8 Intellectually Challenging TED Ed Talks to Watch with Your Students

November 8, 2015
TED Ed is a wonderful resource of educational video content to use in your instruction and for your professional growth. The short duration of these videos ( between 3 to 5 minutes long) together with the beautiful animations used with them make these clips a powerful learning medium par excellence. TED Ed videos span a plethora of topics all of which are arranged into different playlists. We have already featured some popular collections here in EdTech and mLearning and today we are sharing with you this short list comprising 8 interesting animated talks to share with your students. The content of these clips is intellectually challenging and will definitely pick students curiosity to dig deeper to learn more about the topics covered. Enjoy

1- How a few scientists transformed the way we think about disease - Tien Nguyen

2- The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli

3- 3 tips to boost your confidence 

4- How memories form and how we lose them - Catharine Young

5- Do animals have language? - Michele Bishop

6- How misused modifiers can hurt your writing - Emma Bryce

7- The benefits of good posture - Murat Dalkilinç

8- What gives a dollar bill its value? - Doug Levinson

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Some Very Good TED Ed Lessons on Writing to Share with Students

July 12, 2015
This week’s Ted Ed list of talks we curated for you revolves around the theme: writer’s workshop. This is basically a playlist prepared by Ted Ed Channel on YouTube featuring 16 Ted Ed video lessons from which we selected the ones below. The talks are particularly ideal for classroom inclusion. You can use them with your students to teach them about some of the mechanics of writing and raise their consciousness to the important elements that make a good piece of writing.

1- Three anti-social skills to improve your writing - Nadia Kalman

2- The power of simple words - Terin Izil

3- The power of a great introduction - Carolyn Mohr

4- Beware of nominalizations (AKA zombie nouns) - Helen Sword

5- How to build a fictional world - Kate Messner

6- Grammar's great divide: The Oxford comma - TED-Ed

7- In on a secret? That's dramatic irony - Christopher Warner

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A Wonderful TED Ed Video on The Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism

June 24, 2015
Bilingualism or the ability to speak more than one language is a prevalent linguistic phenomenon. Even in the online digital discourse a great deal of multilingualism and bilingualism is observed in text-mediated interactions between users.  For those of you interested in learning more about bilingualism in the virtual world, we recommend Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices (by David Barton and Carmen Lee) and The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online (by Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring). Both of these books provide some interesting academic studies with illustrated explanations of how Internet users appropriate their linguistic codes in different multilingual spaces.

To learn more about bilingualism, this Ted Ed lesson, we discovered through  LarryFerlazzo,  does a great job explaining what bilingualism is all about, its types and its cognitive benefits.

Some of the examples of cognitive advantages inherent in multilingualism include:

• Higher density of the gray matter that contains most of your brain’s neurons and synapses.
• The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can help delay the onset of diseases such as alzheimers and dementia by as much as five years.
• The efforts and attention needed to switch between languages trigger more activity in and strengthens the dorsolateral prefrontal cortext which is the part of the brain responsible for executive functions, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information.

Watch the Ted Lesson to learn more

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The 10 Most Popular TED Ed Videos for Students

June 3, 2015
One of the wonderful video resources we have been recommending for teachers and students is TED Ed video library on YouTube. This library features a wide variety of educational videos curated specifically for education community. These TED Ed videos are explanatory tutorials and animations that cover a wide variety of topics.

TED Ed videos are ideal for flipped classroom learning. Teachers can sift through the videos created by other teachers and share them with students on TED Ed website. TED Ed allows teachers to build a lesson around any of these videos. They can also add questions to the videos that students can answer and get instant feedback on their answers. For those of you interested in learning about how to create flipped lessons using TED Ed,  read  this visual guide.

Below is a selection of the top 10 TED Ed videos in TED Ed video library on YouTube.  We have also added the links to the lessons attached to each of one of these videos. Check them out and share with your students

1- How playing an instrument benefits your brain - Anita Collins

View the TED Ed lesson here

2- How sugar affects the brain - Nicole Avena

View the TED Ed lesson here

3- Questions no one knows the answers to (Full Version) - Chris Anderson

View the TED Ed lesson here

4- The unexpected math behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night" - Natalya St. Clair

View the TED Ed lesson here

5- What are those floaty things in your eye? - Michael Mauser

View the TED Ed lesson here

6- How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries - Adam Savage

View the TED Ed lesson here

7- What makes tattoos permanent? - Claudia Aguirre

View the TED Ed lesson here

8- Should we eat bugs? - Emma Bryce

View the TED Ed lesson here

9- Just how small is an atom? - Jonathan Bergmann

View the TED Ed lesson here

10- The loathsome, lethal mosquito - Rose Eveleth

View the TED Ed lesson here

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