TED Conversations

Stephanie Lo

TEDCRED 50+
TED StaffTED Attendee

This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »

What are your questions about the new TED-Ed website? Conversation with TED-Ed staff!

Share your questions about the new TED-Ed website. We want to hear from you!

Related Talks:
Topics: TED-Ed Forum
+2
Share:
progress indicator
  • thumb

    Ross McMillan 500+

    • +1
    TED AttendeeTEDx Organizer
    May 4 2012: Is there going to be any ongoing forum for us to discuss TED ED? Perhaps a users forum so we can share better practices, creative examples and technical glitches. I personally would find that useful as I develop my videos to flip.

  • Kashaf Mamoon

    • 0
    May 4 2012: Mam,

    Really it is an awesome concept for interacting with studies with fun and with lot of Knowledge ........

    and thanx TED.COM for providing Such an interesting platform for us.
  • thumb

    Sharon Turner 500+

    • 0
    TEDx Organizer
    May 4 2012: Hi Stephanie,

    Thank you to you and your team for this great resource. I have used a a few videos and have now flipped my own. I am about to give a session in my department on how to use these as well as we use a lot of TED videos. I have a question and a suggestion:

    1-I am an English as a Second Language teacher so we also use the videos for language practice. We look at the content, we discuss the ideas so the areas at the moment are perfect for us but we need a language option in the BETA that we could manipulate for different questions and task types related to language as well as for real time discourse analysis. Is TED ED considering their use in English as a Second Language at the moment?

    2- Under the thinking section, when you create an open-ended question and you realise that you have made a mistake or need to reorder the questions you cannot re-edit the slides or move them around. This means that you either need to have perfectly scripted what you want to do or delete the whole thinking section and start again. Could there be more flexibility built into this part of the system as each time we review a material we change it based on the class, the students or what worked and what didn't.

    Thank you again for all you hard work on this project.

    Sharon:)

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 4 2012: Hi Sharon. So glad to hear that you're spreading the platform to the rest of your department! We're definitely considering how these videos might be used in ELA courses and are in the process of developing the translations option for the website. Regarding your feedback on the Dig Deeper section--we'll keep that in mind. Thank you! Look forward to hearing more about how you and your department use the TED-Ed website.

  • Josh Gold

    • 0
    May 4 2012: When will we get access to quick quizzes in our own flipped videos?

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 4 2012: Hi Josh--in the next few months. We'll make sure to update the community once it happens. Just make sure you are subscribed to our YouTube channel and/or Facebook page. Thanks!

  • Kathryn Hodgins

    • +1
    May 4 2012: How about educational games? Attaching educational games (along the lines of John Hunter's World Peace game or Brenda Brathwaite: Gaming for understanding games, etc.) to the lessons? Could that be possible in the future?

    I have always loved TED but TED Ed is just ripe for future possibilities. I am wowed! I can see great potential for TED Ed to get kids in gaged in learning. Thanks TED!
  • thumb

    Derek Young 30+

    • 0
    May 4 2012: Hi,

    What would you tell viewers of videos that already have knowledge of a topic that the video is attempting to educate us about; do you think that old information is worth rewatching and relearning, like repetition is useful for understanding?

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 4 2012: Hi Derek. I think that the benefit of having the videos as a part of learning is that learners can rewatch/relearn the concept by replaying if they didn't understand the first time (or even if they do). We're hoping that you can use the TED-Ed website to learn concepts that you may already understand and concepts that are new. Hope that helps!
      • thumb

        Derek Young 30+

        • 0
        May 4 2012: Thanks Stephanie.

        I read some comments about the "childish" tones of the videos, and I thought I would disagree because learning something new needs a kind and slow approach, I think. If the speaker had an imposing tone, then no one would want to learn. Though some individuals new the concepts they may have found that relearning old material was condescending to them?

        I was wondering how closely do the TedEd staff works with the speakers of the videos?

  • STV V 10+

    • 0
    May 3 2012: Lovely! The first page can have a less casual look and better fonts to give it that "ED" look
    Well -- That is my perception.. Many people may stil love this

    Cheers!

  • Mary Manning

    • 0
    May 3 2012: Hi,
    I love the concept of the Ted Ed videos. I am trying to flip "The Power of Simple Words". I think I've done everything correctly, but I get the message "There was a problem with your request. Please correct and try again". The first time I saw it I did find some problems, but now I can't find any. I get the same error message for both preview and publish.
    Do you have any suggestions? I don't see any help.
    Thanks,
    Mary Manning
    mlman@pdx.edu

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 4 2012: Hi Mary--you can always e-mail us at education@ted.com if you're experiencing recurring technical issues. Thanks for looking out for us!

  • Kara Hamilton

    • +1
    May 3 2012: The site's concept is deliciously well-thought out, but the execution is, well, still beta. How can we, educators who want to facilitate the growth of lessons available, help improve the technical efficacy of the site?

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 4 2012: Hi Kara. Thanks for your willingness to help! We would love it if you (and all your teacher friends) could nominate yourself and others as an educator with your brilliant ideas for lessons that should be animated. It would also be helpful if you could keep us updated if you have technical issues. Generally, technical issues are being worked on by the team throughout the beta round of development, but happy to address any specific issues you might face on a continuous basis. Keep talking to us!

  • Max Goldstein

    • 0
    May 3 2012: What is the true goal of TED-Ed? Is it to create lessons that convey information with such clear explanations that the student can't help but learn? Or is it to inspire children, to show them how cool knowledge is, even if they don't remember all the details?
  • thumb

    Wellerson Miranda

    • 0
    May 3 2012: very nice! =)
  • thumb

    Vidya G

    • 0
    May 3 2012: What happened to the Topics we suggested on Ted-ED? Do we hear back anytime soon?

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 4 2012: Hi Vidya--the editorial team goes through the suggested Educators, Animators and Lessons and you'll receive notice if one of them goes forward with production. (Give the team some time though--it's exciting that so many people have submitted ideas!)
  • thumb

    Yasser Masood 500+

    • 0
    TED AttendeeTEDx Organizer
    May 3 2012: i was at TEDxSummit (I live here in Doha!) when Chris teased the next phase of TED-Ed. In addition, I was also present in the TED-Ed session with Chris where he gave a detailed breakdown.

    Living here in Qatar where school curriculum and education systems, especially public and independent schools, are disjoint. One can evidently see the differences between students that have a significant advantage over another group, as their foundation learning is far more rigorous than another group that doesn't even encourage learning with curiosity or develop critical thinking.

    I'm hoping to get this circulated across the schools here by putting it under TEDxYouth@Doha, especially tap into a community that would create Arabic-related content for it - language is a barrier here at schools (some teach in Arabic but learning materials are not plentiful compared to English versions) and I hope that it may even help other countries in the Middle East region.
  • thumb

    Michelle Leong Francis

    • 0
    May 3 2012: Ok. I will nominate myself. I have teaching experience inside and outside of the classroom [professor and professional mentorship]
  • thumb

    Asgar Fakhrudin

    • 0
    May 3 2012: Ted - Ed is indeed a very exiting initiative with great potential and far reaching benefits. I tried to search for a video I had uploaded in My You Tube Account (it is not Public, but only those with the link can access) but could not get the search result. I tried to copy paste the link in the search box, but it did not work. Please guide. Thanks.

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 4 2012: Hi Asgar, You need to give them access to the video if it's marked private on YouTube. Let us know if you have additional questions at education@ted.com.

  • Scott Courey

    • 0
    May 2 2012: My son, a college freshman used to lament the meaninglessness of high school. Then he'd sit down for hours watching TED talks. TED-Ed is for him.
    Also, I'm making some attempts at flipping, but can you write your own quizzes, track performance and point your users back to the video to re-learn missed questions? Or is this capability only on your productions? Thanks so much, SO excited about this.

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 3 2012: Hi Scott. Thanks for your enthusiasm! You can write your own questions (right now--you can add open answer questions, but you will be able to add multiple choice questions in the near-future) and track performance of any video--not just TED-Ed videos. Go to the YouTube tab on the homepage, search for any video, click on the thumbnail of the video, and you will have the ability to flip the video. Let us know if you have any other questions!

  • Jessica Taylor

    • +1
    May 2 2012: I was so excited about these when I first saw them, I think this whole program has such wonderful potential and is such a great idea! My only question is, can you make the TedEd videos available for download or for streaming on a site such as Discovery Streaming? I'd love to share these with my students, but the internet at school has been configured to block YouTube, so that makes it difficult. I would love your suggestions about how to go around this!
    (As a side note, any and ALL Ted videos that are linked to through YouTube simply will not stream, it's really unfortunate!)

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 3 2012: Hi Jessica. Where do you teach? You should think about nominating yourself for a lesson! As for your question--YouTube has actually been working really hard to make videos available in schools in a safe environment via their YouTube for Schools program (http://www.youtube.com/schools). You can ask your school network administrator to sign up for this program--it'll open up school/age-appropriate videos for your school.
  • thumb

    Ross McMillan 500+

    • 0
    TED AttendeeTEDx Organizer
    May 2 2012: First off, thanks for all of your work on this - the TED ED team should take a (short) breather to take a (long) bow!

    I saw this demo'd at TEDxSummit and am excited for what it can mean for reshaping delivery of education. As someone who has developed leadership and peer mentoring programming at a university, I can see and am planning several uses for TED ED.

    When it was launched, I flipped my first video: How To Make A Human Arabesque: The Making Of The TEDxSummit Video http://ed.ted.com/on/AOxez5KX

    and found it an intuitive process (there was some lag, but it could be my connection).

    I understand this is in beta, so kudos for getting it developed this far. My recommendations include:
    1) give us access to the multiple choice editor for youtube videos. I imagine that the challenge is how you link it to time segments? Perhaps as a first step, just allow us to create the multiple choice questions. This is useful to test factual knowledge (eg. did you actually watch the video)
    2) depending on where you plan on taking this, let us brand the videos through skinning a page ... I can imagine a lot of companies would be into this for training purposes.
    3) search function for video and flipped
    4) gaming aspects, like you've done for TED Translation
    5) let us link a series of videos into a logical sequence and let us export the results ... this would allow us to start building more serious curriculum

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • +1
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      May 3 2012: Hi Ross! Great suggestions and feedback. And nice job flipping your TEDx video. We're working on your first comment and will hopefully be able to make that available after a couple months! Your other ideas are really interesting and we'll definitely be asking you and the TED community to build on some of these ideas over time. Thanks, and keep us updated on how flipping goes!

  • Linda Brown

    • 0
    Apr 30 2012: Hello
    My firm is interested in this site. We employ professionals to provide mental healthcare to seniors in nursing homes. There is quite a bit of material that has to be covered and we've found that if we give these tomes of info to the provider, they do not even open the books - very overwhelming. I like the idea of giving a short video on a subject (dementia, depression, etc.) and followed by in depth info, the quiz, and then the full book. The quiz would assure us that the clinician is in fact reading the basics.
    Also, at times we do in-services at the nursing homes on clinical issues (wandering, repetitive actions, refusal to bathe, etc.). I think your site would help us with this as well.
    How do you see us setting this up? I can't find any information on fees - of course our payments are rec'd through medicare so margin is small and we watch every penny.
    Thanks in advance for your input and suggestions.
    Linda Brown

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      Apr 30 2012: Hi Linda. You can certainly use the TED-Ed website to help provide some of the content that you're teaching. One way that you can do it (not necessarily the only way) is for you to create videos covering the content you want to teach, and then put those videos on YouTube.You can then go to the "YouTube" tab on the TED-Ed website, and look for your own video to "flip" or customize. You can add questions and additional material/content to supplement the video under the "Think" and "Dig Deeper" buttons. After you're finished creating the video lesson, you can publish it by e-mailing it to yourself or others. This is a free service, so the only cost that I can see for your firm is the cost of creating the videos (which can be in varying qualities) Hope that helps! And let us know if you think of other ways to do what you're looking to do.

  • Rosie Crossen

    • +1
    Apr 30 2012: I use a lot of Ted videos in class and was eager to share a Ted-Ed video the other day. My fifth graders were a captive audience to the "How Small is an Atom" piece.--As the number of video lessons increase, I would find it helpful to have them tagged by grade level content as well.
  • thumb

    Michelle Leong Francis

    • +1
    Apr 29 2012: I think this is a great idea. There are so many great untapped and silent yet powerful minds out there, that provide such inspiration and wisdom in their own world that desperately needs to be shared globally. Cannot wait to listen and share, contribute and learn!

    Question. Will there be some type of vetting or eligibility process? How will the organic natue of the process be maintained while ensuring the integrity of the content? Do contributor need to b 'official' educators?

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      Apr 30 2012: Hi Michelle! So glad that you're excited about our work! There is a vetting process for the video lessons--feel free to nominate yourself (and others) at http://ed.ted.com/get_involved. We are definitely encouraging teachers to get involved, but we absolutely welcome people who have a great lesson to teach (outside of the classroom) as well.

  • Mary Critchley

    • +1
    Apr 29 2012: Ah yes, Carl Sagan was a genius. I remember "Cosmos" and his ability to convey wonder. How I agree with you about the "little/softened" voice! Ugh! Mind you, most TED speakers are fabulous. I loved the urgent passion of Jill Bolte Taylor's "Stroke of Insight" It taught me so much about the two sides of the brain - and she communicated her own wonder there all right! Did you see it, I wonder.
    • thumb

      Gabo Moreno 100+

      • 0
      Apr 29 2012: Oh yes. Many many TED talks are truly good, often excellent. But here I was talking about the videos I have seen in the TED-ed stuff (http://ed.ted.com/). I think they are a great idea, educational in purpose, manipulable for teaching, interesting tools for putting together lessons, and such. But so far, most videos use that "tone." I feel that at times the tone extends to the cartoons themselves.

      Perhaps my question, since Stephanie is looking for questions, would be: Can/Will recordings be remade? Will you re-make and re-issue the videos as you get feedback about them?

      P.S. The plankton video also gets my kudos.
  • thumb

    Ken brown 30+

    • 0
    Apr 28 2012: There's no search bar,otherwise it's great for the kids.

  • Mary Critchley

    • 0
    Apr 28 2012: I have only to say that I agree with Gabo. I love Ted talks in general, and they have taught me a huge amount - but I tend to turn off if I feel the audience is being condescended to.
    • thumb

      Gabo Moreno 100+

      • +1
      Apr 29 2012: Yeah, don't talk to kids as if they were stupid. Don't use that "tone." They hate it, and we tend to keep doing that even when they are no longer two-year olds (I realized I was doing this when one kid asked me "do you think I am stupid?"). If the speakers used their own perspective to the questions, instead of talking as if for two-years-olds, they would have a more adult tone, and give the talk a much stronger feeling of meaning and accomplishment. Take the size of atoms. I hate the darn thing. It infuriates me. Yet, the examples are good. Only it seem to try to show little kids about this. If instead it started with a tone that said "I did not know how to grasp this size, so I did these mental experiment: cherry-size thing ... and so on." And this might be what it says, but the tone makes it appear to say "hey little baby, imagine an atom was the size ..."

      In Cosmos, Carl Sagan visited an elementary school and he did not use "the tone." He didn't use a "little/softened" voice. Let's follow that example.
  • thumb

    Don Ruch

    • +2
    Apr 28 2012: I have realy enjoyed the TED-ED addition. Now my grandchildren can get on the TED bandwagon. This site will be valuable to the new generation of children especially when doing school prodjects. They can flip the lessons and make the project personalized. Bravo.
  • thumb

    Gabo Moreno 100+

    • 0
    Apr 28 2012: So far I only like the one by Adam Savage. All the rest seem overdone in the cartoon part, and disappointing on the narrative side. Like made for children, but in a condescending way. They seem to lack love for the subject. Maybe the recommended professors/speakers lost their charisma when confronted with the situation of being recorded for this particular purpose. I still think that this is a project worth doing. Only it is not being working that well. Except for Adam's. Great speaker, and the cartoons really helped clarify what he was explaining. Fantastic combination. Maybe that's what ruined it for me. This one was so good that it set the standard too high, and the rest just did not meet to these expectations.

    Edit: Hum, I did not know that we can create lessons with this thing. So, beyond the video-lesson. Great! I will watch more lessons and see if there is more with Adam's quality.

    • Stephanie Lo 50+

      • 0
      TED StaffTED Attendee
      Apr 30 2012: Thanks for the feedback, Gabe. We'll definitely kept your suggestions about tone in mind as we work with our community on the recordings. Glad you like the "flip" function--would be great to hear how you might use that function over time!
Showing all 45 comments