Webinar: Using Khan Academy and Khan Academy Kids for Distance Learning

- All right, hello everybody. And thank you for all taking time out of what's gotta be an incredibly busy day to join us for this webinar. My name is Karen White, and I am on the Product Team here at Khan Academy. I am also the mother of two girls, ages 12 and 17, both of whom have been out of school since last Friday. One with a distance learning plan and one with no plan at all. So we are definitely winging it here in San Jose, California, while we shelter in place. I'm sure many of you are as well. With me today, we have Dan Tieu from our Marketing Team. You can see him if you go to the next slide, see him pictured there with his nieces and nephews. And we have Sophie Turnbull in that picture with a helicopter. She's going to be talking to those of you with little ones about how to get started on our Khan Kids app which is designed as a mobile app for kids two through seven. I wanna thank our friends at Bank of America for generously supporting our ability to bring school closures resources to you at this time. And finally, before we dive in, I just wanna mention that this session will be recorded and it will be sent out by email soon after we finish this session. Also uploaded to YouTube for easy access. So if you need to step away, if you miss parts, don't worry about it, it will be available to you to review and to share with your friends and family. So with that, today, we're going to help you and your child get started on Khan Academy. If you are a teacher, we're not gonna be going through the teacher experience in this webinar, but we're gonna send these slides out, and that link on the right over there that says watch this webinar, that will take you to teacher webinar we recorded earlier this week, it's fantastic and it'll give you everything you need to get started there. We're also not going to be doing a step by step walkthrough of the setup, but in a couple slides you're gonna see our quick start guides that actually will do that for you quite well. So, a little bit more about Khan Academy. First of all, this came up in a number of questions from the pre-webinar survey. Khan Academy is free. We are a nonprofit organization and all of our instruction and practice is always free to learners and parents and their teachers. Khan Academy is a trusted source. You can trust us because we've been doing this for a long time, more than 10 years with millions of users around the world. All of our math courses are Common Core aligned and our other non-AP math courses include both Common Core material and additional content. Our AP math courses are aligned to the AP standards and as I mentioned, we served, even before the school closure started, we were serving well over 10 million learners around the globe every month. And finally, Khan Academy is flexible. The Khan Academy main app which is what I'm gonna be talking to you about is available on desktop, web, iOS, or Android, anytime, anywhere, translated into over 40 languages. Sophie's gonna talk to you later about the Khan Kids app which is a mobile app only. But Khan Academy is a main, Khan Academy we're gonna be talking about for the next 10 minutes or so, is available on desktop as well. So, now let's get into what it really means to learn on Khan Academy. And in our pre-webinar survey, the most common question we got, and thanks everyone who took the time to fill it out. The most common question we got was how do I figure out what my child should be learning? That's a great question because if you're like me you might not know exactly what your kids were up to right before the school closure started and you're certainly not used to teaching it, right? I've been a mother to my younger daughter for 12 years and I've been her teacher for about 12 hours. So, I would say the first thing to do is pat yourself on the back for trying to pull this off during a time that has a lot of other stressors in play as well. So with that preamble, here are a few tips to getting started. First things first, look at your child's homework and their textbooks. If you have access to a parent or a student portal for your school, you might be able to log in and see what assignments your teachers, your child's teacher have lined up before school let out. That'll give you some clues as to where to start their learning path. If you don't have that, that's okay. You can select a course on Khan Academy based on your child's age and grade. And you can navigate your way through that any number of ways. You can start with their very first lesson. We're gonna talk in a few minutes about how to start with the Course Challenge to identify learning gaps quickly. Or you can let your child choose where to start. And even if your child chooses something that kind of feels easy to you, that's okay. Those early math skills are foundational to more advanced math, and it's not necessarily a bad thing to have your child review that material and gain confidence and really just keep the brain training going while we're in this really unusual time. Finally, for high school students who are enrolled in AP or are studying for the SATs, we have most pop, the most popular AP courses on Khan Academy, and we also have our Official SAT prep. I can vouch for that as a parent of a senior. It is incredibly valuable. My daughter used it as her sole way to prepare for the SAT and was really, really happy with her results. So, overall, if I had to give you one mantra to remember, it's this. Some learning is better than no learning. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. There's all sorts of things that are being demand of you right now and just get started, it's very easy to course correct, to change your learning path and make adjustments as you go with Khan Academy. So, next up, I wanna share those quick start guides I was mentioning. These links, again, this will be provided to you after the webinar. There are three different guides here. Two for Khan Academy and one for Khan Academy Kids. Just for a little bit of context on why we have different guides for younger and older children on Khan Academy. It basically comes down to the fact that there are some regulatory requirements around setting up accounts for younger kids that require your approval. And so what we wanted to do was give you the absolute fastest most efficient way to get started based on your child's situation, and these guides are customized for the fastest path through to get your child learning and then to get you set up as a parent. So, lots of support in there in those guides. What I'm gonna do now is jump into what happens once you're signed up. And this is what you're gonna see first. You're going to be offered the opportunity to personalize your child's learning by selecting their grade level and seeing what courses we recommend. Now, regardless of our suggestion, your child can choose any course on Khan Academy. So if you have a child who's really into math and is generally performing above grade level and loves a challenge, you can choose any course that's right for that child. Same the other way. If you have someone who's struggling, don't feel bound to the grade level suggestions. And after you've done that, so you've selected a course, you can select more than one, you can always go back and add, this is what your child's experience is going to look like. The courses will show up on the home page whenever they log in. And you'll see that Khan Academy is designed to give your child a lot of agency in terms of where they're going to go to do their next task. And that can be great. If you've got a child whose engaged and motivated, let them roam around, let them take these things in the order that sparks their interest and energy. It can also be a little challenging and overwhelming if you've got a younger child to have so many choices. So one of the things we like to do when we're in the classroom with young children is say, follow the blue button. You can see there that red arrow is pointed at a blue start button. That's pretty much always gonna be a good call. It will essentially take the child linearly through the course, starting with the most basic skills and advancing from there. So, always an option if you wanna give your child a little bit more of a sense of where to go next. So, once you've done that, if you were to click into any one of those units, those then turn into lessons that include instruction, practice, and assessments. If you look at where those arrows are, you can see the practice exercise is on the right and the instructional resources on the left. So, if your child is practicing and is finding that the material is a little bit challenging, but not so challenging that they wanna move to a different level. They're likely to find an article or a video or a series of them right next to that practice content that can support them as they're practicing and reinforce those skills. And then, the other thing I wanted to mention is this course challenge. So every, most of our math courses are gonna have this challenge, and it's a great way to accelerate the process of getting your child to that learning edge, that place where they're struggling a little bit in a productive way, but not so much that they get discouraged. And the way to do this is you scroll to the bottom of the course page and you'll see this button that says, start course challenge. These do take a little bit of time, so you wanna leave 30 or 45 minutes for the child to get through that, but what you're gonna come out of it with is the sense of the skills that they're really comfortable with and the skills where they might need some more practice. Especially given where we are in the school year, this is a pretty good option for you because there's going to be a lot of content that feels familiar in most cases. So starting at the beginning may not be what you need to do. The one caveat I'll say is at least if you've got a child who is generally in the mode of performing, being a high performer, the course challenge can feel a little bit like a test that they didn't get to study for. I know for my daughter when I put this in front of her, she was still in that mindset of I have to get an A, but really what the course challenge is for is identifying where she needs to practice. So I needed to really kind of encourage her and coax her along to make her comfortable with the idea that this wasn't a test, she didn't need to get an A, and this was really about finding the best ways for her to spend time on Khan Academy. So, when they're practicing, we've really designed Khan Academy to be a delightful learning experience. We celebrate when they've leveled up, they'll see confetti, there are bells when you're on a roll, you'll get a nice surprise every time you answer a question right, and there are videos and hints to get in the moment support as you go. We really try with Khan Academy to celebrate grit and perseverance, not just leveling up, because that's what having a growth mindset is all about. So now, I'm gonna very briefly talk about the parent tools that you can access as part of your parent account. And the main thing you're going to do when you're logged in as a parent is look at your child's progress. This report is essentially like being in the room with your child, looking over their shoulder, seeing what they're working on, except without the looking over their shoulder part. So, it's almost like an audit trail that shows you every exercise, how much time they've spent on it and how they did. And there's really three values I think that are going to be helpful to you as you're coaching your child or thinking about how to motivate their work. There are two numbers you'll see in there, the two numbers, both say three in this particular case. One is the time spent on exercises which is the real practice of applying the skills, and the other is the total learning time on Khan Academy which includes things like watching videos or reading articles. You're looking for in general a mix of those things, not just the instruction, but also the practice. And then, the third thing you're going to see are those little arrows, you can see a little green one there on the screen. That's going to tell you when a skill is leveling up or down. And what we essentially mean by that is your child is in, if the skill is going up it means they're making progress towards mastery of that skill. If mastery sounds like a fancy term, what it really means is this child is getting so good at this skill that they could probably explain it to somebody else, they could almost teach it. There also are going to be red arrows if the child is struggling and maybe going down a level on a skill, and those are your opportunities to say hey, let's lean in a little bit here, maybe review some videos and support them with instruction. So, this is all a good segway into the last few minutes I'm gonna spend on Khan Academy before turning it over to Sophie. And it's really about how do we motivate and structure the student's day. Let's face it, it's hard, it's a lot competing for your child's attention right now, let alone your own, and just be kind to yourselves. But I always like to remind myself that at the end of the day, yes, I want my kids to be learning, but the most important thing is we're all gonna be stuck in this house a lot together, so we have better get along. So, in terms of setting goals, it's great to include your children in the process, they're going to be more invested if you do it that way, and take it one day at a time. If the goals you set for your first day don't turn out to be particularly realistic given your situation, stay flexible, let yourself, give yourself some slack, we're all in uncharted territory right now. And then recognize milestones. We always like to celebrate both the progress and the effort. So when you look at those numbers around time, that's one of the ways you can congratulate your child for making the effort, and then look for those level ups as an indication that your child is making progress. All right, one last thing. I think some of you probably have seen we have posted online a number of templates for daily schedules that can help you just get a little bit more of that structure that helps your child be calm, creates a sense of predictability, and gives you some room to maneuver because you have a sense of how your day is going to go. So feel free to click through on those when you get the materials and hope that they are helpful to you as they have been to me in terms of giving your children some structure and order in what is kind of a chaotic time. And with that, I will turn it over to you Sophie. - Hi everyone, I'm Sophie from Khan Academy Kids. And tonight, I'm really excited to walk you through the basics on getting set up, how to learn at home with your kids on Khan Academy Kids. Khan Academy Kids is made by Khan Academy. It's a mobile app that is separate to the Khan Academy app or the Khan Academy desktop experience and it's designed especially for children ages two through seven. It's available on your mobile, be it an Apple iOS or Android as well as touch screen Chromebooks, and you can find it in the app store that you use. So, what we're going to do right now is quickly watch a demo of how to get set up on Khan Academy Kids in about three minutes. So the first thing you want to do is go to your app store and download Khan Academy Kids. Once you've done that, you can open our app and you'll be greeted by our fun characters. - Khan Academy Kids. - [Sophie] Cody, Ollo, Sandy, Rhea, and Peck. You'll be taken to a signup screen. Click signup and enter your email. We use this email to create your account and we're going to ask you to verify it. So once you've entered it and clicked next, you'll receive an email in your email inbox and you want to click the verify email button in that email, and then you are set to go back into the app and start creating accounts for your kids. Click next here and here you are. First, we're going to add the name of our first child, Kim. Kim is six and we'll select an avatar for Kim, a dolphin. Ready to start learning now, but we'll quickly show you how to create a profile for another child. If you swipe up into the parents section you'll see Kim's account there, tap the new button, swipe up, and enter the name of the next child, Oscar. Oscar is actually older, he's seven, and he is going to be a tiger. And now we have two children's profiles, Kim and Oscar. We're going to start learning with Kim, so we tap Kim. And if we press the play button here, we'll be in our personalized learning path. It'll serve up age appropriate activities for your child like this one. - And together they have five toy dinosaurs. - If you wanted to do self serve you could click in the top left corner on the library icon, then you can scroll through all of our activities, books, and videos, our reading, our logic, social emotional learning, and you can pick out what your child works on. We've partnered with National Geographic and Bellwether Media to offer a range of characters and stories and formats to keep your child busy. And there's always the offline functionality, that suitcase under the word library. We can't wait for you to discover everything there is to do on Khan Academy Kids. So now, you should be ready to get started learning. And I wanna run through a few of the questions that we've been getting from parents learning at home with their kids. I mentioned the home screen. If you press that big green play button on the homepage, you'll go into the personalized learning path. And if you press the top left library icon, you'll go into the library. Well, what's the difference between those two? The personalized learning path is an automatic playlist of all of our activities, math and reading, social emotional learning, books and videos, and they get served up to your child to meet them where they're at, so they're age appropriate and they're automatically served up. The learning path might be a good idea if you just can't be there to pick and choose every activity that your child is doing for a certain part of the day. The library is where is where you can self serve out of our catalog of activities. It's the blue, the book icon in the top left hand corner of the home screen. All of the activities are the same. It's just about how they're served up to you. Do you want to pick and choose what your child is doing from one activity to the next or are you happy to let them work their way through the personalized learning path? That's totally up to you. Now, I wanna cover some quick tips for learning at home with Khan Academy Kids. All of Karen's points about having a daily schedule, but being flexible, and motivating kids at home being terribly difficult apply to two to seven year olds. On the technical side though, I wanna point out a couple of things. If you have to go offline, I mentioned the suitcase icon in the library, tap that. All your child's progress will be saved and uploaded when you go online next. If you want to view progress, go into your child's library view and you'll see green, yellow, and red check marks indicating whether they've mastered something, they're still working on it, or they're yet to work on it. On the content side, there are a few things that parents have pointed out to us. Parents are loving using out the thousands of books that we have to read to their children. We have books on everything from animals to feeling frustrated. So, have at it in the book section. Parents have also been saying that they're enjoying the healthy habits throughout the act. There are activities on things like saying hello and making friends, even getting dressed in the morning. Some of these habits that are so important when we're couped up inside. And so, I encourage you to check those out in the logic tab. And then, finally, in the create tab, your child can do something creative like drawing, making a card for a friend, you can screenshot it and send it on, and Khan Academy Kids is really focused on not just math and reading the core academic subjects for two to seven year olds, but also making sure kids are creative, that they're interacting with you, that they're moving around, getting up and jumping and making zoo animal noises and really developing their whole selves. The last thing I wanna mention is that there is some places you can go for more information. So teachers should look out for the Teacher Guide that is linked in the quick start handout that we are posting on this webinar. It has a whole lot about how you might teach remotely with Khan Academy Kids. And if you have any questions about getting started, please email khan, that's K-H-A-N, kids@khanacademy.org. And you should follow us on social media if you're into that for daily activities, things like circle time and what to do with your kids on Khan Academy Kids. Thanks so much. - All right, thank you Sophie and Karen. Hi everyone, it's Dan here. I'd like to for y'all to do two steps before we open it up to live questions. First, if you can all go out to the handout section and grab the cheat sheet, it contains guides for this entire process, from finding the right content for your kids, to tracking their progress, and to creating structure and motivation. It also contains step by step instructions on how to set up an account and links to other parent resources. So feel free to download it and share it with other parents, friends and families. And secondly, if you have any questions, please add them to the question box. I'll be facilitating while Karen and Sophie provide their expert answers. So, let's go ahead and start with some good questions that are coming in, and thank you everyone for submitting. So we have a question, Karen, for you. Should my child have separate account for me as a parent? - Yeah, that's a great question. And absolutely, we would recommend that you and your child have separate accounts. First of all, you have a set of controls and settings that are particular to the parent account, but there's a second reason that I wanna emphasize which is that you actually may wanna do some learning on Khan Academy yourself. I have personally found that seventh grade math feels like it was a really, really long time ago, and so while your child is learning in their own account you can actually go in as a learner, and this is in the quick start guide, and practice yourself. So you'll have your own learning path if you have a separate account from the one you set up for your child. - Awesome, thank you Karen. This next one I think it's most appropriate for you Sophie. Is Khan Academy Kids integrated with the desktop Khan Academy, and can I see their progress from the kids app on the desktop? - So the short answer is no. Khan Academy Kids is a mobile app and the progress that your child makes on the Khan Academy Kids mobile app will not be present on the Khan Academy desktop experience. We've designed it so that it's touch screen and it's especially for two to seven year olds. And I think in the future, we look forward to linking those two experiences, but for now, no. - Okay, great, thank you. Here's a question that either of you can answer, perhaps Karen you tackle it first and Sophie, you can go next on this one. So we have a question from Matteas Devereus, apologies if I pronounced the name incorrectly. So the question is, how much should we supervise our kids while they learn? - Yeah, great question. I guess my first response would be, how much can you? I know at least for me, I am working during the day even though I'm here at home, so my ability to supervise is fairly limited, and I imagine many of you are in the same position. And we have designed Khan Academy so that most children can progress independently. I like to make myself available to be nearby, but if you're supervising because you want to hold your child accountable, that's where that progress report becomes really, really valuable. Your child cannot practice on Khan Academy without you seeing it and vice versa. So, that report will be your way of staying connected with what your child is learning even when you don't have the ability to sit side by side. Having said that, if you do have the ability and if your child welcomes it, it's a great, it's a great chance to really be part of their learning journey. - Yeah, I would just quickly echo that. It's great for parents to be interacting with Khan Academy Kids while their child is using it, particularly in the library mode. But if you needed to step away for a time and have your child learn independently, the personalized learning path is really taking care of things while you have to do that, and you'll be able to see a comprehensive view of their progress when you go back into the library. - Yeah. And keep in mind, Khan Academy is used in schools all over the place, and that's a situation where one teacher has a group of 30 kids. So, it's definitely designed for kids to be able to make independent progress through a combination of instruction and practice paired together without direct supervision. - All right, so I think we have time for one more question. Karen, this one's from Heather. Will there be an answer key to help grade if I'm a parent and not in a teacher account? - Yeah, great question. So, you will not get an answer key, but you actually won't need to grade your child's practice, because they are getting real-time feedback with every question. So, as the questions are answered, they will immediately know whether they got the question right or wrong, they'll have access to a hint, and they'll have access in many cases to a rationale even if they do get it right. So, there's really no need for an answer key. - All right. So, thank you Karen and Sophie for sharing your expertise with our audience, and thank you to our audience for taking the time out of your busy evening to be with us. We know there's so much going on and we really appreciate you investing your time into this session. We know that we hit our limit in terms of the number of people who wanted to join the webinar, so we apologize for that. So for those of you who or may know folks who were not able to get in, this will be, this will be record, this is recorded, and we'll be posting live online and available to everyone. And so, rest assured that this information will be available to you. And secondly, we also have quite a few other resources available on our website at khanacademy.org. There's currently a blue ribbon at the very top. We're adding new resources every day and making changes quite frequently, so feel free to go there and click through for more information. Before we sign off, please do us one more favor and take the poll that pops up at the very end of this webinar and let us know two things. First, how could we make future iterations of this session even better for you all? And secondly, what kind of sessions would you like to see next? So this was obviously a relatively high level session to get you all started, but if you wanted us to dive deeper into things like motivation, specific courses like math or science, please let us know, we're here to support you, this is the first of future webinars that we wanna create to be able to support you through this time. So with that, from all of us at Khan Academy, thank you again for joining us, and good night.