “We’re thrilled!” “Design and design thinking has always been core to TED’s mission. After all, it’s the ‘D’ […]
A video that will give you hope in the next generationWalt Cochran, a teacher in Kansas City, shared this touching video with us for Education Week about his children — one disabled, one not — who make you think about the depth of the sibling relationship. Lindsay, 10, suffers from a form of Muscular Dystrophy called Spinal Muscular Atrophy and has been in a wheelchair […]
7 talks for inspiring transformed curriculumsWith more colleges shifting courses to the online classroom and high school teachers and students alike expressing a strong desire to move away from rigid, mandated lesson arcs, it’s clear — classes don’t have to be exactly as they are. Educators across the globe have begun to look at ways of transforming curriculum to suit different […]
TED wins a National Design AwardWe’re thrilled to announce: TED is one of the 2013 winners of the National Design Awards, given by the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt. The National Design Awards celebrate design “as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world” — which is how we feel about it too. Great design, like great writing and great speaking, is a […]
Meet five New York high school students with fascinating storiesNo television special exploring ideas on improving education in the United States would be complete without hearing from students themselves. And so it was essential that students be able to tell their own stories during our first television special, TED Talks Education, which premiered on PBS last night. To that end, we invited Market Road […]
Playlist: 7 education ideas from unlikely placesGeoffrey Canada gives a very interesting analogy in today’s TED Talk: He compares the current education system in the United States to the era when banks were only open between the hours of 10am and 3pm. “Now, who can bank between 10 and 3?” asks Canada to a big laugh. “It went on for decades. […]
Join the conversation about #TEDTalksEdWant to talk about education? Inspired by TED Talks Education, our one-hour TV special that aired on PBS night, and this morning’s batch of TED Talks, here’s a roundup of some great TED Conversations you can join: High school freshman Colin Petre asks: Is college really as important as our society today has made it […]
Bosons, bicycles and big data: 7 things I learned from TEDxCERNThere’s a place in Switzerland where scientists travel on bicycles through tunnels filled with atom-smashing tubes, where the first webpage was born, and where a giant wooden globe watches over researchers replicating the very beginnings of our universe. That place is CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and last Friday, it held its first […]
The asocial side of social media: TED Book author Damon Brown on our “virtual shadows”Are your endless tweets, status updates and Instagrams robbing you of enjoying what’s special about the moments you’re trying to share? Damon Brown fears they may. In the TED Book Our Virtual Shadow: Why We Are Obsessed With Documenting Our Lives Online, he lays out a compelling case for mindfully balancing your online presence with being present in […]
5 mnemonic devices for reading Chinese charactersTo an outsider, the Chinese language “seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China,” says ShaoLan Hsueh in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Hsueh’s mission over the past few years has been to break down that barrier, making reading and writing in Chinese accessible to people who didn’t grow up doing it. […]
Op-Ed: Moving beyond dropout statistics and toward solutionsBy Patricia Harrison When I attended the taping of TED Talks Education last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I knew I was witnessing an innovative collaboration with the potential to make a difference in the lives of many young people. This milestone collaboration between TED, WNET, PBS, and the CPB American Graduate “Let’s […]
The story behind my new TED Talk: Giving teachers what they deserveBy Bill Gates I spend a lot of my time working to help improve America’s schools. I’m also a big fan of TED Talks. So when TED’s Chris Anderson asked me to give a talk as part of a special TED session on education, I jumped at the chance. The show premieres on PBS this […]
7 tech tools now available in the classroom, for better or worseThe analog-to-digital shift that has seen e-readers booting out books, smartphones trumping landlines and tablets making desktops look fuddy-duddy is also bringing new tech tools to the classroom. Last month, I read this New York Times article about CourseSmart, an app that allows teachers to track whether students have done their reading in digital textbooks, […]
TEDsters in the news: Ron Finley dubbed ‘Appleseed with an Attitude,’ Malcolm London on his TED Talks Education poemThis weekend, we opened up the Style section of The New York Times to see a very familiar face — renegade gardener Ron Finley, whose talk “A guerilla gardener in South Central LA” now has more than 900,000 views. In the article, Finley describes what he calls “the TED effect” — the slew of interest […]
Why a good education benefits us all — even if you’re long past being a studentTimothy Bartik says that investing in early childhood education is not just good for the children involved — but for communities as a whole. In today’s talk, he offers a detailed look at how preschool education boosts local economies in colossal ways. “Early childhood education can bring more and better jobs to a state and can […]
