- Hey everyone, this is Jeremy
Scheifling at Khan Academy.
Thank you so much for
making time out of your busy
back-to-school season to join us today.
I know there's a ton
going on in your class
and in the world
and so I wanna make the next
30 minutes really valuable.
And to that end, I'm
gonna focus not on just
another lecture or another presentation
but specifically a guide to making those
Zoom lessons, those Google Meet lessons,
those live video lessons that
you're gonna be doing all fall
really effective for your students.
And so I'm gonna be presenting
a sample lesson to you
as my quasi students right now.
That being said, before we
get started I do wanna lay out
a couple of things.
So number one, the question
I always have on my mind
whenever I'm starting a webinar is;
can I get a copy of this,
can I see the slides?
Absolutely, so I'll be recorded
and shared in your email
inbox in about an hour
so look for that no matter what.
And then number two, the
sort of most common questions
I got from folks leading
up to the session is;
hey, I teach seventh grade not sixth grade
or I teach social studies not math,
is this still relevant?
Absolutely, I was actually a
former kindergarten teacher
before I joined Khan.
So even teaching sixth grade math
is a little bit out of my comfort zone
but the key is not
about the content itself
but the pedagogical principles
about how do you use this new format,
this new kind of Zoom session
to be really effective.
And speaking of that, even
though we now sort of use Zoom
as a generic term to encapsulate
all video conference,
the way we used to do for
Xerox with copy machines
or Kleenex with tissues.
What I really mean is
whether you're using Zoom,
Google Meet, Cisco WebEx
or some other platform
like Go-To Webinar, just know that all
of these principles apply.
Because they're less about
technology and more about
human psychology, about how students learn
and how teachers can teach their best
in this new environment.
So no matter what you teach,
no matter what tools you use
to teach, this will be
highly relevant for you
heading into the fall.
Okay that being said, the
frame for today's session
is this really awesome
op ed that Sal Khan wrote
a couple of weeks back.
And I'm not just saying
that because Sal is my boss
and he signs my checks
but because I really do
believe again, as a former
kindergarten teacher who is
all about engaging his students
and getting them interacting
in the classroom,
that when we think about
teaching in this new environment,
it's so easy to psych
ourselves out and say;
hey, I'm really
uncomfortable and unfamiliar
with these technology tools.
I'm gonna have to fall back on,
sort of the lowest common denominator,
giving lectures, broadcasting my lessons.
And I think that if we
push ourselves a little bit
as educators, we say;
we know what great education looks like,
especially in a regular classroom.
We know that it's not about
lectures and monologues,
it's about conversations and dialogues,
getting students thinking,
getting them talking,
getting them learning.
And so Sal's sort of clear end call
is how can we bring that
same level of interactivity,
that same level of engagement
from the in-person classroom
to the online classroom?
And that's what I'm gonna
try demo for you today.
So the first thing that it
really calls out in this op ed
and also I'll share this
out in the email afterwards,
you can read his op-ed directly
but I pulled out some
valuable quotes here.
Is that maybe because of the
school district pressures
folks were getting in the spring
or because we were all
sort of running around
with our heads chopped off.
I know I certainly was trying to
get stuff done at Khan Academy,
we kind of got into this mode
of let's record a bunch of videos,
send them out to our students
and that'll be the best
way we can engage them
in this really difficult moment.
And the reality is,
is that if you're spending
a lot of your time
recording videos but not actually
interacting with students,
you're kind of reinventing the wheel.
Because Sal and others have
been making these videos
for 10 years or more at this point
and so there's any topic in
the world that you wanna share
with your students,
chances are you can find it
on Khan Academy, you
can find it on YouTube,
you can find it on other platforms.
So why just replicate those lectures?
Instead, use that scarce
time you have online
to really get your students plugged in,
thinking, engaging, not just sitting back
with their minds turned off.
So number one, prioritize interaction.
And the best way you can do
that, just to give you a little
sort of hint, is you can
assign all sorts of video
and practice content to
folks on Khan Academy,
even before your Zoom session.
So I mentioned in my
email, if you saw this
leading into this webinar,
I said; hey do me a
favor, watch this video
on multiplication word problems
and then also do this
exercise on multiplication
and division word problems.
And if you wanna replicate that same thing
with your own students,
you can come right over
here, say; check this,
check that and then
assigned to my students.
I can give you more information about how
to sort of use Khan but
actually that's not so much
the focus today as get
that out of the way,
get that taken care of and
then move on to the more
important things, the
more fun things frankly,
which is engaging your students.
So to that point, let's
move to Sal's second point,
which is; when you prioritize interaction,
don't just immediately
go into academic mode.
Okay, we're gonna talk about
math or we're gonna talk about
social studies, instead
give students a chance
to really process things on
the socio-emotional front.
And I know that SEL has
been hot in the last couple
of years, academically speaking
but never more so than the last six months
because we know that
our students have a ton
on their shoulders right now.
So wanna give them an
outlet for creativity,
for imagination, for
social connection, for joy,
all those things that
can seem really hard,
especially in a digital environment.
And to help you with that,
Khan has put together
a brand new tool called
Khan Academy Refresh.
And basically what this is, is over 100
conversations starters
you can use at the start
of a long Zoom session
or if you're changing
between two topics and you
need a little chance to again,
refresh and shake things up.
And what I would love to do to
start off this session today,
again, putting you in that student mode
is everyone check out this
really good prompt here,
I love this one.
Describe the year 2020 as a food.
What would it taste like and why?
And if you can share that
in the question section,
that would be amazing.
So I'm on Go-To Webinar,
there's a little section
called, questions where
you can actually put in
your questions and just
describe that year as a food.
What do you think 2020 would taste like
if you dug into it and why?
Go ahead and answer that
there and obviously,
you can do the exact
same thing on pretty much
any video platform.
Zoom has chat, Google Meet
has chat, WebEx has chat
so this would be a very
familiar kind of way
to get your students talking.
So I'm gonna just shout out
some of the stuff that I love.
I love the fact first of all,
that Connie and Karen both said liver.
They were the first ones to answer.
And so obviously, as
educators we are all tuned in
to sort of the way the
2020 tastes right now.
Hopefully it's also nutritious
like liver in some ways but we'll see.
Greg says, haggis, definitely hear that.
If I think 2020 was described as a food,
talking about it as a boiled pig's stomach
or a cow's stomach certainly makes sense.
Tiffany also says liver.
Meredith says Sour Patch
Kids, sweet and sour.
I love the Meredith was
able to find some sweetness
amongst all the sour experiences.
Gloria says Cod-liver oil
because it's so nasty tasting.
Adriana and Cheryl both say lemons.
Adriana adds; because it had
some sour times and some times
you're not too happy about, absolutely.
Donna says moldy cheese.
It should be so good, this
should be the most amazing year.
2020, it sounds like the
future but it just ain't.
And then I'm gonna say
a couple of others here.
We've got Raymond saying ghost pepper.
Definitely we feel burned this year.
Becky says broccoli, I'll leave
that open to interpretation.
I know some people love
broccoli out there.
John says sauerkraut and
bratwurst because it takes
a lot of gumption to eat it
but it ends up being
satisfying if you try it.
Okay, I have to end on that one John
because you've nailed it.
This is definitely the
most challenging year
across every industry, across
every part of our society.
But I think what we're gonna sort of learn
from this experience over
the next several months
is we can actually teach
ourselves new skills as educators
and they can actually make
us stronger as teachers
for years going forward
if we invest in them now.
So I love that attitude.
So I wanna build on that
going into the next section,
which is bridging the offline
and the online experience
for your students.
So one of the things
that Sal says is like;
look, realistically you
can't be on Zoom all day
no matter what your district
tells you, you have to do.
It's gonna be too much of your
students, too much for you.
And so you're gonna have to have
some work done asynchronously.
In other words, have students
watch some videos offline
or do some work offline,
kind of like I was suggesting
in that first step.
But here's the key.
I think you have to then
use the information you get
from assigning all that stuff offline
and then reconnect it when
you reconvene as a class
in your Zoom sessions.
So that way for a student,
they don't feel like;
okay, this is just some busy
work to get me through the day
and it has no bearing on what
my teacher is talking about.
Instead, this stuff that
I'm working on on the side,
offline is absolutely critical
to what we're gonna do online
when we come together as a class.
And to sort of demonstrate
what I think is possible there,
I wanna show you
what it looks like on
the Khan Academy backend.
This is available to everyone
on this call as a teacher.
Because it says; hey, you
went ahead and assigned
some practice to your students
the same way that I assigned
practice to you before this session.
I said I want you to go ahead and do this
multiplication and division
word problem practice
so you can come in ready to go.
And one of the really cool
things that Khan Academy
will show you, once you've
had students do this offline
is now online you can
look at their performance
and better yet you can see number one;
which of these questions are students
really struggling with?
And so in my sort of sample classroom,
every question was awesome
except for question three
and specifically you
can show your students
what the responses from the class were.
So they can say; hey, that's my response.
Oh, I'm not alone, others
are thinking the same thing.
And so once you start to
identify some of the challenges
and the understanding of the
problem and how to process it
and how you can tackle
it as a whole class,
this is kind of like extra
revision for teachers.
Because unlike before, when
maybe you just had to guess
who is thinking differently
or who might need a little
extra help, now you
can see a single place.
This is the sort of common area
where our whole class is struggling.
Let's really focus on that
with our limited time together.
And so, to sort of walk you through this
and I wanna make it really
interactive again to Sal's point.
I'm gonna give you some
poll questions along the way
and I'm gonna show you how you can do it
in any platform in a second.
So let's look at this
question together class.
Talked about Ron and Hermione,
from one of our favorite books
and they're using their new
magic skills from Hogwarts
to lift feathers into the air.
Now Hermione, the problem tells us,
can lift a feather
3,525 centimeters into the air.
Not too shabby, she knows her stuff.
However, it's really impressive
because that is five times
as high as Ron can lift his feather.
And so our question is;
how high can Ron lift the
feather with his magic?
Now to really break this
down, I wanna do this
first one as a class.
So I wanna ask you an initial
question, you're gonna see
this on your screen in a second,
which is, before we even get
into the mechanics of it,
what kind of problem is this?
Is this addition, is it subtraction,
multiplication, division?
Is it some kind of
Hogwarty and magic problem?
Let me know what you think,
I just wanna get a sense
of where everyone's heads are at
before we dive a little further.
Okay, see a lot of folks
voting, this is awesome.
And really, like don't worry
about whether you've nailed it
or not, just go ahead and guess
because I wanna get a
sense of where we are
as a class community before we dive in.
All right; three, two, one,
we're gonna close this poll.
I'm gonna share the results with you
and you can see that the
majority of the folks in class
are saying division but a big chunk
are saying multiplication,
some are even saying magic.
So let's talk about it a little bit.
Before we talk about
it, let me just explain.
This is yes, a cool
feature of Go-To webinar.
Zoom has something similar.
Google Meet may not have polls built in
but no matter what platform you're using,
using free Google Docs
tools, you can come over here
and basically add any kind
of question onto your screen
and have students vote either through
the chat function or through this.
And here's a cool little hack for you,
if you ever wanna start a new Google form,
you can send to your students
to test how they're doing,
all you have to do is type,
form.new into your browser
and that will start a brand new survey
that you can send out.
So whether you have fancy technology
or non fancy technology,
it doesn't matter.
There are always ways to work around.
Okay, that being said,
let's talk about this
question a little bit class.
So it's definitely tricky
because we're studying
multiplication and division
word problems at the same time
and you could easily see it
going one way or the other,
especially cause it uses
this word five times,
which sounds kinda like multiplication.
But the key thing here if
we're saying that actually
Hermione is lifting
hers higher than Ron is
and if hers is higher, this
has gotta be a division problem
because we've got to
figure out how much less
Ron can lift his feather with his magic.
So the division folks are
right on in this case.
But now I wanna ask another question,
which is; okay we know it's division
because we're focused on
breaking this bigger number down
into something smaller,
in this case Ron's number.
But how would you go about setting it up?
And again, check out a
couple of different ways
to do it on your screen
and thinking about which
one of these approaches
is the correct one based on
the fact that we now agree,
it's a division problem.
Should we start with the larger number,
start with a smaller number?
What makes the most sense?
And what should we divide by, of course?
By five times as high, by two
characters, what do you think?
Okay, thanks everyone for
voting so fast, this is awesome.
I'm gonna go ahead and
share those results.
And this time I'm really happy
to say, you all nailed it.
We know that Hermione got
her feather astonishing
3,525 centimeters into the air.
So that's gonna be the
top number in our formula
and then we also know that
Ron was five times less
so that's gonna be the
bottom number in our formula.
So that's what we're gonna
focus on, beautifully done.
And now we're gonna actually talk about
the last step here so hold on one second.
What is the answer?
And so I wanna have this be
a little more interactive.
So first of all, go ahead
and do your own calculation.
So let me know what you think.
Is Ron at 705 centimeters?
A little more 17,000 centimeters?
881 and a quarter centimeters?
Or is Ron just bad at magic in general,
so it's not even worth calculating?
Okay, I love everyone answering
so fast, this is awesome.
I'm gonna close the poll,
I'm gonna share the results
and you all nailed it.
I'm definitely gonna send
you some digital certificates
after this to thank you for
your awesome work today.
So, great job class.
Now just to explain for
those who might feel
a little bit frustrated at this point.
Okay, 705 that sounds good
but how do we get there?
What I actually wanna
do is I wanna draw now,
I wanna show you exactly
how I got this answer
by coming over to the draw section.
I think this is so
powerful for your students
because you're amazing on the
whiteboard or the chalkboard
in your class but a lot
of times it can feel like;
oh, I don't have that in
my classroom digitally.
So what do I do?
Well, the nice thing is if
you're sharing your screen
and again, you can do that on
a pretty much any platform,
you can always come
over to the draw section
and literally just start
writing on the screen.
And so what we'll do is we'll set this up.
So we've got
35, 25 right there in the middle.
We're gonna divide five into that.
We know five can't go into three
but five can go into 35, seven times.
So we put in our 35,
bring that down to zero.
Five can't go into two so
we're gonna put a zero there
but it can go into 25, five times
so we have seven 705,
five times five is 25
and we're down to zero with no remainder.
So I have to apologize
for my sloppy handwriting.
I will say, I'm doing this completely with
my mouse over here but if
you wanna pick up a way
Khan tablet like the one that
Sal Khan uses to make videos,
it's about 50 bucks right
now on Amazon I noticed.
And then we're also giving them away from
Khan Academy as well.
So that will definitely make your
handwriting a little bit
more legible than mine.
You can just imagine how my
poor kindergarten students
fare given my handwriting
but definitely a cool tool.
So again, get that whiteboard
feel back in your class.
Okay, that being said,
I wanna move on to the
last point that Sal made,
which is you wanna get
your students thinking
and you especially wanna
get them thinking aloud.
And that's because as every
math teacher knows out there,
even if you don't teach
math, even if you teach
anything else, you know
that the best learning,
the best sort of progress and growth
comes when students struggle.
Not just guessing the
answer and being lucky
but really forcing them to
not to sit back passively
but to engage actively.
And so what Sal highly recommends
is ask your students questions,
get them to share their thinking.
Even cold-call them a
little bit in a friendly,
sort of non-antagonistic
way, just to make sure
they feel plugged into what you're doing
and they're not just
sitting back passively
watching the show.
And to do that,
I will say that Khan is
a real sort of wealth
of really good questions
you can ask your students.
Some of them in the practice
section, as you notice,
are fairly easy and that's by design.
We don't wanna intimidate students
but in the videos, we have
some pretty juicy questions.
And I think you can always
steal these and just put them
on your screen if you really wanna give
a really interesting
brain-teaser to your students.
So we're gonna pull up this question,
which is Blair scored 144
points this football season.
So fingers crossed the
football season still goes on.
Blair scored all of his points
with 50 yard field-goal
kicks for three points each.
Not bad, Blair sounds
like quite the kicker
and he played in 16 games this season.
How many field goals did
Blair make in each game?
So this is a two step problem now
that's gonna take a little doing.
Now here's where I'm going out on a limb
as the facilitator of this class.
Is there anyone in the audience
who would be game for me to
turn on their audio right now
and we can just go back
and forth on this question
and I'll diagram out your answer
on my little digital
whiteboard as we go along?
And I would just love to
sort of talk with you about
your thought process,
how you put it together.
And we'll use this as a learning moment
for all of our classmates
who are also trying to figure this out.
So if you're interested in
being our volunteer today,
all you have to do is
click the hand-raise button
on your Go-to Webinar control panel.
I will go and open up your audio
and we'll have a quick chat.
So again, raise your
hand and let's dig in.
Okay, So I believe that Eric was first.
So let me give Eric a shot.
Hey Eric, are you there?
- [Eric] Yes.
- Hey Eric, are you willing
to be a brave volunteer today?
- [Eric] Yeah, let me
find you on my screen.
I can't find you.
I went to the Khan Academy's
site, there you are.
Okay, yeah.
- Oh yeah, no worries, sorry
for all the multitasking here.
Eric tell us a little
bit about what you teach
and where you're based.
- [Eric] I teach high school geometry
and calculus in Fryeburg Maine.
- Oh wow, so cool, well you
are gonna crush this one.
Plus you're compared to a
former kindergarten teacher.
- [Eric] I was off task
for a minute, let's see.
- Okay now worries, well while
you look at this question,
I wanna pull up another cool
little hack for you all,
which is again, if you've got Zoom,
there's a built in whiteboard feature
but there's no built in whiteboard feature
for Go-To Webinars, what am I gonna do?
Well I find a hack, I find a workaround
and sure enough, there's this free site
called whiteboardfox.com.
You just go there, you start a new session
again without paying a cent,
without even registering
and now you have a whiteboard to draw on.
Eric, if you had a chance
to look at this question,
just tell me how you get started.
How would you even begin
taking on this problem?
- [Eric] So they have some
extraneous information.
He scored all his points with the 50 yard,
50 yard field-goal kicks.
So students are gonna look at that number
and they're gonna wonder;
what do I do with that 50?
Which are worth three points each,
he played 16 games.
Were they all scored,
all his points were three
were field goal.
He played in 16, how many field goals
did he make in each game?
Wow.
144
divided by three is,
okay, it's four, 12,
24, three goes into 48.
Let me just check, 48 times three.
Yeah, so
he kicked 48 field goals.
- Okay, beautiful.
- [Eric] And if he played in 16 games,
then you would divide that by 16.
- Okay, so now we have 48 divided by 16.
And of course, it might
be easier just to sort
of think about multiples
of 16, so the answer is?
- [Eric] Well, 32, three.
- Three, three field goals
per game, not bad at all.
- [Eric] Yeah.
And so Eric like that was
amazing, like you totally
just sort of walked us through
how to break that down.
- [Eric] Yeah but then you wanna check.
You wanna check, so if he scored
three field goals per game,
he scored nine points per game, correct?
- That's right, exactly,
so nine times three.
- [Eric] Take nine times 16
and see if that adds up to 144.
- That's right, there we go.
- [Eric] Yeah.
- Okay, beautiful.
So Eric, I have another question
for you whilst you're live
if you don't mind,
do you feel like this
would be a doable strategy
for your students or
are you doing it already
or planning to do it?
- [Eric] I plan on doing
it but what I'm really
interested in is all the
technology, how you showed
your writing and all those
little icons up above
there that you're clicking.
Are they available on the
Khan Academy, lessons?
Are they available on the
Khan Academy, lessons?
- Yeah. Great question.
So I highly, highly recommend using this
sort of review format with your students.
The reason is, is that
you're able to sort of again,
connect the online to
the offline by saying;
hey, here are the questions
that we all just did as a class.
Here are everyone's
answers and then without
going to another site or
even pulling up the Zoom
whiteboard feature, you
have this draw section
built right in, so it's
really like one-stop shopping.
- [Eric] Okay, it's great, it's beautiful.
- Yeah and if you're like me
and you're like even struggling
with like; oh my goodness like
how do I explain all of this?
You can even go to the Hints
section and kind of break
it down a little further if you want.
- [Eric] Oh, wow.
- You all will probably be many steps
ahead of me mathematically.
- [Eric] Yeah, that's beautiful.
- Another things is, it
just let students know also
that there's this like hunger
for connection right now.
Like they're feeling like; oh my goodness,
is my teacher even seeing what I'm doing?
do they care what I'm doing?
And the fact that you can
literally show their responses
on the screen, albeit anonymously says;
hey, they're paying attention
and it does matter what I'm doing.
Cool, okay so Eric,
thank you so much for
being an amazing volunteer.
You totally rock this one.
- [Eric] Thank you.
Okay, so I'm gonna mute
Eric's line for a second here.
I wanna come to sort of
recap what we just discussed
and then also give folks a chance to ask
additional questions as well.
So if you come back to sort of Sal's
call to action if you will,
he was really calling out
for things for educators.
He was saying, number one,
let's go back to first principles.
No one got into teaching to be a lecturer.
You got in it to be a
stimulator, an inspirer,
getting students interacting
every day in your class.
Let's prioritize that
before we do anything
else with technology.
Number two, recognizing
when times are tough
can't just be all academics all the time.
So use tools like Khan Academy Refresh
or just conversation starters
or how was your weekend?
To have students have a
chance to talk to each other,
share their ideas, be creative again.
Number three, offload a
lot of the heavy lifting
lecture-wise to asynchronous work.
So assign those videos on Khan,
assign those practice sessions on Khan.
Get them doing stuff before
they come into the live session
and then when they come in,
make that bridge between
what they've done offline
with what you're gonna talk about online.
So like Eric was just talking about,
show them what they have done,
explain where they
might need a little help
and get them thinking
and sharing their ideas.
And then lastly, don't just
say; sit back and answer
a lot of poll questions
because that's a good start
but get them really talking
about their thinking,
talking about their process.
And you can do that by
cold-calling students,
by giving everyone a chance
to talk during the course
of a session, just get
them talking and sharing,
which is always the most
engaging way to get those brains
turned on and activated.
So that being said,
I would love to answer any
questions you might have
about the technology, about
the pedagogical approach
or about Khan Academy itself.
I'm happy to answer those
via the question sections.
I'm gonna go right down to that right now.
I'm just gonna start taking
them as they come in.
So if you have a question,
feel free to type it in
and I will respond right away.
So Fawn says; can Google forms give you
immediate poll feedback?
Absolutely, so if I was
to go ahead and share this
with my students, what I
could do is I could actually
generate this link so I click send.
I say, I've got my little poll ready.
I'm gonna copy this and
paste it into the chat
or whatever I'm using.
And then what I'll see in the backend
is the responses live as they come in.
And that's again, pretty
powerful even if you don't have
some fancy poll function
built into your platform.
So definitely check it out
and again, the shortcut is
form.new and you can start
a new form at any point.
Great question Fawn.
Okay, let's see here.
So John's asking; what kind of digital pad
does Sal Khan with a pen?
I'm actually gonna share
this with you all right now.
So check this out.
So first of all, I'm gonna
share a couple of things.
Number one, this is the Khan help center,
where if you ever have any
questions, you can always come
and get your answers answered.
So in this case, I'll say; wacom,
which is the tablet he uses
and sure enough, here is
all of Sal's current setup,
Camtasia, Smooth Draw, wacom but again,
you can buy one of these
for 50 bucks on Amazon.
So if you're interested,
feel free to grab that.
And then lastly, I do wanna call this out.
If you're not finding what you need,
please let us know right away.
I know it sounds negative
to report a problem
but know that you can
come here for questions,
for ideas, for suggestions
and we typically respond
in a couple of hours.
So please take advantage of this feature
if you're getting stumped
with anything along the way.
Great question, John.
Okay.
Oh Vicky, so Vicky is actually
our Head of Development
at Khan Academy.
She's asking; is there an
ideal number of students
for a lesson like this?
So here's the interesting thing Vicky,
we actually have more than 200
educators across the nation
live right now, which just
shows that anything is possible
if you sort of plan things out and focus
on that interactivity.
That being said, I think
it would be even more fun
if you were doing this
with a class of 25 or 30
or 35 students and you could
see your students video,
people were talking more frequently.
So if you do have a large
lecture, maybe you teach
at a community college,
totally get it, it's doable
but obviously a smaller class
allows for even more interactivity.
Great question, Vicky.
Let's see here.
Gloria said; what is the name of the tool
for writing on the whiteboard?
And again, if you just
wanna use Khan Academy's
built in tool, that's under
the assignment score section.
So let me show you how to get here
so that's super easy for you.
If you ever come to your teacher dashboard
and you're looking at your class,
you're gonna come down to
the assignment section,
come over to scores
and then you can choose
the specific assignment that you gave.
In this case, here's the
one that I gave to you all
before the session and then you click draw
and you've got that
whiteboard ready to go.
That being said,
if you want a brand new one,
you can come over to whiteboardfox.com.
Say, start drawing, create a whiteboard
and voila, without registering,
without paying a cent,
I've got a whiteboard to
use on my screen right now.
And again, I don't necessarily
endorse one product
over another but I think
in this moment we all need
really good tools, really free tools
and so that's one that I highly recommend.
Okay great question, Gloria.
Let's see here.
Rosemary is saying; what do
you think about assessing
how well students know their
basic multiplication facts?
I've always increased
fluency with how many facts
can you answer in five
minutes on paper and pencil?
And so what I might suggest, Rosemary is
you could use something like Google forms
because I totally agree.
Multiplication facts are so foundational
to everything that we
do, including the problem
that Eric and I just worked on there.
And the fact that Eric knew
his multiplication facts
from having an amazing
third grade teacher,
means that he was able to
do that question so quickly.
And so I think you really do wanna focus
on that speed of processing
as well as the memorization.
Is you could actually build
out a whole question bank
right here, five times five,
seven times nine, et cetera.
You could give it to your students
and you could literally
put a timer on; hey,
you've got to get this done
in a certain amount of time.
Here's another cool little tack.
If you wanna have a timer on your screen,
you come over here to five
minute timer in Google
and Google will start a
timer for you automatically
that you can share on your screen
so your students know
how much time is left.
Again, super easy way to get started
and get your students working really fast
and I'll share a link to
that technique in the chat.
Great question, Rosemary.
I love multiplication facts.
Let's see here, Donna is asking;
what did you mean by the review section?
Is that a part of Khan Academy?
Absolutely, so this scores report
is again, baked into every assignment
that you give on Khan Academy,
where it's gonna tell
you a couple of things.
Number one, it's gonna tell
you which of the problems
were the toughest for your students.
And it's gonna show you
the actual responses
from your students.
So in this case, we
could start to say; ah,
students are consistently
getting this wrong
with the exact wrong answer.
Maybe I can intuit where
they're going wrong.
They're doing multiplication
instead of division.
And then we can get
into all the other stuff
that we've already shared.
And that's all available, all free
for every teacher out there.
So great question, Donna.
Let's see here.
What is the name of the one
on Amazon, says Georgina?
So wacom I would say, is
sort of like the again,
the Xerox or the Kleenex
or the Zoom of tablets
based on what I've seen.
And they have a new one
called the wacom one, O-N-E.
The one that we had given
in the past or the one
that Sal uses is often used
by professional designers.
It's got tons of sensitivity,
you can do shading,
you can do gradients, all this fancy stuff
and that's great if that's
what you're trying to do.
But if all you wanna do
is draw on the screen,
this wacom one is only 50
bucks and it does allow you
to sort of get all the basic stuff done
without a lot of fancy
features you don't need.
So, you might wanna check that out.
Adriana says; you mentioned
Khan giving away some tablets,
where can I find that?
So I'm happy to say that our
Khan For Educators campaign,
which was a little contest or giveaway
tied to the launch of our
new Khan For Educators course
just gave out 15 of those fancier tablets
and we will absolutely do more
like that in the near future.
In the meantime, if you wanna check out
any of that training material,
here's what that course looks like.
And it'll go way more in-depth
on all the things we just talked about.
How do you give assignments?
How do you look at those reports?
How do you figure out what
your students are doing?
So I highly recommend Khan for Educators.
It's the best way to learn Khan.
You can do it all in an hour or two
and you get a certificate for your time.
Okay, great question Adriana.
Let's see here.
Oh, Adu it has a great,
great point probably.
You always have math examples,
can you provide an English sample?
Absolutely, so I promise
that my next session
will be focused on maybe
ELA, maybe social studies.
My wife is a historian
herself so she's gonna,
I'm gonna be in big trouble
if I don't focus on that.
But if we ever wanna find our
full breadth of curriculum,
you can always go to the courses tab
and this lives everywhere
you go on Khan Academy.
No matter whether you're
on the teacher side
or the student side, you can
always find the courses menu
in the upper left hand corner.
And you can see this full spectrum
from math to science to ELA.
And so, for example, if you're
teaching not sixth grade
math but sixth grade ELA,
we've got a ton of stuff
already built out for you.
And so I highly recommend
checking that out
as well as our additional ELA content.
Great call out Adu and
I apologize about that.
Let's see here.
Timothy says; parents at
our board meeting said
they don't want that
flipped classroom structure.
In other words, having
students watch videos offline
and then assuming they're coming
in already having watched.
What would be a good blended
strategy instead of that?
And I totally get it.
Given the sort of low
participation rates we saw
in the spring, there's a
legitimate fear that if you assign
something ahead of time,
there could be 25% or 30% of your students
who never even see it and never even do it
and you don't wanna leave those
students at a disadvantage.
So what you can do is
you can maybe give it out
as an optional pre-reading
just to sort of throw it
out there but then you
can kick off your class
after you do the refresh section,
with a live demonstration.
And kind of like that example of;
I do one, we do one, you do one,
maybe you do the first
example and you solve
one of these challenging
ones that Sal's thrown out
but then you quickly go from
just pure sort of lecture mode
into an interactive mode.
Ask some poll questions,
get the students intuition,
have a student answer the
question all the way through
to really demonstrate that process.
I think the more time you
can spend having students
thinking actively, the more
engagement and the more
learning you're gonna get.
Great question, Timothy.
Let's see here.
Oh, Lindy asks a really good question.
If I have a group of students
already signed up for Khan
and I've linked the class
to Google Classroom,
what's the most efficient
way to get others to join?
So we'll talk about this more
in our next session next week,
where I'm gonna actually
have our teachers log in
as students to my own class
and see what Khan looks like
through the student prism.
But one thing that I highly
recommend if you haven't seen
this before, is that we have
this nice Google Classroom
integration, where if you come
over here to the students tab
in your classroom, you can say; hey,
my district or I have
already done the hard work
of getting everyone integrated
into Google Classroom.
I don't wanna reinvent the wheel.
I don't wanna have to like
register them all over again.
And so you can do quickly
is come over here, click add new students,
click invite your Google Classroom,
connect to Google Classroom
and you're off to the races.
Basically pulling in your
existing Google Classroom class,
right into Khan Academy.
So hopefully that's the fastest way Linda,
to get your students up and running.
Okay, that being said,
I see that there are a bunch
more questions I don't wanna
sort of go too much beyond my welcome,
given that I did promise to end
on at the bottom of the hour.
Let me end with this.
Number one, if you've
got any burning questions
and you want the absolute
fastest way to get a response,
please reach out to our
world class support team.
Here's the amazing thing.
Thanks to Vicky and her team's work,
even as a nonprofit at Khan
Academy, we're able to field
requests in often under
three or two hours.
And so I want you to take
advantage of this team's awesome
availability by submitting
questions right here
and I'll put that in the chat.
That being said, if you
don't get your question
answered here, you can feel free
to reach out to me directly.
My email address will be
in the email that comes
to your inbox in about 30 minutes
with a copy of the recording,
a copy of the certificate
and all the next steps to get started.
And I promise I'll get you an answer,
even if you don't get it
through this function.
That being said, I wanna close
with something that I really
liked that Sal mentioned
in his op ed, which is
what is the point of school
at the end of the day?
Yes, it's about academics.
Yes, it's about learning and
growth and all that good stuff
but it's also where we learn
how to be effective members of society.
Where we develop those first friendships,
where we get inspired
to take on big things.
And so I think, if you can
model for your students
your excitement and your
passion for these topics
in a way to get them
engaged and plugged in
to what you're excited
about, they're gonna come out
of this year yes, with
having overcome so many
adverse challenges but also
with so much excitement
for what's possible.
And I believe that's truly
what school is all about.
So thank you for all that you do.
Thank you for your amazing
questions and participation
tonight and I wish you
all and your students
tremendous success in the year to come.
Thank you so much.
