Any dedicated educator can tell you: A teaching job extends far beyond the hours of the school day. Molding the minds of future leaders while simultaneously ferrying them across the rapids of childhood and adolescence — and dealing with the economics of the job — is a calling not for the faint of heart. Here […]
EverFi is supporting the TED2017 community in having a direct hand in changing the future. As a leader in connecting education to the real world since launching at TED in 2008, EverFi allows attendees to meet those who will truly impact the future us — middle and high school students passionate about where they want […]
Wendy Morales is one of a group of TED-Ed Innovative Educators who got together at our recent TEDSummit conference. She files this report, which we’re cross-posting from her own blog, The Risk-Taking Educator: When asked what I do for a living, sometimes I catch myself saying, “I am just a teacher.” It’s as if I am apologizing […]
In Kingston, Jamaica, 4- to 6-year-olds in early education programs think about questions like, “What does it mean to be selfish?” In a school on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, fifth graders research topics like, “What is WordPress?” In rural Colombia, students at local libraries puzzle over prompts like, “Why are yawns contagious?” The School in […]
“Let’s skip ahead and assume that children of the future are always connected,” said education innovator Sugata Mitra. Thinking out loud about the evolution of screen sizes and the future of wearables, he came to the conclusion: “The Internet is a subject as important as science or mathematics.” Mitra shared this in a presentation at […]
TED-Ed Clubs are about to get a lot of visibility in Italian high schools. On Thursday, March 3, in Rome, the Italian Minister of Education, University and Research, Stefania Giannini, and the European Director of TED, Bruno Giussani, signed a 3-year memorandum of understanding on cooperation regarding the spread of the TED-Ed Clubs curriculum across Italian high […]
On Wednesday morning at John B. Russwurm Elementary School in Harlem, students pointed excitedly at cat photos on the Internet. No, they weren’t goofing off. They were participating in a “self organized learning environment,” or SOLE, a teaching method where kids are given an open-ended, curiosity-stroking question and asked to research it in small groups. […]
“Innovation in education involves constant collaboration with colleagues — a total last-minute redo of a teacher’s lesson plan because there was something else out there that he or she just had to try, a change in the direction of a class because the students are driving the instruction.” “Innovation in education happens when educators ask, ‘How […]
If you watch my TED Talk from 2010, you might see a confident 12-year-old, cracking jokes and striding around the stage in glasses that keep sliding down her nose. You won’t see me going home and crying, or starting every page in my journal with four words: “I feel sad today.” I divided my life […]
Body image, beauty and bullying. In TED-Ed Clubs, students are guided through the process of making a presentation on an idea they feel passionate about — and dozens of students in clubs around the world have boldly chosen to talk about how to combat negative body image, distorted images of beauty and the bullying that […]
LEGOs are for building spaceships, crafting castles and getting lost in your couch. But what if they could be used not just to dream of lands long ago and times far away, but to inspire future scientists? That’s what writer Maia Weinstock had in mind when she made these STEM scientist action figures. Weinstock has […]
As a Production Intern at TED-Ed, a big part of my job has been to make sure none of our video files have any glitches. So for the past two months, I’ve watched every single TED-Ed Lesson — nearly 500 of them — at least twice. If TED-Ed were a menu, I’d have tried everything […]
High school senior Yash Khatavkar takes issue with the fact that, as he was learning Spanish, his elementary school only offered one hour of Spanish instruction per week. Even as he got older, he felt like Spanish classes in school just weren’t enough to move him past the point of having to translate between English and […]
You’ve probably heard of Area 51. But how about Area Zero? Area Zero is the flagship center of Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud, the idea that won him the 2013 TED Prize. It’s the final of Mitra’s labs dedicated to self-organized learning, and it opened this morning in Gocharan in West Bengal, India. A […]
Picture a classroom teacher without a lesson plan — a teacher who instead asks students an open-ended question to explore: Can animals think? Did dinosaurs exist? What is a soul? With the opening of Newcastle University’s SOLE Central on Monday, this vision is coming to life, in a research center where the concept can be tweaked […]
David Swancott is a retired biology teacher who lives an hour southeast of Bordeaux, France. He spends his free time bicycling, traveling and, for the past two years, being a “Skype Granny.” Swancott is a part of the “Granny Cloud,” a project created by 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra to make teachers available online to mentor children participating […]