TED Blog

By Bill Gates I spend a lot of my time working to help improve America’s schools. I’m also a big fan of TED Talks. So when TED’s Chris Anderson asked me to give a talk as part of a special TED session on education, I jumped at the chance. The show premieres on PBS this [...]

The analog-to-digital shift that has seen e-readers booting out books, smartphones trumping landlines and tablets making desktops look fuddy-duddy is also bringing new tech tools to the classroom. Last month, I read this New York Times article about CourseSmart, an app that allows teachers to track whether students have done their reading in digital textbooks, [...]

This weekend, we opened up the Style section of The New York Times to see a very familiar face — renegade gardener Ron Finley, whose talk “A guerilla gardener in South Central LA” now has more than 900,000 views. In the article, Finley describes what he calls “the TED effect” — the slew of interest [...]

Timothy Bartik says that investing in early childhood education is not just good for the children involved — but for communities as a whole. In today’s talk, he offers a detailed look at how preschool education boosts local economies in colossal ways. “Early childhood education can bring more and better jobs to a state and can [...]

Take a bike ride down the 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider — thanks to a lucky Google Glass winner, whose ride-along video premiered Friday during TEDxCERN. Andrew Vanden Heuvel always dreamed of being an astronaut; he ended up becoming a pioneering online physics teacher. So when he was selected to be one of the first to [...]