“A classroom shouldn’t be about a teacher talking. It should be about students doing. The Hobart Shakespeareans don’t play virtual baseball. They play baseball. They don’t play Guitar Hero and Rock Band. They play the guitar, and they are a rock band. And when these children stay late after school and come in on Saturdays to study Shakespeare, they don’t take a test on Hamlet. They act Hamlet.”

TED-Ed is excited to launch the TED-Ed community — a new section of ed.ted.com that allows teachers and students to share their ideas and ask questions that relate to TED-Ed and to Education at large.

What you will you find in the TED-Ed community…

Recently, the physicists at CERN and the animators at TED-Ed teamed up to combine what they do best (complex particle physics) with what we do best (animations that illuminate tough concepts). The results were broadcast on Friday at TEDxCERN, between incredible talks ranging from women in science to consciousness to grid computing, attendees watched animations on everything from the origins of the universe to the mystery of anti-matter.

We caught up with some of the physicists behind these lessons to ask them what it was like to work with animators and see their lesson on the big screen.

ed.ted.com launched one year ago today on April 25, 2012. Since then, a ton of incredible things have happened with TED-Ed. Here are 7 of our favorites:

With billions of videos on YouTube at a teacher’s disposal, there are billions of ways a teacher could utilize TED-Ed in the classroom. Here is the story of one teacher, Anna Searcy. Anna has been teaching for nearly 15 years and has been at her current school, Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago, since 2002.

Dear TED-Ed community,

We are incredibly excited to announce that ed.ted.com has been nominated for two Webby Awards! The Webby Awards honor excellence on the Internet, and we’re in the running in the Education Website and Best Practices Website categories.

These awards are decided by votes!

Want to help us win?

1. Vote here for Education Website (http://on.ted.com/EdWebby).

2. Vote here for Best Practices Website (http://on.ted.com/BPWebby).

Please feel free to share this with anyone who you think might be interested.

Thank you!

The TED-Ed Team

You might have heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as the giant, powerful particle smasher that received quite a bit of attention over whether it would accidentally create a black hole and swallow the earth (don’t worry, it won’t!). But the LHC isn’t the only mind-boggling powerhouse that lives in a little town outside of Geneva at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Amongst atom smashers and particle detectors work a team of top-notch scientists, and here at TED-Ed we’re excited to bring their ideas to you, in the form of Lessons about the universe. How did it begin? What is it made of? How do we learn about the universe, and what do we know? Today, TED-Ed launched the first of five lessons made in partnership with TEDxCERN. The other four animated Lessons will premiere at TEDxCERN on May 3 and be available on ed.ted.com starting on May 3rd. Tune in and watch!

The mystery of pants finally solved.

This week, TED-Ed is excited to roll out a featured mini-series all about the wacky way that words evolve.  All those questions you have about the English language, where words come from, and why we say the things we do. Why do we drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? Why do we say that something is noisy? Why is a single pair of pants called pants and not pant? If you think about it, English is full of strange words that each hold fascinating and often epic histories.

In the spirit of these histories, we’re diving deeper into the world of words with our new featured series, aptly named ‘Mysteries of Vernacular.’

TED-Ed is a free educational platform that allows visitors to engage in, create, and distribute “Lessons worth sharing.” Every Lesson in the TED-Ed library is a result of a collaboration between some combination of educators, learners, animators, and the TED-Ed team. Every feature we’ve built is based on recommendations from members of the TED-Ed community. In this post we’ll elaborate on a five practical ways that we hope you or your organization will continue to help build the TED-Ed platform. 

The TED-Ed BETA website has seen over two million unique visitors since its launch in late April of last year. In hundreds of thousands of instances, visitors have opted to activate one of TED-Ed’s most powerful features: the ability to track and measure various forms of engagement within each TED-Ed Lesson over time. This post explores the Lesson-tracking features in depth, but first know that….