Bridgeway & The Khan Academy

Back on December 11, we posted a long article about the Khan Academy and how the online approach they're taking to education is revolutionizing some classrooms.  As it turns out, Khan Academy videos have made it into our own Bridgeway classrooms!  Here's a posting from one of our Math teachers on how she's using it to help students with learning disabilities.

Enjoy!

Rhonda & the Bridgeway team


By Jean Cain
Teacher, Bridgeway Academy

My name is Jean Cain and I have been a teacher at Bridgeway for the past 4 years.  All of my students have learning disabilities in different areas, such as listening, writing, reading, and math, so I have to come up with creative ways to teach the skills they need.

I use Khan Academy in my math skills class with some of my students.  A fellow teacher showed me this site last summer and I thought it would be a fun and useful additional resource my students could use.

My math classes have 6- 8 students in them at a time, and each student is working on individual lessons that cover topics or skills they need to review and practice. Students complete their work at their own pace.  I teach the initial lesson with the students often using concrete materials or manipulatives. Afterwards, those students who wish to use this website are encouraged to do so.

Students enjoy this website because it offers concise lessons that are taught step-by-step.  Salman Khan will talk out his reasoning while recording this information to solve multi-step math problems.  This is very beneficial to those students that find multi- step problem-solving challenging.   My students also like how he records information or steps using different colors.

The lessons can be paused and replayed, so the students can record the work at their own pace. Students that require more time to process material benefit greatly from this.  They’re able to create their own detailed notes that are well-organized. For my older students that find textbooks challenging for various reasons, this website allows them a more independent approach to learning.  I have seen an increase in confidence as a result.  Students can use this site at home to help with their homework, or receive additional instruction regarding a topic they’re interested in learning about.  Younger students enjoy collecting the badges and choosing which lessons they want to work on.

This site is helpful for most of my students and is definitely worth checking out.

More ideas that challenge the rules of education

If you`ve been following the blog for a while, you know I love to share ideas about education that make us think differently.  Here`s a looooonnnnggg article from Wired magazine about the Khan Academy that I stumbled across the other day.  I won`t post the whole thing here, but I will encourage you to click through to the article and read the whole thing. 

Enjoy!

Rhonda

How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education

By Clive Thompson

“This,” says Matthew Carpenter, “is my favorite exercise.” I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It’s an inverse trigonometric function: cos^-1(1) = ?

Carpenter, a serious-faced 10-year-old wearing a gray T-shirt and an impressive black digital watch, pauses for a second, fidgets, then clicks on “0 degrees.” Presto: The computer tells him that he’s correct. The software then generates another problem, followed by another, and yet another, until he’s nailed 10 in a row in just a few minutes. All told, he’s done an insane 642 inverse trig problems. “It took a while for me to get it,” he admits sheepishly.

Carpenter, who attends Santa Rita Elementary, a public school in Los Altos, California, shouldn’t be doing work anywhere near this advanced. In fact, when I visited his class this spring—in a sun-drenched room festooned with a papercraft X-wing fighter and student paintings of trees—the kids were supposed to be learning basic fractions, decimals, and percentages. As his teacher, Kami Thordarson, explains, students don’t normally tackle inverse trig until high school, and sometimes not even then.

But last November, Thordarson began using Khan Academy in her class. Khan Academy is an educational website that, as its tagline puts it, aims to let anyone “learn almost anything—for free.” Students, or anyone interested enough to surf by, can watch some 2,400 videos in which the site’s founder, Salman Khan, chattily discusses principles of math, science, and economics (with a smattering of social science topics thrown in). The videos are decidedly lo-fi, even crude: Generally seven to 14 minutes long, they consist of a voice-over by Khan describing a mathematical concept or explaining how to solve a problem while his hand-scribbled formulas and diagrams appear onscreen. Like the Wizard of Oz, Khan never steps from behind the curtain to appear in a video himself; it’s just Khan’s voice and some scrawly equations. In addition to these videos, the website offers software that generates practice problems and rewards good performance with videogame-like badges—for answering a “streak” of questions correctly, say, or mastering a series of algebra levels. (Carpenter has acquired 52 Earth badges in math, which require hours of toil to attain and at which his classmates gaze with envy and awe.)

Initially, Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She’s now on her way to “flipping” the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan’s videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It’s when they’re doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck.

“I’m able to give specific, pinpointed help when needed,” she says.

The result is that Thordarson’s students move at their own pace. Those who are struggling get surgically targeted guidance, while advanced kids like Carpenter rocket far ahead; once they’re answering questions without making mistakes, Khan’s site automatically recommends new topics to move on to. Over half the class is now tackling subjects like algebra and geometric formulas. And even the less precocious kids are improving: Only 3 percent of her students were classified as average or lower in end-of-year tests, down from 13 percent at midyear.

Read the rest of the article here.