Revisiting Khan Academy

  We now have students who have had access to technology all their lives so they think nothing of using technology for snapping photos, checking out the latest on You Tube, texting or posting on various social platforms.  They are used to immediate feedback with this internet lifestyle.  I read somewhere that they have an attention span of eight seconds which is really not very long.

One of the resources I've used in the past is the Pixar in a Box course with Khan Academy.  I had quite a few low performing students who needed a math credit and didn't do well in a regular math class.  We had fun with the topics and I integrated more in-depth math problems because my superintendent told me it had to have a lot of math, so we just explored the associated math in greater detail.  At the end, they worked in groups to produce animated shorts.  They results were cool and we made a movie with all the shorts for the parents.

I haven't visited the site much this past year due to internet issues but I was surprised to find more material for math teachers and students.  They now have middle school math from Illustrative Mathematics which is a problem based curriculum.  From their web page, they say it is designed to connect procedure with concepts.   I checked out a couple of lessons to see how they worked.

I checked out an 8th grade quiz on rotation around a central point.  There were four questions to answer, some asked for clockwise while others asked for rotation in a counterclockwise direction.  The nice thing is the immediate feedback with information on why the incorrect answers are wrong.  That is really nice because its a step more than "It's Wrong".  Most lessons have a short video with an available transcript so a student can read the material before viewing it.

Another one they have is Eureka Math and Engage New York which have some great lessons.  One provides remedial material for grades 3 to 8 while the other has grade level material for grades 3 to Pre-Calculus.  The remedial material for grade 8 is broken down into modules with a few topics that the student works through.  Once they've completed the module, they take a unit test to see how much they learned.

For grade level material, I checked out the Pre-calculus class.  It is also divided into modules with topics covering around 20 lessons.  I checked out module 1 which covers complex numbers and transformations including matrices.  This unit does not yet have lessons 1 to 3 live so you actually begin with lesson 4. There are practice questions available for each topic with quizzes sprinkled at the end of each set of lessons.  The module ends with a unit test.  This is set up so students can work at their own pace which is nice, especially if students end up traveling a lot.

I like it as a teacher because if I have to teach say statistics which is one of my weaker areas, I can brush up on the material before teaching it.  I realize You Tube has a ton of videos but you can't always access them during the school day.  Our school blocks it as part of its routine because of our very limited band width.

I found one cool feature I'd been unaware of before today.  Khan academy has a feature which allows the teacher to enter a student's MAP scores to generate a "play list" or set of customized skills they need work on.  I think this is cool because many of our students arrive below grade level and need scaffolding. This allows us to do this. We use MAP testing at the school I'm at and the one I'll be at next year so I can use this to help in class.

I think this is cool.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.  Beginning next week, I'll be cutting down to three times a week and possibly weekends because I'm scheduled to travel about every other week and will not have the time to do five a week.