Over the years we have done numerous posts highlighting various TED videos. The videos are taken from various TED shows, which were started by Ricky Wurman in 1990. I was lucky enough to attend one of them back then.
Today the TED folks have launched TED Ed “lessons worth sharing” with a blog post from Chris Anderson here. Anderson is the curator of the TED conferences and isn’t the same guy who worked for many years at Wired magazine. The TED folks have a team of in-house animators to help turn the lessons into more interesting visual pieces, and they will be soliciting materials from other teachers too.
Greg Gage’s cockroach beatbox is a fascinating example of the series, where he dissects a common cockroach and hooks up one of its legs to his iPad to show how it responds to various stimuli.
TED Ed is part of the effort by YouTube to segregate its content into what they call YouTube For Schools that we wrote about last December. That helps schools that want to continue to block the rest of YouTube have some solid content that they can whitelist and freely share on their networks. Other content partners of this effort include the usual suspects such as Stanford, the Khan Academy, and PBS. No annoying pre-roll ads are one aspect of the school-friendly vids.
You can watch the dozen or so TED Ed vids here on their YouTube channel.
There is other TED news today, we also cover its new API access to its video library here.
