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This is an app for the popular TED Talks Conferences. TED, which stands for Technology Education and Design, is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. These conferences bring together the top minds from a wide variety of fields (science, art, mathematics, medicine, education, etc.), and they present a short talk, 18 minutes or less, about their topic.

The talks are engaging and informative, and because they are short, they could easily be used to supplement a lesson or to bring up an idea for students to contemplate. Presenters come from a wide variety of backgrounds from all over the world, and so students would have exposure to multicultural perspectives as well.

Topics can be found by searching for featured topics, tags, themes, ratings, and languages, and these can then be narrowed by subject. For example, if students are studying nature, videos can be found covering everything from evolution and engineering to the six ways that mushrooms can save the world. Students could also be encouraged to explore topics of interest to them for research purposes, such as music or movies. Students could take two different videos about the same topic, such as climate change, and compare and contrast the two talks.

While many topics are more suitable for older students, some could probably be found that would be applicable to younger ones as well. This would take some searching on the part of the teacher.

Videos can be played directly on the tablet or smart phone, and can even be downloaded and saved for later use.

The TED app can be found in the Google Play Store for the Android smart phone by searching for TED Talks. It can be found on the iPhone or iPad by searching for TED Talks in the Apple iStore. It is free. To learn more about TED, visit their website at TED.com.