In browsing through some of my RSS feeds this weekend I came across a couple of sites with lists of useful online resources for educators.
The first is a list of 25 Incredible TED Talks for Educators, compiled by the team at Bachelor’s Degree Online. For those who are regular watchers of the TED Talks online videos many of these will be very familiar, but for those who aren’t this list provides a useful link to many of the videos that will be of particular interest to educators.
Some of my favourites that are on this list include:
- Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
- Richard Baraniuk on open-source learning
- Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves
- Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas
- Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child
That’s not to say that these are the only interesting ones, just that they’re among those I’ve seen in the past and been inspired by. Something that is interesting about this list is the number of videos on the list that deal with education in Africa – certainly an area to keep an eye on!
The second list is from a group called Ace Online Schools titled 25 Awesome Virtual Learning Experiences Online and contains links to 25 websites that feature virtual learning experiences, exposing online visitors to everything from history to geography, astronomy to anatomy, literature to government. The majority of links are to US-based experiences, but serve to illustrate just what sorts of things can be done in the online world to provide a virtual experience for those unable to attend or participate in the real thing.