TED-Ed: Great delivery & creation tool, falls short on global collaboration

Chris Anderson addressed an audience of innovative educators at this year’s Building Learning Communities conference to discuss the launch of the TED-Ed platform. He shared that the great power of technology was its ability to facilitate amplification, specialization, and collaboration. TED-Ed knocks the ball out of the park on two of the three.

Amplification
An extension of TED’s commitment to sharing ideas worth spreading, TED-Ed’s commitment is to creating lessons worth sharing. This in turn amplifies the lessons by the best teachers to students across the globe.  Below is an example of a video which this lesson was created around.

Specialization
The TED-Ed lessons bring into focus how the future of education will bring specialization to the teaching profession with the lessons from the world’s best educators captured as well as the specialization of those able to bring those concepts to life via animation, video capturing, and editing capabilities.  This will free time for educators to work with individual students, pairs, and small groups.  

Collaboration - The missing piece
The TED-Ed platform is powerful in shifting the way teachers may spend their time in the classroom, but it misses the boat on collaboration as pointed out in the following tweet:
JackieGerstein Ed.D. ‏@jackiegerstein
@InnovativeEdu How does TedEd promote global collaboration? There are no tools for doing so on the site? Only tools for making tests

Chris Anderson explained that the collaboration happens when lesson creators and animators connect but it doesn't seem that the capability to do so is built into the system. Most importantly there is no way for learners to connect and collaborate. This would be a powerful feature that hopefully will be incorporated in the future.  

The power of the platform
Providing lessons that can be used for learning anytime/anywhere is not the only power of the platform.  What some teachers will find exciting is that they can customize existing lessons or create their own lessons using any YouTube video including those they themselves have created.  What's more, they can track learner progress because each unique lesson has its own url and learners can view their progress by viewing the "recent activity" tab.

What you’ll find on the site
Here is an outline of what you’ll find on the TED-ed site. You can watch it on video here.
Series

• These are video series.

Subjects

• The Arts
• Business & Economics
• Design, Engineering & Technology
• Health
• Literature & Language
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Science & Technology
• Social Studies
• Thinking & Learning

Best Flips
Best flips are exceptional, user-created lessons. Users nominate the lessons they build. The lessons are carefully selected by volunteer teachers and TED-Ed. Want to see your lesson here? Don't forget to hit nominate after you publish.
YouTube
You can transform any YouTube video into a lesson worth sharing and customize it by adding your own supplementary materials and sharing your lesson with others.

• Watch
• View the video
• Think
• Questions which students will answer and submit
• Dig Deeper
• Ideas to continue the learning
• …And Finally
• Concluding thoughts

Once teachers become comfortable with TED-Ed for lesson delivery and creation, they may want to support their students in become lesson creators too. Anyone can create a TED-Ed lesson. For the best lessons, don't forget to nominate them for Best Flips to amplify lessons that can be shared with the world.


So what do you think? Is TED-Ed a tool you can see incorporating into your practice.

You have read this article #blc12 / TED Talks / TED-Ed with the title #blc12. You can bookmark this page URL http://machining33.blogspot.com/2012/07/ted-ed-great-delivery-creation-tool.html. Thanks!

What will you do the first five days of school?

"We can lose the value of a whole year if we do not get the first five days of school right." - Greg Whitby @gregwhitby Executive Director of Schools, Diocese of Parramatta

What do you do during the first five days of school to ensure the year is off to a great start? That is what attendees of this year’s Building Learning Communities conference are sharing, discussing, and rethinking face to face and via the Values Exchange Community.

Alan November gets the conversation rolling on the First Five Days Theme Board with these nuggets:
Culture Questions for the First Five Days

Who should own the learning?

Who should work harder during class?

Who should contribute to the learning of the whole class?

What are the potential global relationships?

How can teachers learn as much as possible about their students during the first five days?

What PD can we provide to teachers to prepare them for the first five days of school?

-Alan November (conference organizer)

Digital Learning Farm
Alan November’s article about organizing students with real digital enabled jobs, such as tutorial designer that empowers all students to create content to contribute to the learning of the whole class. These jobs can be set up during the first five days of school as a basic to the empowered culture of learning.novemberlearning.com/resources/archive-of-articles/digital-learning-farm/

-Shared by David Seedhouse (Value Exchange community developer)

What do you plan to do during your first five days to ensure the year gets off to a great start?  Even if you’re not at BLC, you can register here to join the conversation at the First Five Days Theme Board.  

You have read this article #blc12 / back to school with the title #blc12. You can bookmark this page URL http://machining33.blogspot.com/2012/07/what-will-you-do-first-five-days-of.html. Thanks!

Check out the hottest resources presented by innovative educators at the EdCampBLC Smackdown

Educators discovered innovative teaching and learning resources at this year’s EdCampBLC (Building Learning Communities) Smackdown. A Smackdown features a “show and tell” sharing of favorite resources that innovative educators have found to be of great use.  A stopwatch is used to time group presentations lasting up to 2 minutes.
My favorite resource was ThingLink which makes your images interactive by creating hot buttons (of text, video, audio, other sites, etc.) on the photos. It is great for use with timelines, science diagrams, famous pieces of art, maps, historical scenes, and much more.


Here is the ThingLink created by Tracy Skolaski at #EdCampBLC



I also really liked World Mapper which lets you generate discussion and build global perspective with world datasets represented by “warping” the map - great for analytics and conversation starters. 


Below are some of the other resources that were shared with innovative educators.  

Resource / Idea	Shared By	Twitter
Storify Collect & publish “stories” of an event, class, etc. using tags and feeds from Tweets, status updates, Flickr, and more. You can also annotate, add media, and categorize.	Lisa Nielsen	@innovativeedu
Flash Loan Change the World in 60 Seconds - Join us!	Jeremy Angoff	@mytakeonit
App of Approval (started by @smeech) skill-based but customizable and creative (both $1.99) Compare a Twist Compare a Twist is an engaging interactive lesson platform that allows learners to leverage learning through the personalized creation of compare and contrast activities. Kid’s Journal Kid Journal easily allows children to focus on the content of their response to “Whad’ya do today?” with an easy-to-use interface.	Sean Sweeney	@speechtechie
Many Eyes This site allows the entire internet community to upload data, visualize it, and talk about their discoveries with other people.	Dan Riles	@rilesdan
Applist.me Make an app list website based on the apps you have loaded in iTunes Example: http://applist.me/xpm5ka	Barbara Cohen	@barblcohen
iPodMeister Trade in CDs/DVDs for devices like iPads and eReaders. Songza (iOS music app) Playlists by music experts. Play songs that support learning for free with no adds.	Brian Hammek	@hammelb
MIT - K12 STEM videos created by MIT's students for students.	Janet Dee	@janetldee
Videolicious Free App Turn raw video clips and photos into tightly edited masterpieces.	Sarah Doane	@sadoane
World Mapper Generate discussion and build global perspective with world datasets represented by “warping” the map - great for analytics and conversation starters	Shelley Paul	@lottascales
Bump Bump can magically move contacts and now can also move photos very quickly from device to device - great for schools that have kids sharing idevices	Michelle Luhtala	@mluhtala
Make Space - The Book How to set the stage for collaboration by helping people intentionally manipulate space to ignite creativity.	Name Missing
Cloudring, Wappwolf, IFTTT, Allows you to send info from one server to another (e.g. from Twitter to email, or from twitter to Evernote)	Jeremy Angoff	@MyTakeOnIT
ThingLink Makes your images interactive by creating hot buttons on the photos...great for use with timelines, science diagrams or any photo	Tracy Sockalosky	@tsocko
RandomMastr app Make choosing anything a breeze...worth the $.99 This is what we used to give away the raffle.	Tracy Sockalosky	@tsocko

Thanks to Tracy Sockalosky @tscoko for capturing the Smackdown resources and who presented each and thanks to the organizers for making the event possible.

You have read this article #blc12 / #edcampblc with the title #blc12. You can bookmark this page URL http://machining33.blogspot.com/2012/07/check-out-hottest-resources-presented.html. Thanks!