I started using Khan Academy all the way back in 2013. And while it's gone through a lot of
iterations throughout the year, the core of it has always been instructional videos
and exercises that students can complete online. I've used it, not only for the students in my math
class, but also when I made the transition from teaching elementary school to middle school math.
I actually went to watch some of the videos of this new middle school content that I was going
to be teaching, just to get some ideas of how it could be taught. Khan Academy has expanded beyond
the realm of math and now when you go there, you can see that they have Science content,
Art and Humanities, Reading and Language Arts, and even Life Skills content. So
while my example today is going to be a math class example, just about everything I share
will be applicable regardless of the type of content you're going to use Khan Academy for.
Howdy folks, I am Thom Gibson of New EdTech Classroom, where we show you everything you
need to know about teaching with technology. So let's start by creating our teacher account.
Click on Sign Up, join Khan Academy as a teacher, and use whatever method you'd like. I prefer using
my school Gmail account. And if this is the first time you're creating an account,
it will ask you what class you teach and what school you're at. If your school is not listed,
then just go ahead and skip this part, there's no way to add to your school to the list. So this
is our teacher dashboard. If you're ever anywhere on Khan Academy and you want to get to this page,
click on your name on the top right, and then just click on Teacher Dashboard and it will bring
you right here. And so now let's create our first class. If you picked a subject when you enrolled,
they'll have a class already started for you, or you can just go ahead and add a new class
from scratch. Let's go ahead and add a new class from scratch. Enter your class name. I like to do
the class and then the periods, so Pre-Algebra 1st or something like that. And if you've got
Google Classroom already set up with students, you can actually import those students into
Khan Academy. Select the content that this class is going to be learning. You're going
to see it with some of the Math stuff, you see Get Ready Content, which is good, a good warmup
for students that may be entering these classes. But typically I just select the regular class,
so for me, it'd be Pre-Algebra is the content for this class. Don't worry if you think you're going
to pull content from other sections, you'll be able to, they're just going to present the
Pre-Algebra stuff predominantly for you and for your students. So now we can go ahead and invite
students to join our class. You'll also see a link on the bottom there to get parent permission
to use Khan Academy. So if you're interested in that, especially if you teach younger kids, those
resources are there. And if you are syncing with Google Classroom and your students are already in
your Google Classroom, meaning you're not trying to do this before school starts before your kids
are in classroom, going the Google Classroom method is going to be the fastest method.
And what it does is it emails all of the students in your Google Classroom with a link to join the
Khan Academy class. If you're not using Google Classroom, you can just get the class link and
then share that in an email to your students, or put it up on your learning management system, or
however is going to be the best way for you to get that link to your students. The students have to
use this link to join your class, so I recommend actually using class time to ensure it's like,
"All right, I've got 10 people joined, I'm waiting for four more, waiting for three more, waiting
for two, all right, everyone has joined!" When the students click on that link, they're going
to be asked to either create an account or log in with an existing account. If they are creating an
account, I recommend they use the school email to log in. And if you click on Sign up with Google or
Apple, that's going to be best because it's going to be one less password that the students have to
remember. They just go to Khan Academy and then click on Log In with Google or Log In with Apple,
if your school has that option. If your students are under 13, it may ask them to input their
parent email, depending on if you're a Google Apps for school or not. If you're working with students
that either don't know their parent emails, or you don't think that all the parents are going
to check their email, or not all the parents have emails, then I recommend using the last method
where you actually create the accounts for your students. When you create the student accounts,
you put in your student's name and it creates a username and password automatically for them.
After you create it, you'll have the option to download the list of usernames and passwords, and
this is the only time that you have this option. So I highly recommend downloading it, saving on
your computer, printing it out, and always having a copy available, particularly if you're working
with kids under 13 years old, because they are going to lose that little index card that you
give them that says, "This is your new username and password. Don't lose it." Always just have it
ready or is this going to be super frustrating for you and for the students. Assigning content. On
Khan Academy, you can assign videos, exercises, articles, or quizzes for students to complete.
There's a few ways to do this. You can click on the Assignment section of the teacher dashboard,
and then go down to Assign and search the content that you would like to assign. It's going to be
showing you whatever you said this course was, so if you selected Pre-Algebra, you'll see all the
Pre-Algebra content. As you're looking through it, you can tell it's a video if it has a play button,
it's exercises for students to complete if it's a pencil, and if it's an article or document to
read, it's a little notepad. And clicking on each one of them lets you preview what it is. So what's
nice is if you click on the exercises, you can actually scroll through and see all the different
questions that the students may be asked. And at the very top, it says how many problems the
students will have to complete in order to finish this assignment. It's usually four or seven.
I don't think you can change whether it's four seven, it just comes by default on one of those
two. And you can also see what the student view of the assignment would be. To select the content
that you want to assign, just use the checkboxes off to the right, click Assign at the top right,
and if you're assigning any exercises, it'll ask you if you want to have the students do
different problems, or if you want all of them have the same problem. I usually do different,
so that way they're not all saying, "Oh, I, we got, got that problem. The answer's 7. Pick the
class or the classes that you want to assign this to, as well as individual students if you
were looking to differentiate at all. Set your due dates, and the students can complete it
after the due date, it's just going to be notated late if they do. And you can either assign it now,
which the students will be able to see that it is now assigned, or you can say Save for Later.
I don't recommend planning the next month and a half out and assigning everything that
the students are going to do. If you want to get ahead, then go ahead and select your assignments,
save them for later, and then slowly start to assign them as those dates approach,
so the students don't feel as overwhelmed. You can also use the search bar at the top if you
want to search for something outside of the course content that you've assigned to this
class. And so I teach Pre-Algebra, but sometimes I want to assign something from 6th grade Math or
8th grade Math. So you can search for the topic or you can even search by Common Core State Standard,
and then you'll see the different results of videos and exercises and all the different
resources there are with that topic or standard. Once you click on one of them, you'll see a bar
across the top that says Assign, and then you have all of the same assignment criteria that
you had on the previous page, just located here on the actual video or exercise or whatever it is
that you're wanting to assign. To see all of your active and saved assignments, if you go back to
your Teacher Dashboard under Assignments, there's going to be a section called Manage, and you can
move between your active assignments as well as your saved assignments. The student perspective
and experience. So from the student perspective, if they click on their name at the top and then
click on Learner Home, and they can see their assignments by clicking under Assignments on the
left hand side. Any active assignments that are not past the due date are going to show up right
there on that main Assignment page. And anything that is past the due date is going to show in the
Past tab. You are going to want to go over this with your students because a lot of times the
students will log in, they'll see nothing under Current Assignments and think they're good to go,
not realizing that they've got a ton of past assignments that are overdue because they didn't
even know to click on the Past section. Past assessments will also show whatever score they
had gotten on any previously due assignments. When students are doing the exercises,
they're going to have a page and it's going to be a mix between multiple choice questions, as well
as fill in the blank, and a couple other types that are thrown in there, depending on the content
you're teaching. They put their answer in, they click Check, and they see if they got it right.
If students need a little bit more help on the problem, they can click on where it says Stuck,
and then they have an option to either watch a supplemental video about this topic or get some
hints. Now, if they watch a video about the topic and learn it and then come back to the problem and
get it correct, they still get full credit for that problem. But if they use the hints, they
won't get full credit for it because the hints will lead them to the answer eventually, depending
on how many hints they use. So if students get one wrong, there unfortunately isn't a "Restart this
Batch of Questions" option. I usually recommend students to still try the remaining problems and
then they can give it a shot again and try to go through that next batch of questions, but the
quickest way to actually restart is students will generally just put a wrong answer in, it'll say
that's wrong, and then they'll have to say, okay, let's just move on to the next one. And then they
get to the end and then start over. The students can redo the assignments until they get a grade
that they are happy with. Khan Academy will keep the highest grade that they get. So if they got an
83 and then they tried it again, but got a 75, 83 is going to be what shows up in the grade book.
So this really is built in differentiation, because I remember when I was in school, it's
like, "All right, everyone do 2 through 20 odd problems. And sometimes I was like, "I get this
after doing like 4 problems, why do I have to do like 6 more?" And other times I did need to get
that practice and see more problems. Students are getting immediate feedback and immediate
resources to help them as they are going through these problems. And if they get it pretty quickly,
then they can do the 4 problems, get the 100% and they're done. If they need more of that practice,
then they can continue to get that practice until they get to the 100%, or the grade
that they're satisfied with. And on the note of grades, here's how you see the students
scores. Select the class, and then go down to Assignments, and then on the Assignments section,
click on Scores. You're going to see a grade book and across the top is the assignments, and on the
left side is students' names. So there's quite a bit of data that you can get depending on where
you click. And so if you click on the student name, you'll see all of their assignments,
if they were completed, or if they were done late, how many attempts they had, and what their best
score was on those assignments. Back on the grade book, if you click on the assignments at the top,
it gives you a picture of how the class did as a whole on those problems. The left side
shows the assignment questions, and you can see which ones most students got correct,
and which ones most students got wrong. So if you see a bigger gray bar than a green bar,
more students got that wrong than right. So if you click on one that more students got wrong, this is
actually a really good opportunity to do a whole group discussion about this problem that a lot
of students are struggling with. You'll see the problem in the middle with a lot of blank space,
which if you're projecting this on the board, is plenty of space to work out the problem. And
on the right hand side, you'll see the different answers that students gave, and how many students
gave each answer. But it doesn't actually show which one is the correct answer until you click
Reveal Answer. So what I recommend is just projecting this up and then saying, "Okay, a
handful of you said this answer. Does anyone want to say why they said that answer?" and have that
discussion. And then eventually you can hit Reveal and be like, "Oh, that's the right one!" Course
mastery. Khan Academy really tries to instill mastery of topics in students. Just because the
student did well on assignment the day that it was assigned doesn't mean they've actually mastered
it. How are they going to do in two days, or two weeks, or two months after they first learned the
content? To monitor this quest for mastery, Khan Academy has a course mastery system. You have the
course that your students are enrolled in, in my case it's Pre-Algebra, and students can see
all of the skills related to Pre-Algebra, and what their skill level is on each one. They may see
no skill level because it's something they haven't attempted, all the way up to mastery, which is
something that they have shown proficiency on multiple times over time. And so for students
to actually monitor their course mastery, the teacher needs to create a course mastery goal.
So from your Teacher Dashboard, click on Course Mastery and then Placement. Create a goal. It'll
default to the course that you set this class up, and you can select which students have this goal.
I typically just have all of my students trying to get Mastery on the course that we're in by the end
of the year. So when a student logs in, they're going to see Course Mastery under their class,
and the first time they log in, it'll ask them to do a course challenge, to see where they're at and
possibly level up some of the skills, right from the beginning. And so from there, they're going to
see all the different topics from this course and how much of it they have mastered or leveled their
skills up in. And in math classes, they're going to have an option for Mastery Challenge available
at the top to strengthen some of the skills that they may have already practiced, whether it was
two days ago, or two weeks ago, or two months ago. And once they try the mastery challenge,
it's not going to be available for another day. So they can't just be like, "I'm mastering everything
today!" So this is built in spiraling of content for your students, differentiated to them,
what they need, letting them move on from the things that they have mastered, and giving them
the opportunity to practice the things that they have not mastered yet. And it's gamified, because
students love seeing those levels rise for all of these different skills. Teachers can monitor the
course mastery by going to the Progress screen under Course Mastery on the Teacher Dashboard
to get a glimpse of where students are at in their quest for mastery. So in my class,
the Course Mastery is just something that students work on when they finish whatever we are doing in
class. It's like, "Oh, I've got my assignments in. Okay, go and work on course mastery."
But I am thinking of actually implementing it as like a, you know, 20 minutes each week,
everyone is working on course mastery, and I'm walking through and seeing where kids are at
and helping them as needed. I primarily just use Khan Academy for the exercises. I don't actually
use the videos that much because I like making my own videos, using a Wacom tablet like this,
which is the exact same company that Sal Khan uses to make his videos. So if you'd like to make
your own videos, check out the most affordable Wacom tablet, the One by Wacom. Thank you so
much for watching, and we'll see you in the next video and over on the Wacom tablet review video.