TED is an organization and a website with a collection of over 450 video lectures by some of the most notable academics, businesspeople, researchers, politicians, and scientists in their fields. Each lecture is only 18 minutes long. A small non-profit organization dedicated to getting the news out on the power of ideas, they have attracted such large names as Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Jane Goodall, Bono, Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking, and Steven Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics.

While each of the lectures, which can be streamed for free from the website, is educational, they are also inspirational. Since each of the lecturers is spending less than twenty minutes to describe their life’s passion, and because each of the lecturers is a superlative expert in their area of study, the lectures are as exciting and simply presented as they are educational and informative. For this reason, they might best be used at the outset of a curriculum, to introduce a topic, a theme, or an area of study. For instance, as a teacher begins a portion of a science curriculum on outer space, she could show Carolyn Porco’s TED speech, which asks the question, Could there be forms of life on one of Saturn’s moons? The lecture is fascinating, but also presented in simple enough terms for most high schoolers and certainly for college students. Alternatively, there are also many education-related lectures on TED that teachers or administrative staff might watch for their own edification.

Renowned mathematician Arthur Benjamin delivers a lecture suggesting ways to make math education more effective and less stressful. In two separate lectures, Sir Ken Robinson and Elizabeth Gilbert both discuss broad changes they would like to see made to the education system in order to foster students’ strengths. Whether for classroom use or for school staff’s personal use, TED lectures educate with the kind of gravitating and inspired videos that are just unavailable in most pre-packaged curriculum-driven video series. Find TED online at http://www.ted.com.

Ted Wujec on 3 Ways The Brain Creates Meaning