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TED is a nonprofit website intended to "spread knowledge and information from the world's most inspired thinkers." TED contains information on a wide variety or topics. Particularly valuable are video presentations from experts in so many areas.

"Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world!" Ted.com features thousands of short videos of people talking about topics such as technology, entertainment, business, science, global issues, etc. The videos are organized in several ways such as by newest release, date filmed, most comments in a week, most persuasive, funny, and much more! You can also participate in live question/answer discussions with some of the speakers and join ongoing blog conversations with people around the world on important topics related to the videos. I just showed my students a talk by a famous composer who directed a virtual choir and they were very inspired!

This website has a plethora of games that teachers can customize. You can choose from about 22 different types of games and interactive organizers and input all kinds of information that you want students to be challenged on. The games and organizers are great to use as a review for students as well as having the students create a game as part of a project or assessment. The games and organizers can be saved to a webpage or embedded into a blog or webpage (possibly even Moodle although I haven't tried it yet). One added bonus to this website is that it is free and you don't have to sign in by creating a log in or password!

There are quite a number of valuable tools on this site. There are many different types of graphic organizers and templates. You can also create some games, quizzes, and diagrams. The resources they have can be sorted by either subject or template type. They have one template called Fakebook. You can click on the picture of a famous person and see their "Fakebook." Some of them are very clever and funny. However, I noticed on the Mickey Mantle one that his comment for October 11, 1957 was that he had just lost the World Series to the Milwaukee Brewers. It actually should have said Milwaukee Braves. So I guess you have to be careful that some of the information could be inaccurate.

"TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. " This is a great site to research ideas from others' perspectives and apply that information to your projects. I think middle school and high school teachers can use this with their students and search a topic and have one of the speakers help to apply or review the knowledge the teacher is covering. I plan on using the technology perspectives with my eighth graders of a great example of how to communicate with your audience.

Beyond the fact that some of these are great resources for teaching (Have you seen the one on Marshmallow towers? Undersea Astonishments?), many of these are good pick-me-ups, either because they are inspiring, or funny, or just get 'ya going.

There are some very interesting and enlightening talks here. I do like that many of the talks are related to where the world is heading and how we can better prespare our students for the future that they will inhabit.