Watching #TED-Ed Videos with my Students

TED-Ed is TED’s newest initiative and the first phase was launched earlier this week (see my storify story).

I work with a group of 9-12th grade students (very mixed skill level) and decided to do a unit focusing on social media. After the launch of TED-Ed, I got to thinking that maybe I could tie it all together…

So I had my students create a twitter account and a storify account. We watched “The Cockroach Beatbox” together as a class (I paused for clarification and to allow them to tweet along the way). They tweeted things they learned and things they thought interesting while watching the video. I had them all use the same hashtag for easy organization.

Here are a couple examples:

They did have some difficulty understanding the video, even though I paused quite a bit. The speaker talked a bit fast, in their opinion, they didn’t have all of the background, and they had a bit of difficulty knowing what to focus on (again, I think it just came at them fast — as I slowed it down and explained slower, with a bit more detail, they started getting it). Also, I’m a math teacher – not a science teacher :)

But all in all, they thought it was really cool and they really look forward to watching more of them (as do I!).

Cool sidenote: this post was reblogged by TED.com!!