TED Talks Education
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Teach teachers how to create magic | Christopher Emdin
08 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
What do rap shows, barbershop banter and Sunday services have in common? As Christopher Emdin says, they all hold the secret magic to enthrall and tea...
A new equation for intelligence | Alex Wissner-Gross
06 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Is there an equation for intelligence? Yes. It's F = T ∇ Sτ. In a fascinating and informative talk, physicist and computer scientist Alex Wissner-G...
Why massive open online courses (still) matter | Anant Agarwal
27 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
2013 was a year of hype for MOOCs (massive open online courses). Great big numbers and great big hopes were followed by some disappointing first resul...
The magic of Fibonacci numbers | Arthur Benjamin
08 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Math is logical, functional and just ... awesome. Mathemagician Arthur Benjamin explores hidden properties of that weird and wonderful set of numbers,...
The pursuit of ignorance | Stuart Firestein
24 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What does real scientific work look like? As neuroscientist Stuart Firestein jokes: It looks a lot less like the scientific method and a lot more like...
Why I fell in love with monster prime numbers | Adam Spencer
03 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
They're millions of digits long, and it takes an army of mathematicians and machines to hunt them down -- what's not to love about monster primes? Ada...
How to escape education's death valley | Sir Ken Robinson
10 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, sti...
Grit: The power of passion and perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth
09 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly rea...
Our failing schools. Enough is enough! | Geoffrey Canada
08 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Why, why, why does our education system look so similar to the way it did 50 years ago? Millions of students were failing then, as they are now -- and...
My story, from gangland daughter to star teacher | Pearl Arredondo
08 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Pearl Arredondo grew up in East Los Angeles, the daughter of a high-ranking gang member who was in and out of jail. Many teachers wrote her off as hav...
3 rules to spark learning | Ramsey Musallam
08 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It took a life-threatening condition to jolt chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam out of ten years of "pseudo-teaching" to understand the true role of th...
Teachers need real feedback | Bill Gates
08 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Until recently, many teachers only got one word of feedback a year: "satisfactory." And with no feedback, no coaching, there's just no way to improve....
Learn to read Chinese ... with ease! | ShaoLan
07 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
For foreigners, learning to speak Chinese is a hard task. But learning to read the beautiful, often complex characters of the Chinese written language...
Every kid needs a champion | Rita Pierson
03 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people th...
4 pillars of college success in science | Freeman Hrabowski
08 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
At age 12, Freeman Hrabowski marched with Martin Luther King. Now he's president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where he work...
A girl who demanded school | Kakenya Ntaiya
07 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Kakenya Ntaiya made a deal with her father: She would undergo a traditional Maasai rite of passage, female circumcision, if he would let her go to hig...
Build a School in the Cloud | Sugata Mitra
27 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Onstage at TED2013, Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can ex...
Dare to educate Afghan girls | Shabana Basij-Rasikh
11 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine a country where girls must sneak out to go to school, with deadly consequences if they get caught learning. This was Afghanistan under the Tal...
Hey science teachers -- make it fun | Tyler DeWitt
05 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
High school science teacher Tyler DeWitt was ecstatic about his new lesson plan on bacteria (how cool!) -- and devastated when his students hated it. ...
Let's teach kids to code | Mitch Resnick
29 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Coding isn't just for computer whizzes, says Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Lab -- it's for everyone. In a fun, demo-filled talk Resnick outlines the bene...
Kids need structure | Colin Powell
23 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
How can you help kids get a good start? In this heartfelt and personal talk, Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State, asks parents, friends a...
Your brain on video games | Daphne Bavelier
19 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
How do fast-paced video games affect the brain? Step into the lab with cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier to hear surprising news about how video ga...
The tragedy of orphanages | Georgette Mulheir
08 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Orphanages are costly and can cause irreparable damage both mentally and physically for its charges -- so why are they still so ubiquitous? Georgette ...
What I've learned from my autistic brothers | Faith Jegede Cole
02 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Faith Jegede tells the moving and funny story of growing up with her two brothers, both autistic -- and both extraordinary. In this talk from the TED ...
Talk nerdy to me | Melissa Marshall
11 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Melissa Marshall brings a message to all scientists (from non-scientists): We're fascinated by what you're doing. So tell us about it -- in a way we c...
The self-organizing computer course | Shimon Schocken
04 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan developed a curriculum for their students to build a computer, piece by piece. When they put the course online -- givin...
How we can eat our landscapes | Pam Warhurst
09 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
What should a community do with its unused land? Plant food, of course. With energy and humor, Pam Warhurst tells at the TEDSalon the story of how she...
What we're learning from online education | Daphne Koller
01 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free -- not just as a service, but as a way to research how...
A teacher growing green in the South Bronx | Stephen Ritz
31 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
A whirlwind of energy and ideas, Stephen Ritz is a teacher in New York's tough South Bronx, where he and his kids grow lush gardens for food, greenery...
Every city needs healthy honey bees | Noah Wilson-Rich
28 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Bees have been rapidly and mysteriously disappearing from rural areas, with grave implications for agriculture. But bees seem to flourish in urban...
Reinventing the encyclopedia game | Rives
26 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Prompted by the Encyclopaedia Britannica ending its print publication, performance poet Rives resurrects a game from his childhood. Speaking at the TE...
The 100,000-student classroom | Peter Norvig
21 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In the fall of 2011 Peter Norvig taught a class with Sebastian Thrun on artificial intelligence at Stanford attended by 175 students in situ -- and ov...
The electric rise and fall of Nikola Tesla | Marco Tempest
20 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Combining projection mapping and a pop-up book, Marco Tempest tells the visually arresting story of Nikola Tesla -- called "the greatest geek who ever...
Archaeology from space | Sarah Parcak
14 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In this short talk, TED Fellow Sarah Parcak introduces the field of "space archaeology" -- using satellite images to search for clues to the lost site...
Why is 'x' the unknown? | Terry Moore
06 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Why is 'x' the symbol for an unknown? In this short and funny talk, Terry Moore gives the surprising answer.
What's left to explore? | Nathan Wolfe
21 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
We've been to the moon, we've mapped the continents, we've even been to the deepest point in the ocean -- twice. What's left for the next generation t...
Feats of memory anyone can do | Joshua Foer
10 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer...
Massive-scale online collaboration | Luis von Ahn
06 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the...