gpmt

TED-Ed is launching a suite of tools that allow teachers to design their own web-assisted curricula, complete with videos, comprehension-testing questions, and conversational tools. TED-Ed provides a template -- think Power Point slides, with populate-able fields -- that teachers can fill in with customized content: lesson titles, lesson links, student names, embedded video, test questions, and the like. Once saved, a lesson generates a unique URL, which allows teachers to track which students have watched assigned videos, how they've responded to follow-up questions, and, in general, how they've interacted with the lesson itself. 

 

Most intriguing: Teachers can customize the lessons they create on a student-by-student basis, using the TED-Ed platform both to track individual student progress and to tailor questions to student interests and skill levels. The site offers real-time feedback to students, letting them know when they get answers right and providing hints when they get answers wrong. That's big. And it could be, just a little bit, revolutionary. The core assumption of the industrialized education model, after all -- since the inception of the universal public school system in the mid-19th century until, pretty much, today -- has been one of collectivity and community. Education has operated, overall, on a cohort model: Students learn and test and advance as a group, grade by grade, class by class. Classes move, together, through a prescribed -- and proscribed -- curriculum.

 

 

 

Via susangautsch

"This post includes a number of wonderings . . . For the past few days, there has been some controversy over a TED talk that included some commentary about classism...The basic premise was that the talk was censored from public viewing due to it being offensive to the wealthy folks that pay to attend the TED conference."

Gerstein goes on to raise a number of questions we should consider, such as is "the digital divide...an intellectual or pedagogical one" and what schools are using/sharing the new Ted-Ed Lessons Worth Sharing? Great questions to ponder.

Via Beth Dichter