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100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!)

In the spring of 2007, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, gave a legendary TED University talk: an ultra-fast-moving ride through the “100 websites you should know and use.” Six years later, it remains one of the most viewed TED blog posts ever. Time for an update? We think so. Below, the 2013 edition of the 100 websites to put on your radar and in your browser.To see the original list, click here. While most of these sites are still going strong and remain wonderful resources, we’ve crossed out any that are no longer functioning. And because there are so many amazing resources out there, please add your own ideas in the comments. Happy surfing!BUSINESS + E-COMMERCE

AUDIO + VISUAL

LITERATURE, MEDIA + CULTURE

POLITICS, NEWS + GLOBAL ISSUES

EDUCATION

SCIENCE + TECHNOLOGY

And now, the original list from 2007, created by Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH. While most of these remaining thriving websites, we’ve crossed out defunct websites and added notes when possible:

CURIOSITY & KNOWLEDGE

GRAPHICS, MUSIC & ARTS

E-COMMERCE EXPERIENCE

SEARCHING & FINDING

ONLINE RESOURCES

TOP INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE CREATORS

12
Nov 2014
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Innovation in education – latest research updates

Since January, we’ve been exploring the area of evidence in education technology. This follows on from the finding of our ‘Decoding Learning‘ report that hundreds of millions of pounds are spent on technology in schools with little evidence for the impact it makes on learning outcomes.

Back in January, I set out the rationale for this work, and in April I gave an update on how things have been progressing. As the teachers and learners we have been working with enjoy a much needed summer break, here is a further update on how the projects have been progressing.

The Visible Classroom

This project explores the use of real time captioning and transcription for student learning and teacher professional development. It is an EEF funded pilot, and has run in 10 schools since February.

As a pilot project, it has been a case of working with teachers to develop different aspects of the technology and the way it is implemented and explore the process by which it works as well as the impact it has on students and teachers. The project has now come to an end in schools, and the various teams are collating their data and findings and preparing to report on the impact it has had.

The use of the technology developed as we were trialing, most significantly as we explored the professional development aspect and whether teachers found it better to respond to ongoing ‘drip fed’ feedback on their teaching or an intensive programme. Some teachers on the trial tried having a single lesson a week transcribed and fed back on over the course of two terms, some tried an intensive 5 week programme where a lesson was transcribed every day.

Pulling together and synthesising all of the rich data we have collected will take some time. However, it is clear there will be some very interesting findings and implications for teacher CPD and technology programmes when the report is published in a few months.
Find out more about this project.

Flipped Learning

Our Flipped Learning trial takes the model of delivering new content prior to lessons in the form of videos and exercises, then following up with more interactive and personalised learning activities in class. So far we have run the trial in five high schools in Scotland, exploring how students and teachers experienced the approach in a topic in their Mathematics lessons.

Some interesting findings and questions have come out of this work so far. Trouble free access to educational websites outside of school is still a challenge for some schools, as is making sure students complete homework tasks.

The traditional structure of lessons have many benefits, one of them being that familiarity means teachers and students know how to get the best out of them, so changing to a new and unfamiliar structure takes some adjustment. Mapping a new approach to the existing curriculum is really important, and the mapping we have done for the Maths curricula has been fundamental in making this trial work.

The Khan Academy resources have received much praise from the teachers we have worked with. The next stage is to refine our approach based on the feedback so far, and continue this trial in a further seven secondary schools in England in the autumn term.

Find out more about this project.

Remote Tutoring

We are working with Third Space Learning to explore the impact of additional one to one tutoring, delivered remotely, to support primary children to achieve their potential in Maths. As a large random controlled trial, there has been significant work on the setup and initial data collection for this project.

We now have our full complement of schools identified and ready to start in September, and will work with six hundred children over the two years of the project. We will be discovering whether the children (around ten per school) who receive the intervention have better outcomes on average to those identified in other schools.

However, the evaluators York Trials Unit will also be exploring the wider effects of such an intervention. A case could be made that supporting children in a class who are struggling allows the entire class to achieve better. We will be testing that case to see if there is evidence for such claims.

Find out more about this project.

What’s next?

Over the coming months the results of some of our work will be analysed and start to be published, and I will blog as they do.

For now, I can report that we have learned a lot from these projects already in terms of how the experience of research affects schools and how the implementation of trials can be successfully approached. I will consider these practical findings in future posts.

– See more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/innovation-education-latest-research-updates#sthash.GX36SsIQ.dpuf

10
Nov 2014
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21st Century Education: 5 Lessons from China

by Catherine Yan Wang, National Institute of Educational Sciences

China has redesigned its education system since embarking on opening up the country and engaging in reforms in the late 1970s. The journey of change started from an ethos of “Orientation Towards the Modernization, Orientation Towards the Future, and Orientation Towards the World” created in late 1970s, went though a three-decade long reflection and debate on quality-oriented education (vs examination-oriented education), gained momentum in an Action Plan for Invigorating Education for 21st Century in 2001, and resulted in ground-breaking Basic Education Curriculum Reform that profoundly changed education philosophy, content and pedagogy for education from Grade 1-12. After 3 decades, not only has China achieved universal access to basic education, but also Shanghai became a top-performer in PISA tests in 2009. And in 2014, the changes still continue. Although there are still many challenges and barriers with education system in China, several strategies and approaches proved to be workable and effective, including the following 5 lessons:

1) Evidence-based, participatory policy-making: Like many policies of China, the formulation of the Basic Education Curriculum Outline involved five steps: conducting surveys, drafting, consulting, experimenting and implementations and expansion. It began with stakeholder survey including teachers, parents, researchers, local authorities and communities, followed by drafting the document by a team consisting of researchers, practitioners and administrators. It then went through consultations with schools, teachers, local governments to solicit their opinions on the relevance and feasibility of the policy. The policy for trial was piloted in four provinces and amended on the basis of piloting. The finalized Outline was put into implementation nationwide.

2) Provision of professional support for teaching: China created a Teaching Research System to provide ongoing support to teachers’ classroom teaching, consisting of teaching research institutes at provincial, prefecture (municipality) and county levels. The researchers, mostly selected from the best teachers, support teachers’ work by coordinating school-based research projects, regular visits to schools, interpreting curriculum standards, analyzing classroom teaching, preparing teaching lessons, developing teaching materials and distilling best practices for extension (e.g. through demonstration class). Some of the institutes have been integrated with teaching training college and this made teaching research a booster of teacher’s professional development.

3) Learning from the world: China, its government agencies, research institutions and even schools all look to other countries’ experiences for inspiration in the process of making changes for improvement.  Since the 1980s, Government officials have made many overseas study tours to learn different practices.  These brief glimpse of the outside world impacted their way of thinking and doing their work. Major studies almost always contain a component of international comparative study to benchmark against developed countries, and draw upon best practices to generate policy recommendations. The schools, in their pursuit of internationalization, developed exchange partnership with overseas counterparts, and also kept on learning from outside world to update their teaching content and methods.

4) Experimentation: Partly originating from the principle borrowed from economic reform, “cross the river by touching stones,” various new thoughts and ideas have been tried as experiments in the education system continually, with successful experiments often being translated into policies. A typical example is the “Shiyi Experimental School”: it abandoned traditional way of organizing students’ learning in fixed classes on dozens of subjects, and instead, developed over 1000 courses from which 4600 students could choose, many of them relating to emerging issues of the 21st century.

5) Balancing between centralization and decentralization, emphasizing both unity and diversity: In 2001, China adopted a three-level curriculum structure aligned with the principle of “common basics, diversified options” that encompasses national, local, and school-based curricula, of which the national curriculum accounts for 80%, and local and school-based curriculum 20%. Such a structure ensure that all the students master fundamental knowledge and skills, while leaving schools ample room for experimentation and innovation.

It is hard to generalize about education development, given its inherent complexity compounded by the size and diversity of such a large country as China. A Chinese idiom “Bearing global perspective (big picture) in mind, and start from (small) concrete action” might best summarize and illustrate the lessons in setting educational policy for the 21st century from China. Education can and will make a difference on students’ learning and social well-being, when taking into consideration the tremendous changes happening and coming in the 21st century and taking actions to meet these challenges and opportunities step by step.

08
Nov 2014
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iNACOL Report: Online Learning Can Close The Opportunity Gap

Originally posted in Education Week

Course Access programs allow students to participate in part-time online learning. Half a dozen states have taken steps to expand access, particularly for high school students, to advanced courses, electives, world languages, and career and technical courses. According to a report issued by The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL), Course Access, “Is a mechanism by which students can gain equitable access to a variety of courses in a programmatic effort to increase access, quality and equity in public education.”

Most school districts report that they currently have, or plan on adding part-time online learning options. Course Access takes that idea a step further; it is state initiatives that authorize a group of diverse providers, ranging from individual teachers to national organizations, to provide public school students with expanded course offerings.

The iNACOL policy brief, Course Access: Equitable Opportunities for College and Career Ready Students provides an overview of Course Access as a state policy solution to opportunity and achievement gaps in K-12 education. The brief suggests that Course Access can easily and affordably extend access to quality college and career preparation to every high school student in the country. For example, few high schools can afford to offer all 32 Advanced Placement courses and 6 world languages, but with Course Access it is provided and cost effective. In addition to these suggestions the brief includes model legislative principles for state Course Access legislation.

The iNACOL report recommends that Course Access initiatives should prioritize poorly served students, should use a rigorous review and authorization process, and should be based on sustainable funding that encourages completion and achievement.

“The funding model should allow for progression and funding based on demonstrated competency, not seat time,” and according to the brief, “Courses should have clear, explicit, mastery-based learning outcomes, and the funding model should reward providers for student attainment of these outcomes.”

While districts should not be able to limit student learning options, the expansion of online learning options requires that students are connected to guidance and support services. The iNACOL brief mentions options that could be used in tandem:

 

  • Local support: The student’s home school may retain a portion (e.g., 10-25%) of the student’s funding for the course to cover a relative share of costs for services such as assessments, counseling, custodial, and administrative functions. (For example, in a state with an average expenditure of $9,000, one of six classes would be worth $1500, 85% of that would be $1275).

 

 

  • Online support: One key lesson learned in Louisiana was the importance of the counseling program set up to provide technical assistance to school counselors, students, and parents. Course Access program counselors work with school counselors to make them aware of the program and course options, and to ensure that courses selected by students and families are educationally appropriate, logistically feasible, and keep the student on track to an on-time graduation. (For more, see DLN paper onGuiding and Personalizing College & Career Readiness.)

 

The release of iNACOL’s brief follows Digital Learning Now’s Leading in an Era of Change: Making the Most of State Course Access Programs released last summer. This white paper recommends that multi-state networks share the burden of course reviews, while encouraging reciprocity of teachers and approved providers across state lines.

A group of Stanford Students developed A Framework for Selecting Quality Course Providers at Competitive Prices which builds on Louisiana’s market-oriented pricing strategy.

Ken Bradford, leads Louisiana’s innovative Course Access program. He said the goal is, “To provide high-quality educational options to students in both rural and urban areas of the state that currently do not have access to the classes they need to prepare for college or a career.”

07
Nov 2014
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Assessing 21st century learning and teaching?

February 21, 2014

The Program for International Student Assessmet (PISA) Math scores from 2012 were released in December 2013, ranking students from Asian countries at the top of the list, with Finland being the sole non-Asian country included in the list of top performers in science.

The top performers in math: China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea
The top performers in reading: China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea
The top performers in science: China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Finland
(Source PISA 2012)

According to the PISA website, since the year 2000, every three years, fifteen-year-old students from randomly selected schools worldwide take tests in reading, mathematics and science, with a focus on one subject in each year of assessment. The 2-hour tests are a mixture of open-ended and multiple-choice questions that are organised in groups based on a passage setting out a real-life situation.They and their school principals also answer questionnaires to provide information about the students’ backgrounds, schools and learning experiences and about the broader school system and learning environment.
PISA claims that it is “unique because it develops tests which are not directly linked to the school curriculum. The tests are designed to assess to what extent students at the end of compulsory education, can apply their knowledge to real-life situations and be equipped for full participation in society” (PISA website).
Sample questions can be found here.
07
Nov 2014
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iNACOL Report: Online Learning Can Close The Opportunity Gap

Originally posted in EdWeek

Course Access programs allow students to participate in part-time online learning. Half a dozen states have taken steps to expand access, particularly for high school students, to advanced courses, electives, world languages, and career and technical courses. According to a report issued by The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL), Course Access, “Is a mechanism by which students can gain equitable access to a variety of courses in a programmatic effort to increase access, quality and equity in public education.”

Most school districts report that they currently have, or plan on adding part-time online learning options. Course Access takes that idea a step further; it is state initiatives that authorize a group of diverse providers, ranging from individual teachers to national organizations, to provide public school students with expanded course offerings.

The iNACOL policy brief, Course Access: Equitable Opportunities for College and Career Ready Students provides an overview of Course Access as a state policy solution to opportunity and achievement gaps in K-12 education. The brief suggests that Course Access can easily and affordably extend access to quality college and career preparation to every high school student in the country. For example, few high schools can afford to offer all 32 Advanced Placement courses and 6 world languages, but with Course Access it is provided and cost effective. In addition to these suggestions the brief includes model legislative principles for state Course Access legislation.

The iNACOL report recommends that Course Access initiatives should prioritize poorly served students, should use a rigorous review and authorization process, and should be based on sustainable funding that encourages completion and achievement.

“The funding model should allow for progression and funding based on demonstrated competency, not seat time,” and according to the brief, “Courses should have clear, explicit, mastery-based learning outcomes, and the funding model should reward providers for student attainment of these outcomes.”

While districts should not be able to limit student learning options, the expansion of online learning options requires that students are connected to guidance and support services. The iNACOL brief mentions options that could be used in tandem:

 

  • Local support: The student’s home school may retain a portion (e.g., 10-25%) of the student’s funding for the course to cover a relative share of costs for services such as assessments, counseling, custodial, and administrative functions. (For example, in a state with an average expenditure of $9,000, one of six classes would be worth $1500, 85% of that would be $1275).

 

 

  • Online support: One key lesson learned in Louisiana was the importance of the counseling program set up to provide technical assistance to school counselors, students, and parents. Course Access program counselors work with school counselors to make them aware of the program and course options, and to ensure that courses selected by students and families are educationally appropriate, logistically feasible, and keep the student on track to an on-time graduation. (For more, see DLN paper onGuiding and Personalizing College & Career Readiness.)

 

The release of iNACOL’s brief follows Digital Learning Now’s Leading in an Era of Change: Making the Most of State Course Access Programs released last summer. This white paper recommends that multi-state networks share the burden of course reviews, while encouraging reciprocity of teachers and approved providers across state lines.

A group of Stanford Students developed A Framework for Selecting Quality Course Providers at Competitive Prices which builds on Louisiana’s market-oriented pricing strategy.

Ken Bradford, leads Louisiana’s innovative Course Access program. He said the goal is, “To provide high-quality educational options to students in both rural and urban areas of the state that currently do not have access to the classes they need to prepare for college or a career.”

06
Nov 2014
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11 of the funniest TED Talk spoofs, and what speakers can learn from them

DED Talks. High TED Talks. Onion Talks. Here in the TED office, you will often hear chuckles as someone watches one of the quickly growing crop of TED spoofs floating in the ether. And surprisingly, there are some pretty good lessons for speakers embedded in these spoofs. See what I mean below.

 

The spoof: Paul Scheer’s (faux) TED Talk
Created by: Team Coco
The lesson: Don’t fall victim to idea sprawl.

Paul Scheer loads up his talk with insights on everything from dreams to the appropriate dipping sauce for chicken wings. But wouldn’t it have been more effective if he’d shared one single, cohesive idea? This is what we tell speakers: Consider the idea you want to share with the world. And include only the essentials to pop that idea into focus.

 

 

The spoof: Onion Talks: Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn’t That Be Great?
Created by: The Onion
The lesson: Don’t share an idea you don’t believe in enough to follow through on.

In the inaugural episode of The Onion’s spoof series, a man shares an idea for cars that run on compost as if it were gas. Intriguing. Only, he says, “Feasibility deals with implementation—and I’m not involved with that.” This … isn’t good. When it comes to your big idea, you have to walk the walk as much as you talk the talk.

 

 

The spoof: Onion Talks: Ducks Go Quack, Chickens Go Cluck
Created by: The Onion
The lesson: Don’t bother sharing an idea that isn’t new.

Here, a man gives a talk about the noises made by your favorite barnyard animals. And while his Old MacDonald presentation style is compelling, his substance is nil. We look for ideas that surprise and change perceptions — whether it’s a talk that flips your thinking on a scientific phenomenon or one that makes you see something subtly different in your relationships.

 

 

The spoof: DED Talk: A TED Talk for Zombies
Created by: Official Comedy
The lesson: Beware of taking too sharp a left turn in your talk … and, please, only kill metaphorically.

This zombie’s talk is almost standing O–worthy. And then — there’s a twist that goes horribly wrong. While surprising talks are great, nothing should ever go this fully off the rails. A good talk takes the audience on a journey step by step. Also, literally killing the audience? Well, that’s no way to make sure your idea spreads. (That note also goes out to the speaker of Onion Talks: Stabbing Ignorance With Glass Ceiling Shards.)

 

 

The spoof: Patton Oswalt’s (fake) TED Talk
Created by: Team Coco
The lesson: Don’t let stern faces in the audience get you down.

At 1:08 in this talk, Patton Oswalt gets into a brawl with an audience member. Why? Because the guy in the audience had a sour expression on his face. The truth of talking to a big audience: not everyone will be engaged. So why focus on them? Instead, talk to the people who are clearly with you. Find a few friendly-looking people in different parts of the audience and speak to them as if they were old friends.

 

 

The spoof: Onion Talks: A Future Where All Robots Have Penises
Created by: Onion Talks
The lesson: Don’t rely on your demo.

This speaker shares the strange idea that household robots would catch on only if they had realistic genitalia; his talk goes all to hell when his robot malfunctions and falls off the stage onto an audience member. Of course, robots, animals, flying machines — they’re all a little unpredictable. So if your talk includes a demo, make sure you lay out the framework of your idea enough that you’re not fully betting on the unknown.

 

 

The spoof: High TED Talks
Created by: College Humor
The lesson: Neither mind-altering substance, nor the munchies, will help you feel more prepared to give your talk.

It’s completely natural to be nervous before speaking in public. (Watch the TED-Ed lesson “The Science of Stage Fright” to see how it isn’t so much a mental challenge to be overcome, as a physical reaction to be adapted to.) But walking onstage drunk or high, or overeating from the snack table backstage, is not how you conquer your nerves. The only way to fight the feeling: practice, practice, practice. Know your talk forwards and backwards to the point where the flow of words becomes second nature.

The spoof: Very Mary-Kate: SoHobo

Created by: College Humor
The lesson: Don’t do that thing where a bulleted list appears on your slides just as you say the very same words.

During a talk, the audience processes what they see on a slide and what they’re hearing in two separate channels. So if you type it in your slide, people aren’t fully paying attention when you say it. In general, we ask speakers to use as little text as possible on their slides, and to be especially wary of unnecessary bulleted lists. Our motto, which I just made up: Say it, don’t display it. (A sub-lesson for this spoof: Don’t steal ideas from Zoolander. As hilarious as this video is, “SoHobo” reminds us a bit of Derelicte.)

 

 

The spoof: Onion Talks: Loudness Equals Power
Created by: The Onion
The lessons: Don’t yell, and definitely don’t over-promise.

Every now and then, a speaker strides on the stage and uses a forceful tone that leaves the audience … disconcerted. The reason for the microphone: so you can talk normally, as if you’re having an engaged conversation with a friend. But this talk hits a bigger speed-bump when the speaker says of his invention, “In a few years, there’s no question [it] will transform our lives.” This kind of big promise just raises skepticism and smacks of inauthenticity. Keep promises realistic. Always.

 

Some other what-not-to-dos represented in these spoofs: don’t whisper, don’t nervously pace, watch the “jazz hands,” and don’t cling to your props for dear life. Don’t talk about your talk, introduce too much specialized vocabulary, fail to admit controversy, or paint a picture that’s either too utopian or too dystopian. And of course: Don’t offer up purely anecdotal evidence. You can read many more speaker tips in our comprehensive TEDx Speaker Guide (PDF).

21
Oct 2014
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Don’t Teach For America

“Education reform” that helps only your resume

By Sandra Y.L. Korn

The Red Line

Last month, I got an email from a recruiter. An associate of Teach For America, citing a minor leadership role in a student organization as evidence that I “have distinguished [myself] as a leader here on Harvard’s campus,” asked me to meet with Harvard’s TFA representative on campus. Dropping phrases like “race and class,” “equal opportunities,” and “educational injustice,” the recruiter promised that I could have a significant impact on a classroom in an underserved community.

I have thought for many years about teaching high school history. But I stopped replying to this email after a few exchanges.

I am not interested in TFA.

For one, I am far from ready to enter a classroom on my own. Indeed, in my experience Harvard students have increasingly acknowledged that TFA drastically underprepares its recruits for the reality of teaching. But more importantly, TFA is not only sending young, idealistic, and inexperienced college grads into schools in neighborhoods different from where they’re from—it’s also working to destroy the American public education system. As a hopeful future teacher, that is not something I could ever conscionably put my name behind.

Princeton alumna Wendy Kopp originally founded TFA with the mission of filling teacher shortages in U.S. public schools. The program, which helps young college grads find placements teaching in public schools after they graduate from college, combines the persistence of a five-person recruiting team with the cache of a competitive on-campus-interview process. It has quickly become one of the most popular destinations for Harvard seniors after graduation.

Clearly, some Harvard students still believe that TFA’s model of recruiting young idealists, throwing them into five weeks of intensive training, and then placing them into schools in neighborhoods very unlike the ones they came from is truly the answer to everything from income inequality to underfunded public school systems. Perhaps they even think that teaching is such an unattractive profession that bright college graduates should be bribed with a feel-good resume booster to fill the vast shortage of competent teachers in the United States.

But it has become increasingly clear to anyone who thinks critically about teaching that there’s something off with TFA’s model. After all, TFA alumni repeatedly describe their stints in the American public education system as some of the hardest two years of their lives. Doesn’t it bother you to imagine undertrained 22-year-olds standing in front of an crowded classroom and struggling through every class period? Indeed, most of the critiques of TFA in The Crimson have focused on students’ unpreparedness to teach.

However, unpreparedness pales in comparison to the much larger problem with TFA: It undermines the American public education system from the very foundation by urging the replacement of experienced career teachers with a neoliberal model of interchangeable educators and standardized testing. If TFA intended to place students in schools with insufficient numbers of teachers, it has strayed far from its original goal. As an essay by Chicago teacher Kenzo Shibata asked last summer, “Teach For America wanted to help stem a teacher shortage. Why then are thousands of experienced educators being replaced by hundreds of new college graduates?” Journalist James Cersonsky notes that veteran teachers and schools alike may suffer from this type of reform: “Districts pay thousands in fees to TFA for each corps member in addition to their salaries—at the expense of the existing teacher workforce. Chicago, for example, is closing 48 schools and laying off 850 teachers and staff while welcoming 350 corps members.”

Chicago is not the first city where Teach For America has tried to replace veteran teachers with new recruits. Two years ago, The Crimson quoted the president of the Boston Teachers’ Union as saying, “Teach For America claims that it does not come in and take positions from incumbent members. That is a lie. They are doing it in Boston…Their arrogance is appalling.” Cersonsky and blogger EduSchyster have meticulously documented TFA’s connections to dozens of charter schools as well as education reform advocacy organizations that focus on standardized testing and privatization instead of grassroots community involvement and student voices. In doing so, TFA is working directly against the interests of teachers, students, and communities alike. Neoliberal school reform is the true “educational injustice” here.

Happily, Chicago does provide a model of truly community-driven and progressive education advocacy. Last summer, the Chicago Teachers’ Union organized with parents and students to advocate for quality public education including smaller class sizes, more staff like school nurses, less standardized testing, and progressive taxation structures for school funding.

I don’t mean to vilify students who’ve chosen to recruit for TFA—I’m sure they have only the best intentions of helping underserved students—but I would like to call on my classmates and current TFA corps members to reconsider their decision to be part of this program. TFA has positioned itself as an ethical alternative to Wall Street for college seniors looking for a short-term commitment. We should all have questions about how much we can actually help to fix structural problems with just a month of training and a few years of work.

Sandra Y. L. Korn ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a joint history of science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays. Follow her on Twitter @sandraylk.

18
Oct 2014
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10 tips on how to make slides that communicate your idea, from TED’s in-house expert

Speaker David Epstein created a truly stellar slide deck for his talk at TED2014. When your slides rock, your whole presentation pops to life. Here, advice from our office slide master on making Keynote and Powerpoint presentations that communicate strongly. Photo: James Duncan DavidsonReposted from TED blog.Aaron Weyenberg is the master of slide decks. Our UX Lead creates Keynote presentations that are both slick and charming—the kind that pull you in and keep you captivated, but in an understated way that helps you focus on what’s actually being said. He does this for his own presentations and for lots of other folks in the office. Yes, his coworkers ask him to design their slides, because he’s just that good.We asked Aaron to bottle his Keynote mojo so that others could benefit from it. Here, 10 tips for making an effective slide deck, split into two parts: the big, overarching goals, and the little tips and tricks that make your presentation sing.Gavin-AllHands-20140710-1.0.001The big picture…

  1. Think about your slides last. Building your slides should be the tail end of developing your presentation. Think about your main message, structure its supporting points, practice it and time it—and then start thinking about your slides. The presentation needs to stand on its own; the slides are just something you layer over it to enhance the listener experience. Too often, I see slide decks that feel more like presenter notes, but I think it’s far more effective when the slides are for the audience to give them a visual experience that adds to the words.
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  2. Create a consistent look and feel. In a good slide deck, each slide feels like part of the same story. That means using the same or related typography, colors and imagery across all your slides. Using pre-built master slides can be a good way to do that, but it can feel restrictive and lead to me-too decks. I like to create a few slides to hold sample graphic elements and type, then copy what I need from those slides as I go.
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  3. Think about topic transitions. It can be easy to go too far in the direction of consistency, though. You don’t want each slide to look exactly the same. I like to create one style for the slides that are the meat of what I’m saying, and then another style for the transitions between topics. For example, if my general slides have a dark background with light text, I’ll try transition slides that have a light background with dark text. That way they feel like part of the same family, but the presentation has texture—and the audience gets a visual cue that we’re moving onto a new topic.
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  4. With text, less is almost always more. One thing to avoid—slides with a lot of text, especially if it’s a repeat of what you’re saying out loud. It’s like if you give a paper handout in a meeting—everyone’s head goes down and they read, rather than staying heads-up and listening. If there are a lot of words on your slide, you’re asking your audience to split their attention between what they’re reading and what they’re hearing. That’s really hard for a brain to do, and it compromises the effectiveness of both your slide text and your spoken words. If you can’t avoid having text-y slides, try to progressively reveal text (like unveiling bullet points one by one) as you need it.
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  5. Use photos that enhance meaning. I love using simple, punchy photos in presentations, because they help what you’re saying resonate in your audience’s mind without pulling their attention from your spoken words. Look for photos that (1) speak strongly to the concept you’re talking about and (2) aren’t compositionally complex. Your photo could be a metaphor or something more literal, but it should be clear why the audience is looking at it, and why it’s paired with what you’re saying. For example, I recently used the image above—a photo of a container ship about to tip over (it eventually sank)—to lead off a co-worker’s deck about failure preparation. And below is another example of a photo I used in a deck to talk about the launch of the new TED.com. The point I was making was that a launch isn’t the end of a project—it’s the beginning of something new. We’ll learn, adapt, change and grow.

Here, a lovely image from a slidedeck Aaron created about the redesign of TED.com. View the whole deck from this presentation.

And now some tactical tips…

  1. Go easy on the effects and transitions. Keynote and Powerpoint come with a lot of effects and transitions. In my opinion, most of these don’t do much to enhance the audience experience. At worst, they subtly suggest that the content of your slides is so uninteresting that a page flip or droplet transition will snap the audience out of their lethargy. If you must use them, use the most subtle ones, and keep it consistent.
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  2. Use masking to direct attention in images. If you want to point something out in a photo, you could use a big arrow. Or you could do what I call a dupe-and-mask. I do this a lot when showing new page designs, particularly when I don’t want the audience to see the whole design until I’m finished talking about individual components of it. Here’s the original image.mask-1Here’s the process for masking it. (1) Set the image transparency to something less than 100. (2) Duplicate that image so there is one directly over the top of the other. (3) Set the dup’d image transparency back to 100. and (4) Follow the technique here to mask the dup’d image. You’ll end up with something that looks like this.
  3. mask-3
  4. You can use this technique to call out anything you want in a screenshot. A single word, a photo, a section of content—whatever you want your audience to focus on.
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  5. Try panning large images. Often, I want to show screen shot of an entire web page in my presentations. There’s a great Chrome extension to capture these—but these images are oftentimes much longer than the canvas size of the presentation. Rather than scaling the image to an illegible size, or cropping it, you can pan it vertically as you talk about it. In Keynote, this is done with a Move effect, which you can apply from an object’s action panel.
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  6. For video, don’t use autoplay. It’s super easy to insert video in Keynote and Powerpoint—you just drag a Quicktime file onto the slide. And when you advance the deck to the slide with the video that autoplays, sometimes it can take a moment for the machine to actually start playing it. So often I’ve seen presenters click again in an attempt to start the video during this delay, causing the deck to go to the next slide. Instead, set the video to click to play. That way you have more predictable control over the video start time, and even select a poster frame to show before starting.
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  7. Reproduce simple charts and graphs. Dropping an image of a chart into a presentation is fine, but it almost always disrupts the feel of a deck in unsightly fashion. If the graph data is simple enough (and you have some extra time) there’s a way to make it much more easy on the eyes. You could redraw it in the native presentation application. That sounds like needless work, and it might be for your purposes, but it can really make your presentation feel consistent and thought-through, of one flavor from soup to nuts. You’ll have control over colors, typography, and more. Here are some examples.users-chart
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    traffic-chart

Lastly, I’d love to leave you with a couple book recommendations. The first is Resonate, by Nancy Duarte. It’s not so much about slides, but about public speaking in general – which is the foundation for any presentation, regardless of how great your slides are. In it, she breaks down the anatomy of what makes a great presentation, how to establish a central message and structure your talk, and more. (One of her case studies comes from Benjamin Zander’s charming TED Talk about classical music, a talk that captivated the audience from start to finish.) Think of this as prerequisite reading for my second recommendation, also by Duarte: Slide:ology. This is more focused on presentation visuals and slides.

17
Oct 2014
POSTED BY Jeff
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10 tips for editing video

One of TED's video editors, Kari Mulholland, hard at work. Below, her editing advice. Photo: Biljana LabovicThe techniques that video editors use to shape their content reveal a lot about how people create meaning in the world. Editors have a deep understanding of how people think, feel, remember and learn, and we use this knowledge to build powerful, moving stories and experiences. The best editing decisions come from empathy — both for the people who exist virtually on the screen and for the audience watching them.The TED Talk editing toolkit is small when compared to ones used to cut a narrative feature or documentary. And that’s why it’s a good place to start as an introduction to the art of editing. We use continuity editing to maintain a consistent feeling of space and time over the duration of the talk. But overall, we strive to keep our edits invisible. What does that mean, exactly? I’ll make the invisible visible by editing a short excerpt from a TED Talk badly.

 

Now, compare that to the same excerpt edited competently.

 

 

What made the first excerpt so uncomfortable to watch was that the edits were unmotivated; every edit was random. Here are ten tips for making meaningful edits:

  1. Choose the best camera angles for each moment. As you look at your footage, your goal is to balance speaker intent with the expectations of the web audience. Think about where the audience would want to be looking at different points during the talk if they were in the room — that will help you select the best camera angle to reconstruct each moment. By thinking about that, you are also choosing angles that help the speaker better express his or her story.
  1. Use more close-ups and medium shots than wide shots. It’s important to cut between different camera angles so that the audience understands the space where the TED Talk took place. But once the talk is contextualized, close-ups and medium shots hold the most meaning for the audience. It’s engaging to watch speakers’ facial expressions and body language as they speak and, with a closer view, you can just see it better.
  1. Watch a speaker’s body language and pay attention to the way they talk. Language is embodied. A speakers’ thoughts, words and breath are all revealed through their body language. Meanwhile, each speaker has a unique rhythm and cadence to their voice. If you pay attention to these things, it will provide a natural rhythm for your editing and it will all feel intuitive for the audience, too.
  1. Cut on action. One way to make the edit between two shots seem invisible is by cutting on a gesture. The viewer watches the beginning of a motion that begins in one shot and follows it as it crosses the edit and finishes in the next shot. The completion of the gesture masks the edit. Here is an example of a cut made on the subtle gesture made as the speaker completes his thought and begins a new one.

 

 

  1. Cut on words. The sound of a word, especially if it contains a hard consonant, can make an edit feel less obvious. When the word is one that is relevant to the main point of the speaker’s talk, the edit can also highlight that word and make it more memorable. Let’s listen to example of an edit cut on a word.

 

 

  1. Keep things moving. The web audience has a short attention span. Framing a speaker’s words with multiple camera angles is more dynamic and interesting than holding on one camera angle for a long period of time.
  1. Break up graphics. At TED, the slides that speakers use often stay on-screen for quite a while. We try to break the slide up into sections, so that only the relevant parts of the slide are revealed in time with the speaker’s words. This may or may not help in your own editing, but the point is: be methodical with directing attention.
  1. Edit out mistakes. At TED, we do edit out both technical errors and speaker errors. We often mask these edits by cutting on action. Let’s take a look at an example of how this is done. First you will hear two sentences that are hooked together by an “um,” something many speakers do without realizing it.

 

 

Now the “um” is edited out, by cutting between two shots during an action-filled moment.

 

 

  1. Think about who’s speaking and who’s listening. One challenge we sometimes get in the TED editing room: interviews. To explain the best approach to editing one, let’s watch a short excerpt from an interview Chris Anderson did with Bill Gates. In this example, only one camera angle is used.

 

 

Now let’s watch the same excerpt edited like a TED Talk.

 

 

The edits are motivated by the words spoken by both Chris and Bill. This works, but a better way to edit this interview would be to reframe Chris’ words with shots of Bill listening. Watch the same excerpt edited with footage of Bill Gates listening.

 

 

All of a sudden, the point of view of the interview shifts. Because the purpose of the interview is to give the audience an opportunity to know more about Bill Gates, watching the interview from Bill’s perspective is just more interesting.

  1.  Take some space from your edit. After spending some time with the same edit, it’s easy to become desensitized to the material. So it’s important to step away. Taking a break from an edit and returning with fresh eyes can help you maintain your sense of audience and help you do your best work.

Hope that these tips have been helpful. One thing I often think about when it comes to editing TED Talks: The Internet is still very young and doesn’t yet have its own, unique vocabulary for video editing … but one day it will. As new technologies introduce new models for telling stories, and audience expectations shift as a result, the way TED Talks are filmed and edited will change. It’s fun to imagine what the TED Talk of the future might look like.

15
Oct 2014
POSTED BY Jeff
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