Tips for new users

(upbeat electronic music) - The Khan Academy is really easy. It makes it so simple to make the account, it's all free, which is, which still blows my mind. Where I would start with Khan Academy, being new to Khan Academy, is pick one topic. Maybe one topic per week that you can search and try assigning just one assignment or one video, and see where it takes you. It will be amazing how easy it is to then start using that to subgroup kids, to get more feedback, to be able to track their progress. - The way that I got started with Khan Academy is by being a student myself. I didn't necessarily have the math topics that I needed to learn, but I enjoyed going on to see how they were being done and presented on Khan Academy, and then I tried the problems, and I'd see how I did, sometimes I'd make mistakes too. - So the way that I started with Khan, this school year, was I had the kids do a scavenger hunt. They totally for an hour was just doing a scavenger hunt and playing with the website, just getting them excited about it, and just seeing their reactions. When I saw their reactions with Khan and all the cool features, and even things that they were discovering that weren't on the scavenger hunt, then I knew, okay, this is totally doable. When I'm looking for resources on Khan, the first feature is the search feature. It's really friendly, you can put in almost any topic and it will pull up either the grouping of topics that go with that, so if i'm, since our current unit is about solids, I can put in three dimensions and it will bring up all the different things that Khan has available. I can be more specific and put in things like Pythagorean Theorem and it will take me right to that. It's broken down into very simple content units. You can watch a video for a couple minutes, you can look at the article, you can test out the practice set to see if that's the material that you want your students to be getting. And then you decide how you want to use it. Do you want to use it as homework? Do you want to use it as practice inside of class? Do you want to use the video to help you deliver the content or use the video to help you review the content later down the road. There're so many options and there're so many ways to utilize it that I think once a teacher has seen how easy it can be, they get excited about trying it out. - I think at first I was more focused on maybe students who were absent, who needed to get the material in a different way, because I was still teaching in a very traditional sense. But then I started realizing this could be used in other ways, this could help in the classroom, this could help as part of daily practice. And the key for me with Khan Academy is it didn't become one more thing. It was a better thing that took the place of other things I had been doing. As you get more comfortable with Khan Academy, model some things in the classroom. Maybe pick a set of problems, project those for the kids and work through them together. You can show the kids how to use the hints, you can show the kids how to use the video, and along the way you end up learning how to use Khan Academy too, without spending any time outside of class. (upbeat electronic music)