Teaching with TED

In class the other day, we watch an interesting and informative video on www.ted.com about the function and use of an archaic technology called an Astrolabe. Whilst this is a fantastic example of old technology, the lesson we learned was not about the Astrolabe itself, but rather the application of using websites such as TED in the classroom.

Over the past few years, I have been an English language teacher in numerous countries including South Korea, Thailand and China. In my lessons, I often took advantage of the videos provided by TED for various reasons.

One way I used TED was for the obvious reason of teaching my students about a certain subject which was discussed in one of the TEDtalks. For example, I showed my Chinese students a video by Sir Ken Robinson about how schools kill creativity. I displayed the video and asked my students to give a response to the content.

Another way was by showing the students a random video and, because they are English language learners, I had them listen and had them fill out a worksheet based on the script.

I also had my students do a project on a topic chosen by themselves where they had to find a video on TED which they found interesting and then report on it back to class.

Overall, I believe that websites such as TED are great educational tools because they are free to use and incredibly informative. Students' interest is also maintained because they enjoy watching videos rather than listening to a teacher lecture. There are numerous applications of this type of website and are a useful tool for any teacher.