Do you have a lesson to teach? Seeking nominations for TED2012: The Classroom

For the upcoming TED conference — TED2012: Full Spectrum — we’re looking for 10 of the world’s best teachers to take the TED stage during a special session we’re calling The Classroom. We’re accepting nominations to help track these people down. You can nominate yourself or a remarkable educator we should know about — who doesn’t have to be a teacher in the traditional sense.

After TED, these talks will have a life online as part of TED-Ed, a new initiative we’re launching in 2012. With TED-Ed, we are creating a library of videos sepcifically for educators and students. The videos will be arranged using teacher-centric/learner-centric categories and tags, designed to help teachers quickly discover the perfect video for the lesson at hand. The videos will also be arranged into playlists to give students a multidisciplinary, immersive insight into a learning concept.

The talks we’re looking for will each:

+ be shorter than 10 minutes
+ contain informative material, not just inspiring messages
+ be delivered with a huge amount of passion for the topic
+ engage an audience from age 14 to adult
+ be something you might imagine a teacher using in the classroom as video to supplement a lesson.

We’re especially keen to include brilliant EXPLANATIONS, meaningful A-HA moments, powerful STORIES, indelible IMAGES.

Here are a few links to talks that fit the bill:

Vilayanur Ramachandran on mirror neurons

David Gallo shares underwater astonishments

This explanation of special relativity

Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different?

Now, a couple of notes about what we’re not looking for. For this session, we do not want talks about teaching methods, education reform or education in general. We are not looking for an inspiring, “go forth,” commencement-style talk. We do love those sometimes, but they’re not a fit for this session.

The deadline for nominations is November 30, 2011, at midnight Eastern, and we’ll contact the speakers we’ve chosen with invitations (or more questions) by December 12, 2011.

TED2012 takes place February 27-March 2, 2012, in Long Beach, California. The Classroom session will take place on March 2. We’ll cover coach travel, good accommodations, and a pass to TED for those 10 amazing teachers who take the stage.

We hope you’ll share your best lessons (or teachers) with us. Good luck!

Nominate yourself or another person >>

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