Due to many people demanding it from me I had to reblog this post!
For many years I’ve been trying to find useful videos which I could use with my students in classroom. Many students keep asking me for sources that may take them to an upper English level through watching videos online or on cable TV. As you may know not many people in Brazil is blessed enough to afford a fancy cable set of TV channels. YouTube has been great for many years but due to its commercial use and the viral syndrome that blasts the internet it has also been criticized for killing spare time by showing meaningless content. As a matter of fact I almost never recommend youtube videos to my students because I don’t want to take the risk of not finding it because they might have taken the video away.
As a solution I have constantly tried to get some video resources from places where they would probably not disappear and TED is one of these places. TED, as is shown in the website, “is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.”Currently you can find videos (with transcripts) of conferences and lectures raging from psychology to nutrition and also technology, entertainment, design, business, science and global issues. Are you looking for a nice source of videos that can make you boost your English? Give it a try! http://www.ted.com/
TED’s videos are free and of great quality and most of them come with transcriptions. My favorite videos at the moment are:
Exploring the mind of a killer The amazing intelligence of crows Are mushrooms the new plastic? When social media became news
What are your favorites?