I had something come across my desk here that I thought I would share with all of you.

TED-Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing & the People Who Teach Them

I’m sure by now, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, that you’ve heard of TED. I’ve certainly posted enough videos from there or discussed topics from there. The whole idea behind TED is “Ideas worth sharing”

TED has also spawned a number of TED like events, around different themes or in different regions (i.e. TED MED or TEDxHouston).

And now, there’s something for us education folks. TED-Ed. Focused on Lessons worth Sharing.

This is a brilliant idea. It’s not limited to traditional classroom lessons, but can span important lessons on any topic, academic to life lessons.

You can take these videos and supplement lessons you’re trying to teach. You can center your lessons around these videos. You can build a flipped classroom. There are so many possibilities!

And what these videos have done is taken the great lessons that are out there, that are working, that people are engaging with, and bringing them to the public!

I highly encourage you to check out TED-Ed. Some of the lessons have already been flipped, and you can see what is possible with the flipped classroom.

As a side note, if you know of an awesome lesson that you or one of your colleagues, or your teachers, or someone is teaching in a brilliant way, there’s a bit of a contest going on where you can nominate great lessons to be animated for TED-Ed.

Please note, I am in no way an employee or in any other way funded from or supported by Kohls.

One of the most common requests I get here at the library from people who are attempting to do research, are requests for statistics of some sort.

While the usual answer for most ed stats is to take a look at NCES or similar sources listed under statistics in the Education Virtual Library, or possibly pulling stats from articles that discuss the kinds of information you want, the simple fact is that sometimes that information just isn’t out there in an accessible format.

I find that the big push for open/public data is very exciting. It means more information and raw data is available out there to help people answer every question. And not only give answers, but provide a means to finding solutions and making change.

Check out this quick video that shows some of the great things that have been done with open data sets.

You can certainly see these data sets becoming more available.

Recently, Google released their (beta as usual) Public Data Explorer.. While the education specific data is limited (some OECD indicators and data from California). It IS beta, and it was JUST released.

The public data explorer provides some interesting visualization tools that allow you to explore trends in a simulated real time fashion. If nothing else, it’s fascinating to tinker with. And I have high hopes that the public data sets will expand and become even more useful to researchers.

I’ve also become intrigued by Many Eyes and Swivel, Both of whom have public data sets that users have decided to share with the community.

Of course, quality varies from set to set (anything from a personal weight loss log from some users, to enrollment data from University Regsitrar’s for example). But with a critical eye, some valuable information can be obtained from either site.

I also believe that both could provide great venues for scholars to share some of the data sets that they’re developing to make the information more available to be shared with other scholars.

I invite you to explore these resources. Maybe that bit of information you’re looking for is already there!