The Power of Storytelling in Teaching Part 2

In my previous post, I discussed using Storycorps as an educational resource. This was part of a two post series about using storytelling in your teaching. In this post, I will talk about another great resource called TED Talk. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Speakers talk about topics of interest, the point being to share ideas on various topics. The speakers are often leaders in their field. Their talks carry powerful messages. The talks are videotaped and uploaded to both the TED site and YouTube for viewing. The videos can be searched by speaker (some give more than one talk) or topic.

There are other possibilities with TED talks also. One option is named TED-ED. TED-ED is a great resource for flipped learning. There are four parts to TED-ED flipped lessons:

1. Watch: The video is posted here for the students to view.
2. Think: This section has one or two short answer multiple choice comprehension questions.
3. Dig Deeper: Provides additional information about the topic along with some outside sources for further research.
4. Discuss: This section asks open ended higher level questions to get students thinking more about the topic.

TED-ED has many lessons that can be filtered by topic, video length, grade level, or whether the videos have subtitles or not. There are also video lesson collections that are categorized by topics. Lessons can be used as is or modified to fit your needs. You can also create lessons about any TED video using the TED-ED lesson creation tool.

On a slightly different note, there is also a resource in TED-ED. This is for starting TED Clubs. Schools can start their own TED clubs so students can share ideas on topics they are passionate about. This is a great resource for helping students build communication, research, and collaboration skills.

So, lets recap. TED Talk videos are great for introducing or providing enrichment on many different topics. Lessons can be found and used as is, modified, or created for using in flipped learning lessons using TED-ED. On a broader level, bringing the concept of TED Clubs into a school provides great opportunities to build communication, research, and collaboration skills with students. Here is a link for another post about flipped lessons as an added bonus. What ideas do you have for flipped learning or using TED? Have you found any alternatives worth sharing? Let me know. Follow me on Twitter @JoshuaElliott3 for more tips and ideas.