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….

It’s hard to believe, but the TED-Ed team is excited to have just passed the one-year mark for when we launched our YouTube Channel on March 12, 2012. And what a year it has been! In 365 days, we published over 100 TED-Ed Originals and nearly 100 TED Talks with over 16 million views total. And we have almost 100 additional projects in production!

Last week, TED-Ed got to hang out with some fantastic people, including some faces you might recognize. Some of our guests make really successful YouTube videos about all sorts of things. We picked their brains about their work in creating educational video content during our brainstorm sessions, but we didn’t think it was fair to keep their wisdom to ourselves, so we asked three of them to share their insights.

Greetings from TED Active! Over the past few days, the TED Education Team had the exciting honor to bring together  educators, video content creators, and animators to pick their brains and come up with exciting, creative lessons. Here are some of our favorite shots from the past few days.

Mike Rugnetta of PBS’s Idea Channel, and Michael Stevens, creator of VSauce.

Blue whale researcher and TED Senior Fellow Asha de Vos unveiled her TED-Ed lesson today on the TED Fellows stage. The video — “Why are blue whales so enormous?” — stars a puppet version of de Vos, which she had been coveting for weeks. So Fellows & Community Director Tom Rielly presented her with it, hand-carried from London by TED Senior Fellow Taghi Amirani. We asked her how she felt to be gifted with her own plush doppelgänger.

We’ll be updating the blog all week with lessons created by TED2013 and TEDActive 2013 attendees.

Alex Dainis: Caffeine!! – Bite Sci-zed

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, TED-Ed teamed up with Christian Rudder, co-founder of dating website OKCupid, to create a Lesson on dating. In true TED-Ed fashion, the Lesson focused on the algorithm behind OKCupid.

Inside a cartoonist’s world sparked an interesting conversation between TED-Ed Animator Jeremiah Dickey and New Yorker cartoonist  Liza Donnelly.

Watch the intriguing and thoughtful conversation that ensued when the two sat down to discuss the similarities and differences in their work…

2012 was truly a spectacular year in Science, and so it is only fitting that the most popular TED-Ed Lesson of the year is an ode to Science delivered by a true champion of the Scientific Method, Adam Savage.

This TED-Ed Lesson is perfect for reflecting on how global and personal developments in the last year will unlock even greater opportunities in the year (and years) ahead.

Happy New Year from everyone at TED-ED!

New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly visited TED-Ed headquarters to meet with TED-Ed Animator Jeremiah Dickey for a conversation ranging from the similarities between cartooning and animating to the nature of supposedly ‘dying’ art-forms.

Re-watch their joint endeavor here and come back soon for excerpts from their fascinating conversation!