Do you share with others?

With all of the negative surrounding education these days, I am so excited to share a POSITIVE with you today! I truly feel we are lucky to be able to work in education at this time in our country’s history. Gone are the days where teachers create their own lessons and ideas, close their classroom door and only share those ideas with their students. We are now able to connect with teachers from all over the world. On a daily basis, teachers are constantly sharing ideas, creating lessons to share and blogging about successes in their classrooms. For new (ok...newer) teachers like me, this is so very helpful. I have always appreciated the work and ideas of others. So, today, I wanted to provide you a great up and coming resource I have found.

This new initiative brand new...and has only been released as of March 12^th. It is a new project created by Technology, Education and Design (TED). I have watched several of TED’s videos in my online graduate classes. They are known for making innovative and engaging videos on a variety of topics. These topics are generally created for adults. Now, they have launched a new website: TED-ED. They are asking for teachers to create and submit engaging video lessons. This idea reminds me of a mixture of ALEX and TeacherTube. Here is a video explaining their idea:

So, if teachers have a great idea for an engaging lesson, they can submit the lesson to the TED-Ed website. If TED agrees, they will send a portable recording booth to the teacher. He or she will then record their lesson and send it back to TED. The video lesson with then be sent to an animation team to enhance it. Then those videos will be post to their YouTube Channel. I watched a few and found them very cool. Here is an example of a video they have already posted:

The greatest part is that their goal is to help students become life-long learners and provide teachers with an engaging way to help their students learn. It is a great tool and even better...it is FREE! I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the downside. One, it is currently only available through a YouTube Channel. Fortunately, you can still download the videos at home and play them back at school. You can also "follow" the channel and be alerted when new videos have been added. Two, since they are so new, there are not a lot of videos to choose from. I didn’t find too many videos that applied to my lower-grade students, but I just know that this idea is going to grow into a plethora of videos that span the grades.

Click here to read more about this idea from an e-School News article published earlier this month.