TED Talks

TED Talks (technology, entertainment, and design) are a great resource to use in the classroom. There are thousands of videos available. The TED Talks can be used to prompt debate, discussion, or writing in a class. A great TED talk could be “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This could be a great video to play at the beginning of the year in an English class to open up a discussion on the importance of diversity in literature. Students can write about the talk and learn how to better summarize, paraphrase, and quote information. TED talks can also be used to deliver background information for a topic that is about to be introduced. For example, there is a video titled “Everything You Need to Know to Read Frankenstein”. This video would be great to show to students before reading the novel Frankenstein in a literature class. I read Frankenstein in school and this would have been a great video to see beforehand. This video is also on TED-Ed. TED-Ed is specifically designed for students. They provide engaging animated video lessons that can be filtered by student age. The videos also provide comprehension and discussion questions.

TED Talks can also allow for student choice. Students can look through TED Talk videos and filter them by subject matter. This allows them to explore their interests. Lastly, it can be used to teach public speaking. Students can create their own TED talks in the classroom. After watching TED talks and seeing how they are done students can research their own interests and pick a topic to talk about. Then they can give a talk to the class and the teacher could record it. This would allow students to practice public speaking.