Lessons worth spreading | Chris Anderson | TEDxSydney

After a long career in journalism and publishing (Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 magazine, and creator of the popular games website IGN), Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.

Here, Chris introduces TED-Ed.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Teachers are heroes.

I think we can all agree this, right?

(Applause)

They spend their lives devoted
to spreading great ideas,

and they spread them to the people
who need them most.

I mean, it's hard to imagine work
that matters more

or that is more scandalously
underpaid, unrecognized.

So at TED

over the last couple years,
because they're doing our core mission,

we've been wondering
how we can help empower teachers?

And this is a task
that's made a little harder

by the fact that teachers
do so many jobs in one:

Mentor, cheerleader,
disciplinarian, alternative parent.

I mean, just to take two of the roles
that are perhaps the most important.

So,

teachers are instructors,

they stand up and they explain,

they transfer knowledge, if you like,
into those receiving minds,

and they are coaches, giving
one-on-one attention to individual kids

to activate that knowledge.

But these are such different roles,

you can see the difference if you ask:

What's the ideal class size
for teacher as instructor?

Well, if you prepared a lesson,

and you're going to share
it in a powerful way,

you've put thought in it.

You want your class size
to be as big as possible,

you want many kids to hear it.

But as a coach,

every child's needs are different.

So, just a small peer group is the most
that you could possibly handle;

you want a tiny class size.

There we go, that worked.

That means that if you look at
the constraints on an instructor,

really it's one of scale.

And for a coach, the issue is time.

How do you find the time to give each
of those kids the attention that they need

to really bring the best out of them.

So, in our new initiative,

we set ourselves the task
of giving something

to each of these types of teachers
often contained in the same teacher.

What can we give the instructor?

Well, our goal in our new
initiative called TED-Ed

is first of all is to give an instructor
a classroom the size of the world.

One of the most thrilling things
about TED these last few years

has been seeing how one person's words,

one wise person's words,
can ripple out across the planet.

We know that there are thousands,
probably millions of teachers out there

who have an amazing lesson in them

that deserves to be heard
not by the 30 kids in their class

but by millions of kids across the world.

We want to give them that platform,

and we want to give them
something else as well.

A magic blackboard.

If you're a great teacher
and you understand a subject well,

if you could make your blackboard
show anything that you could imagine,

would that help you
explain the subject better?

We think it would.

So, that's why we're offering to teachers

a small army of remarkable animators,
filmmakers, visualizers

so that they can take their lessons

and convert them into films
that will really get kids attention

and get inside their brains
and spark curiosity.

So, we're starting to assemble
this archive of short animated films;

they're kind of like TED Talks,
but not really, they're animated.

So they look a bit like this.

(Video) "There's more to a symbiosis
than one species feeding another.

In the case of the Clark's nutcracker,
this bird gives back.

Nutcrackers can gather up to 90,000 seeds.

What they don't go back and get,
those seeds become whitebark."

"Today, planes can transport viruses
to any country on the globe.

In February 2003, for instance,
a doctor arrived in Hong Kong.

Within 24 hours of checking into room 913,
16 other guests had been infected.

He was harboring a new
animal origin virus called SARS."

"He calculates the speed of light,
and he did it with one of these.

This is a toothed wheel.

It's got a bunch of notches,
and it's got a bunch of teeth.

This was Fizeau's solution
to sending discrete pulses of light.

He put a beam behind one of these notches.

If I point a beam through this notch
at a mirror five miles away,

that beam is bouncing off a mirror
and coming back through this notch."

So what's exciting about this
is that these videos scale.

You know, soon after
putting out one of them,

a teacher who had paired
with an animator tweeted:

"I've spent 10 years
teaching sex determination,

and in that time have communicated it
to about 500 kids,

and on TED-Ed, in three days
I've reached 13,000."

Now, I just checked that number
and it's 48,000.

And that video you just saw by Adam Savage
has been seen by 750,000 kids.

So this scale is really exciting.

We know that when it's done right, video
can carry a surprising amount with it.

It really can carry explanation.
It can actually even carry inspiration.

It can make the difference between
not giving a damn about a subject

and deciding that you actually
might want to devote your life to it.

And since we've launched this,

to our delight, more than 1,000 teachers,

and more than 1,000 animators have
offered their services to continue this.

So we're going to build an archive.

We're planning to have about 350 videos
online made this way within a year's time,

and beyond that, who knows,
thousands, we hope and believe.

(Applause)

Thank you.

What about teacher as coach?

Video instruction alone isn't enough.

You know, kids learn by doing.

So how do we address
this core problem of time?

Can you expand classroom time?

Think about a teacher as a coach.

They're having to attend to the needs
of perhaps 30 kids,

and already they've got this
huge classroom requirement

of having to stand up and teach
and give a lesson.

How much time does that leave?

But what if you could
take the teaching time

and move that out of the classroom,

move that into the home.

This is why people have got excited
about this idea of flipped teaching.

In this model,

a teacher can take either themselves
on video, their lesson,

or videos from the world's most brilliant
teachers, wherever they can find them,

and assign them to their kids as homework.

The homework actually happens
before the lesson.

So kids can learn at their own pace;

the slower kids can rewind
several times until they get it.

That opens up all of class time for doing
things that teachers are excited about

in terms of peer-to-peer learning,
learning by doing,

interactive exercises,
one-on-one coaching and so forth.

It's a really transformative picture.

So we set ourselves the task
of trying to give teachers some tools

to make it really easy for them
to try out flipped teaching,

and that's what our site Ed.TED.com does.

Here it is.

On the surface, it's this archive
of some of these animated videos

anyone can browse through
and take a look at.

They're grouped into series that are meant
to make learning sound exciting.

"Questions No One Knows the Answer To,"

"How Things Work,"
"Inventions That Shape History."

But as a teacher or a student,

you can also browse through them in more
traditional subject categories like this.

Here's our science videos, for example,

and that Adam Savage video
was one of them.

When you watch the video,
you're not just looking at a video,

it's contextualized.

There are now, while you're watching it,

you can take a quick quiz,
multiple choice questions.

If you get them right, that's great.

If you get it wrong, you can click,

and it will take you to the right point
in the video so you can get it right.

There are open-ended questions
that you can answer

and other resources
that you could look at.

But here's the key,
this "Flip This Video" button

because this is the magic button
that allows teachers to take control.

They can create
their own version of the lesson;

they can contextualize it for their
own kids, headline and their own context.

They can sort out which questions
they want to have in there.

They can add their own questions,

and then when they're ready,
they press the magic "Publish" button.

When they do that,

they have their own page
on the internet, their own URL.

Here's the moment.

It's coming up, this is big.

This is empowering.

Publish!

You can share that now
on Facebook or Twitter,

or email with your kids, whatever way.

You can track how they respond
to each of the questions,

so you can see in one place -

Did they watch the video?
Did they get it right?

But here's the really big news.

You can do this not just with our videos,

you can do this with any video
that's on YouTube.

So you can search for a video
you yourself recorded,

(Applause)

put your own questions on there
and set up a lesson however you want.

Teachers are doing this;
we've noticed that kids are doing this.

Kids are becoming teachers

and telling us that they're learning more
by teaching than by anything else.

What's really happening here
is that we're recruiting

a small army of teachers across the web

to act as co-curators with us,

to find the best educational materials
that there are online,

and to turn them into powerful lessons
that we can all share free with the world.

Where that leads, I don't know.

Everything TED has done
in the last few years

has happened by throwing
the keys to other people.

That's how our Open Translation
Program happened

that took TED into 85 languages.

7,000 volunteer translators
did that working in pairs.

That's how TEDx took off;

we didn't think
it was going to be like this.

We gave people a free license,

suddenly to our amazement,
there are five or six events like this,

maybe not quite like this,

almost as good as this, happening
every day somewhere in the world,

it's mind-blowing.

What could an army of teachers do?

We don't know, we cannot wait to find out,
because this is a big deal.

You know, as we think of the future,

we're all scared by this prospect
of 9 billion, 10 billion people coming,

and we think of them as hungry mouths
coming to munch away our beautiful planet

and take away our future.

But if instead we could think of them
as empowered creative minds.

If we could think of 2 billion
new brains coming online,

that could be the resource that our planet
needs to make a better future,

that kind of changes everything,

and it all hangs on this thing.

Whether we can teach,
whether people can learn.

For the first time in history -
and this truly is amazing -

we're very near to the point where
every kid on the planet, pretty much,

is going to be connected, is going
to be able to summon to their phone

the world's greatest teachers
in the subjects that matter most to them.

How amazing is that!

This means that we have the chance
for an unprecedented experiment

in human potential,

and where that potential takes us,

who knows, but it's a thrilling endeavor.

I know that many of you in this room

share the dream
of contributing to this endeavor.

It's an honor to be
on that journey with you.

Thank you all so much.

(Applause) (Cheers)