Khan Academy Student Demo

Hi everyone, this is Jeremy Shiffling from Khan Academy. Thanks so much for taking time to join me in this big week, either before the start of school or in the middle of the start of school, depending on where you're calling from. But wherever you are in your own educational journey this school year, I'm really excited that you joined us for our student experience demo. This is all about a chance to basically go behind the curtain and see what your students see on Khan Academy, so you can make the most of this tool this year.

That being said, just a couple of things to get started here. I want to call out as always that, like every Khan Academy webinar, we will be recording the session and then sharing it in your email in about an hour, so that'll happen automatically whether you can join for the whole session or whether you have to run out and make dinner or anything else. So have no fear; you will have that in your inbox shortly.

In the meantime, you can even get the slides themselves through the handout section right now on the GoToWebinar control panel. So if you're really eager like me to see where we're headed, feel free to grab that PDF under the handout section. And then finally, because just like last week's session, I want to make this as interactive as possible, please, please, please make sure that you're logged into your Khan Academy account. That way you can follow along and actually experience everything just the same way that your students do. It'll make it a really fun session and a really powerful one as well.

That being said, I want to sort of cut to the chase here and talk about one of our big philosophies here at Khan Academy, which is that great teaching involves great empathy. And I love this quote from Ann Lieberman, which is that great teachers don't just teach kids and lecture to kids; they empathize with kids, they respect them, they understand where they're coming from, and they serve those needs through that empathy. And I think, to put it in a more practical standpoint or a practical perspective, what I've heard from a lot of educators is, "I never really got Khan Academy until I tried using it as a student, either for my own courses in college or my own teacher test prep, or just trying to understand what my students were saying." That was the light bulb moment; that's when I got it.

So please put yourself into your student's shoes for the next 25 minutes or so and sort of experience what your students experience, so that way you can give them the best possible experience this fall. Okay, to get things started, we're going to begin with you joining my classroom on Khan Academy the same way that students might sign up for your own classroom. So again, if you're already logged into Khan Academy, all you want to do is go to bit.ly/coninvite.

So I'm going to actually show you what that looks like over here, so check this out. So here I have my teacher account set up, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here to bit.ly/coninvite. I'm also going to put that in the chat just so you can click the link for even easier access. And once you're over there, what you will see is this little invitation pop-up, and it's going to say, "Hey, you're joining the student experience demo. Are you ready to sort of plug into this classroom?" And I know it might seem a little strange, like, "What is this classroom that Jeremy has set up?" But just roll with me a little bit here.

Go ahead and click "Join Student Experience Demo," and you will now be a registered member of our sample class. I will give you two minutes to do the same on your side. I wish, I wish, I wish I could play some Jeopardy music right now, but at the very least, just follow the invites on the screen: bit.ly/coninvite, join my class. And if you have any questions whatsoever, feel free to ask them using the questions section of the GoToWebinar control panel. I'm happy to answer those live and over text as we go along.

So again, join my class, and that'll be the first step towards seeing what your students see. Looks like no questions are coming in yet, which is awesome. Definitely, probably not going to be identical to the experience your students have; mine always ask questions about everything. But hopefully that means everyone is making good progress in joining my class.

What you'll be able to see, as a teacher, whether you're doing this over Zoom or doing this in person, is you'll be able to see students coming into your class in real time. So check this out; I'm going to come over to my roster. This is the student experience demo. I'm going to click refresh, and what you're going to see now is that all the teachers across the country who are involved in this webinar have just joined this class, which is pretty incredible. So sure enough, they're coming in. Ally's here, Eliza's here, Christine's here, Diane's here. Thank you all so much.

And what I'm going to do is actually include you in an assignment shortly, but I will get back to that in a moment. I want to answer a couple of questions because folks are asking. Leila says, "It looks like I'm still in my teacher's account." Absolutely! What you might have noticed in my demo window here is that after you join my class, Khan always kicks you back to your teacher homepage, and that kind of keeps you centered on the teacher experience. But have no fear; I'm going to show you where to actually confirm that you are now a member of my class as a learner. Great question, Leila.

Diane had the same question. Great point. Melissa said the same, so sorry I didn't call that out; my apologies. But yeah, you will come back to your teacher dashboard, but have no fear; you are now registered in my class, and it's showing up on the screen right here. So I think at this point, everyone's had a chance to join. We have about 30 students from across the country, which is awesome, so thank you all for joining.

What I want to do now is do a couple things for you. So first of all, just sort of give you a sense of how you might do this on your own side, I'm going to make my screen a little larger so it's easier to see. And if you ever want to share your own class code with your students, all you have to do is come into your classroom account, Academy, come over to the Students tab right down here under Admin. And then there's a nice share class code link right in the upper right-hand corner. By clicking here, I can grab the code, just like the one I gave you.

Now, I put it behind a fancy little bookmark from Bitly, but you can share this link or whatever form you want with your students, and they can join the exact same way you did. You can even print these instructions if you want to share them in a different way or different languages. But this is the easiest way to get your students started. So there's your class code; there's your link.

Then, like I said, you can see your students coming in in real time, which is awesome. And now that you have your students here and you're saying, "Okay, this all looks really good. Ally's here, Ellen's here, Diane's here," let me actually get you off to the races with an assignment. So I'm going to come over to the Assign section. What I'm going to do is just walk you through what the teacher is saying now that her students or his students are enrolled.

As I come down here, I say, "You know what? I'm going to start you off. Maybe in this case, you know what? I'm going to switch things up. I'm going to start you off with a grammar lesson because I got some free feedback in my last webinar: 'Jeremy, I love all the stuff you're doing, but it's too much math, math, math. Let's shake it up a little bit.'" You're absolutely right, so let's do a grammar lesson right now and let's focus on identifying nouns.

So I come over to Assign, I click this little checkbox, I click Assign. I'm going to say all of my students in my class are going to get this assignment. So here we go, all students. You have till tomorrow. We're going to do right now, and I'm going to have you all do the same question set so we can review together as a class, which is pretty powerful over video conference. I'm going to assign that right now, and so if we switch back into our student experience, you've gone from enrolling in my class to now having a chance to actually get information and assignments as a student.

Now, to get there, what I want you to do is to switch from your teacher view, kind of the teacher hat that you're wearing, into student mode and see your student view. And the way you're going to do that, and I'll walk you through it right here on my screen, is you're going to come over here; you're going to come up to your name in the upper right-hand corner. I'm going to actually shrink it a little bit so you can see that.

So I have Salvador, you might be Diane, you might be Eileen, whatever it is, you're going to click right in the upper right-hand corner, and then you're going to click Learner Home. And basically what this is telling Khan Academy is, "Hey, I'm about to switch identities. I'm a teacher and a learner, and in this case, I want to focus on the learner view."

So Learner Home is where you want to go. And if you've actually done it, what you should now see is, under the Student Experience Demo, you will see this assignment that I've just given, which is identifying nouns. Just to sort of reiterate, as I have here in this teacher note, if you click your name one more time, you'll notice that there are these notifications that are letting you know that you have just received this assignment.

So if you click the notification link, you can see that the assignment has come in. This is one way that you can communicate with students. Obviously, you can let them know about assignments verbally during a Zoom session, via Remind, via Class Dojo, via Google Classroom, all sorts of different ways. But fundamentally, every time you make an assignment, it'll pop up in the notification section.

And so now, to move on to the last section, I want to give you a chance to get into your student view. So if you haven't done this already, take one minute right now and click your name and then click into Learner Home, and your time starts now. I've always wanted to say that—would want to be a game show host—come on into your student view. Again, you're coming over to your name and you're clicking Learner Home, and that'll take you right there.

Just as we make sure everyone's on the same page before we move forward, I'm going to answer some questions. Regina did get a little prompt that said, "I was not able to get into the session. It asked me to create an account or log into my existing account." That's totally fine! If you don't want to use your existing teacher account, you can always create a new student account, maybe with your personal Gmail, for instance, for the purposes of this session. Totally fine to keep it separate. Great question, Regina.

Okay, about 15 seconds left. You want to make sure that everyone is now in the Learner Home where you're going to see your assignments; you're going to see all the interaction with the teacher in this case. And once the timer is up, we'll move on to the next section. Thank you all for being rockstar students; I can tell this class is going to go far!

Okay, time's up! Let's move on to the third step, and that is a chance to actually do the assignment. And I know this might seem a little funny to actually be doing the work on Khan Academy as opposed to assigning the work, but again, I think it's so important to really see that fundamental thing that your students experience of what does an assignment look like, how does it feel, and how do I get help when I'm stuck.

And so what I would love for you to do is to do exactly what I'm going to show you on my screen right now, which is I come over here to my assignment section. I say, "Aha, my teacher has made this assignment identify nouns." I scroll over, I click the Start button, and I'm literally just going to go through this and try to answer these to the best of my abilities.

So noun, not a noun, not a noun, noun. Check! Get that nice little reward invite for the next question. And what I'll challenge you to do as you go through this is to actually try getting it wrong once in a while or asking for a hint just to see what that experience looks like. You know, especially with all these students learning over distance right now, they may not always be able to reach you with questions.

So in that case, how can you instruct them on how to use the hint system and the video system? Well, first of all, try it out yourself, and then you'll be empowered to really support them going forward. So it's been about five minutes going through it right now; I'll start the timer. And again, just to sort of retrace my steps, I'm in my Learner Home, I'm going to my assignment section, I'm clicking Start, and I'm just literally going through this as a student would—one question after another, getting stuck sometimes, getting hints, and getting a sense of how this all feels and how it all works.

Because once you understand that, you can really translate it for your students. So as you do that, again, feel free to ask any questions via the questions feature in GoToWebinar; I'll be happy to answer those live.

Leila says, "Should we watch the video also?" Totally up to you, Leila! If you're one of those superstar students zooming ahead and you have time to not only do the exercise or watch the video, go for it! Get a sense of what those Khan videos feel like. Great question!

Christina's saying, "I can get to the Learner Home, but I can't see the assignment." So I just want to call this out: you may have multiple courses here, depending on how many things you've signed up for as a learner. Definitely make sure that you come over to the Student Experience Demo, which is the name of my particular course. Good question, Christine!

And Melissa says, "Will this link still be active so we can show the kids the student view demo?" Absolutely! I'm going to leave this classroom up for the entire academic year, so if you ever want to log back in and sort of reconnect with this experience or share with your own students, by all means! And also know that you can certainly do the same on your own end; you can always create a sample classroom, you can add yourself to it, and really see what students are seeing or make it easy for your students to play around in kind of a sandbox environment, if you will. So definitely feel free to take advantage of all these resources both now and in the future.

Thanks for asking that, Melissa! Okay, we're about halfway through. So hopefully you're having fun getting in touch with those old-school grammar mechanics. I know it's probably been a while unless you do teach grammar yourself, but definitely fun to see what our students see and see the structure that's built in as far as those rewards when students are getting it right and also the support structure that's in place when they need a little extra help.

So Sherry says, "My school is not listed," and what she's referring to is a school picker that appears at the very top of the Khan Academy dashboard. Let me show you what that looks like. So here I am logged in as a teacher again; it says "Add Your School," and you may search in your zip code, and you may not find your school. Absolutely no worries; you can still use it 100%. We are working really hard to get additional schools added to this, so if you see any trouble with it, Sherry, please send us a request after this webinar, and we'll try to get that school added. I'm going to show you how to make that request in about 10 minutes, so thanks for calling that out.

Let's see here. Sherry is asking, "If I am tutoring, should this process work?" Absolutely! Whether you're working with five students or 150 students, everything I'm showing you is exactly the same. And so whether it's choosing content for your students or your tutees, making assignments, everything can be done no matter how many students you have. Thanks for asking, Sherry!

Let's see here. Tamara is saying, "Is there a way to have my student access to practice questions that I located by doing a search on the topic 'Ideals of Democracy'? I haven't seen a way to find them from the student page." Yeah, such a good question! One of those powerful hidden things in Khan Academy is that you can come in here and you can search for whatever you want: "Ideals of Democracy." Voila!

Here's the awesome thing that Tamara found. You can definitely, you know, go into your teacher classroom and add that as a class that you want touse and go through the full assignment process like I demoed, you know, about five minutes ago. But what you can actually do is from this page, you can start to assign it. So check this out; here's a "Sign" bar at the very top.

And if we make this a little bit bigger, I'm just going to blow this up on your screen. I can say, "Aha! It deals with democracy. This is the perfect piece of practice. I'm going to assign it to my class, to these students. I can give them the same questions or different questions, and I can give them a clear deadline." That way, without even going into the assignment mode, you can assign something the minute you find it. So really powerful way to immediately get that practice into your students' hands. Hopefully, that's helpful. Good question, Tamara!

Alright, about 10 seconds left. Lisa is asking, "What would be a valuable way to use Khan Academy for virtual learning?" Lisa, I would highly recommend that you check out last week's webinar, which is on our YouTube playlist, and I'll share a link later which gets into all the stuff around using Khan Academy during a Zoom session, before a Zoom session, after a Zoom session. But I think the bottom line is you don't want to have too much lecture in that rare moment of teacher-student interaction. Instead, you want to make it really engaging like Sal Khan talked about in his New York Times op-ed a couple weeks ago.

So try to use Khan Academy to offload some of that stuff: have the students watch the video ahead of time, have them do some practice ahead of time, and that way you can use those virtual sessions for lots of engagement, where you make cold calls, you ask questions, you give pop quizzes, and get students thinking in real time. That's my advice!

Okay, let me pause on the questions for a second. I'll come back to the promise. In the interest of time, I want to now actually switch from student mode to teacher mode so you can see the fruits of your labor. So everyone's done the assignment, and by the way, here's one really cool thing that's unique to the fall at Khan Academy: as you probably heard, we have this cool program called Learnstorm, which is like everything on Khan Academy—a free program to motivate your students to really be their best, especially at this very tough moment, and to help celebrate as a class your progress together.

You can always come to your Learnstorm tracker. So check this out; your Learnstorm tracker is always going to be found at the top of your Khan Academy dashboard. So here I am as a teacher, I'm logged in, and sure enough, the very first thing is "Check My Progress: How Am I Doing on Learnstorm?" You can literally show this to your students to get them so pumped up.

So you come over here to Student Experience Demo, which is the name of our class, I check for progress, and check this out! Watch this climb so fast as a tribute to all the hard work you just did. So if you ever need a little extra way to bring oomph and excitement to the back-to-school season, this is a way to say, "Hey, we are all in this thing together, and even though we may be a part of this moment, we are working together to do big things!" You can track the progress with this Learnstorm tool and share that with your class during a Zoom session just by sharing your screen.

So definitely check that out; it's pretty fun. Okay, now back to the flow. So you've done this assignment as a student; what would you do with that information as a teacher? Let's review this together. So I'm going to come back to my class, and again it's called Student Experience Demo, and this time, instead of going to Assign, I'm going to go to Scores.

Let me actually make this a little bit bigger so it's a little easier to see, and so I'm going to refresh this, and I'm going to check out the results from all of your hard work on this assignment. So sorry to put everyone on the spot here, but I do want to showcase some of the great stuff you all have done. So go over to Identifying Nouns, which is the exercise you just did, and voila!

Check this out. I love this so much because it's kind of like x-ray vision for teachers where you can drill down to the question level and figure out how things are going. And so one of the things that I immediately see is that question one, you all are nailing—26 out of 29 of you got that on the very first try—fantastic! Whereas question four was maybe more of a struggle, so I want to drill down to that question and I say, "Aha! I see that six students got the incorrect answer."

So maybe I reteach this one, and I go over things like, "Is a preposition a noun? Is something like 'exciting' or 'adjective' like 'creepy' a noun?" And I use it for that as a teaching moment to say, "I know a lot of us are sort of running into trouble here, but let's solve it together. Let's come together as a class to address those misconceptions and make sure they're all on the same page moving forward."

And again, you can definitely, on your own time, click in and see the exact students who are correct or incorrect. But for now, Khan keeps it all anonymous, which is nice for you because you can show your students that you're paying attention to their work and you're looking at it as a class together without calling out any one student. So just a nice way to bring the class together around your shared work and your shared experience.

So I highly recommend going into these assignment scores to give that kind of report out to your class. Okay, so we're back to our flow now. What we've talked about so far is getting started as a student, going into your Learner Home, doing your first assignment. But if you followed any of the things that Sal Khan has been talking about these last couple of years, even pre-COVID, you know that assignments are just the tip of the iceberg.

One of the things that we strongly believe in at Khan Academy is the power of course mastery to really help students do their best, especially in this difficult moment. And that's the idea rather than just move together in lockstep and say, "Hey, half our class may not be getting it right, but that's okay; we've got to move forward." Let's have each student continue to work on that skill until they reach mastery so when they move on to the next skill and the next unit, they don't have those Swiss cheese gaps in their foundations and they move forward stronger and more confident than ever before.

So if you want to take advantage of course mastery, check this out. I'm going to come back into my teacher dashboard just to show you what this looks like. I come into the Course Mastery section over here, so not Assignments. I click Placement. I'm going to set a goal. So check this out. I'm going to say I want to create a goal for the 40 new students in my class, and I'm going to say instead of focusing on grammar, let's move to second-grade math, and I want you to master this topic by, let's say, the end of the school year—June 1st, give or take.

So we create that goal, and now what's going to happen on your end is back in your Learner Home, you're going to start to see that filter into your Course Mastery section. So to show you what that looks like, we're going to switch back into our learner view. So as you may recall, we click our name in the upper right-hand corner, we click Learner Home, and this time—voila!—a new section has appeared.

Before we had assignments, and we did the assignment; that was great. But now there's course mastery. And to dig into course mastery, here’s exactly what you do: you can follow along on your own screen. So first of all, you click second grade; that’s the goal for the year. I want you to master this body of content—all the related skills. I click into that.

Now, if you are perhaps a third-grade teacher and you want to make sure that your students master second grade before moving on, you can have them start with a course challenge—that's a quick way to recap how they're doing at the start. But for our purposes, let's say no thanks, and let's just follow the blue buttons because really that's kind of the digital cookie crumb trail that you want to teach your students to always follow.

When in doubt, look for the blue. So in this case, we go to Get Started under the first unit, then we go for the first blue button, which is the first scale of second-grade math—adding within 20 visually. Again, we click the Start button, and did we dive right into this practice session? Let's go!

So just like before, I would love for you to spend a few minutes doing your first experience of course mastery as a student, so you can see what that feels like. So I'm going to start the timer over here, and again, just to retrace my steps, I was back here on my teacher dashboard. I came to my name, I came to Learner Home, and then I found out that I had not just assignments but also course mastery. I'm going to refresh that. Voila! There's course mastery.

I click second grade to dig into this lofty goal we have. Say no thanks to course challenge for now, and then I just follow the blue buttons, Get Started, and start the skill, and now I'm off to the races. So again, spend a few minutes just going through that, try getting a couple of answers right, a couple wrong, see how Khan Academy responds and how it supports you along the way.

And as you do that, I'm going to answer some questions that have come in. So let's see here. Diane says, "Do you have a suggestion for how to pick just one assignment for a particular topic? When I assigned a topic to a student, they signed a large number of assignments and became totally unmanageable, which overwhelmed the student." And I feel your pain, Diane, because this is one of the biggest pitfalls that I encountered when I first started using Khan Academy.

I would be over here on my teacher screen, and I would say, "You know what? I'm going to do an assignment. I'm going to assign basically an entire unit." Well, the problem with that is that I'm assigning 24 things at once—that's videos, maybe articles, some practice. That's way too much! I highly recommend being laser-focused, especially at the start of the year. You're just getting your students warmed up, and you say, "There's only one thing I want you to focus on," and most likely that's the thing that you just talked about in class during your last session.

So if I had just taught about adding and subtracting within 20, I would choose only that singular skill and I would assign only that, and that way we have baby steps in the Khan Academy as opposed to that feeling of being overwhelmed. Great question, Diane!

Okay, Julianne is saying, "How do you assign something on Google Classroom?" So the first thing is, you do have to assign it using the techniques we've already talked about on Khan Academy if you want to be able to track it on Khan Academy and get all those valuable reports. So that means either assigning it through your teacher dashboard or actually on the section itself using that little assigned blue bar. But that being said, once you have something going, here's what you can do next.

Let me actually just get this going for you here; hold on one moment. So if we expand this, let me get out of this modal mode. You'll notice there's this Google Classroom link under every video and every practice. And by clicking that link, just like you would a Facebook link or a Twitter link, you're basically sending it to your Google Classroom. So as long as you're logged into Google, as long as your classroom is set up, you can specifically send that piece of content straight into your classroom account, and that's a nice supplement to the assignments that already exist in Khan Academy. I hope that helps!

Okay, let’s keep tabs on our timer here. We're down to about two minutes. Okay, great question, Juliette! Tamara's doing well; Lisa's doing well. Let's see here. Ooh, Yesenia says, "How do we archive last year's class in order to start a new class this year?" Great question! So if you have something that you want to get rid of because it's cluttering up your teacher dashboard, you can always come down to the settings and just say, "You know what? I'm going to delete this class." And the data still exists, so the teacher, the students aren't going to lose their data, but it will be removed from your dashboard so you don't have all this information overwhelming you because overwhelm is real—not just for students but also for educators. So definitely check that out, Yesenia.

Alright, let's see here. And then Melissa said, "How do you get to that gradebook again?" So if you ever want to get back to that assignment gradebook, all you do is Assignments, and then Scores, and voila! You now have the results for each of those sections. So Identifying Nouns, let’s see how students did.

Okay, so now we're down to the final 30 seconds. Rosemary is saying, "Do students do work with pen and paper at desk, or can they sell digitally?" Oh, such a good question! I'm glad you brought that up, Rosemary. So when you are doing work on Khan Academy, you may have noticed this, and I hope this is one of the benefits of actually doing these things, is that you can actually start to draw on the screen as a student!

So whether you're using your computer, your Chromebook, your tablet, or your phone, you click this little button and you can literally do some doodles and some sort of quick calculations right on your screen. But what I always encourage students to do is whatever is most effective for them. If that means using pen and paper, if that means using a little sort of personal whiteboard on their desk, by all means! Great question!

Alright, so we have come to the end of step five, and now this is the big moment of truth. So don’t fail me now; it’s our final step reviewing the progress together. And I'm super excited to show you not just course mastery progress at a high level, but specifically an x-ray view into the skills that your students are generating.

So again, everyone in my class has just completed their first course mastery practice, which is awesome! When I come here, I can look at that through two different lenses. First of all, I have this lens of overall course progress, and I can say Melissa and Pamela and Regina are off to the races; they're doing great! And I can literally track that at the unit level and at the overall course level as well because your goal is always 100% course mastery. I want everyone in my class to master all these skills.

However, just this summer, have we rolled out a brand new report called Skills, and here’s where you find it. So again, you’re in your teacher dashboard, you’re in a specific classroom, and you go to Activity Overview, and then you go to Skills. And what you will find here are all the skills in your entire course—whether it's grammar, whether it's math, whether it's science—all laid out for you.

And then when you click on it, you can actually see how everyone is doing in terms of that spectrum from first getting started, getting familiar, to getting proficient, and ultimately mastering that skill. I think this is such a powerful thing because, you know, when I was a teacher, I almost did all of my assessments at the unit level, and I knew who was succeeding in general and who was struggling in general, but I didn't always know the specific students and the specific skills that were holding them back.

And now you have that all in a single report! So what you might say is, "Okay, I'm feeling great about Larry and Ori and Miss Daniel, but I'm a little worried about Tammy and Kristen," and what you can do is you can actually assign the skill just to the students who might be struggling a little bit, and that way they get that extra practice before you move on as a class.

So again, put on those extra goggles; get a sense of how your class is doing, and this is a really powerful new report that I hope you'll try out! Okay, so now I know we're almost at time, so I do want to finish with a quick recap for you. If there are three things that you want to show your students at the start of this year, whether your school year has already begun or whether it's about to begin next week, is number one, when in doubt with registration, the simplest thing to do is just share your class link.

You come into your class, you come to Students, and you share that class code, and that'll get students up and running pretty quickly. Number two, you're going to train your students that once they've gone ahead and registered, all the action is going to appear on their Learner Home.

So they're going to come up to their names, they're going to click Learner Home, and they're going to see all the classes they're a part of, all their assignments, and all their course mastery—all in one place! And then finally, as mentioned here in the third point, assignments and course mastery—they'll be notified right here on their Learner Home. So here are the notifications; here’s what’s coming in; here’s what’s due.

And that way, even if everyone is learning at home, learning remotely, you can centralize that—the single source of truth about what you're handing out—all in one place. That being said, a couple of things I want to call out before I start taking your questions live again. I know that there’re going to be more questions either now or in the next few weeks, so I want you to have all the resources possible. Number one, I want to try to take as many questions as possible right now, but if you don’t get your question answered or if something else comes up over the long weekend or in the showers or getting ready for the first day of school, here are two amazing resources.

Number one, you can always ask our support team using this link: bit.ly/conquestion. Basically, what that is doing is it's taking you from the help link at the very top. So click your name, you click Help, and then you report a problem. Even though that sounds kind of negative, it’s basically a chance to say, "Hey, I've got an idea for Khan Academy, or I have a bug in Khan Academy, or I have a question about Khan Academy."

And we typically respond a couple of hours, even at the start of the school year, so definitely lean on our community support team for help. And then in addition, make sure to check out with fellow teachers what they're doing and learn from their best practices, and you can do that on our Facebook group called Teach with Khan. And as you can see, people are saying, "Help, I have a question," and teachers are sort of coming in and sharing their expertise left, right, and central.

So take advantage of that tool as the school year dawns. Okay, that being said, let me take your questions live now. So Stephanie, I'm going to lead off with you: you say our students have fake Google email addresses. Khan Academy recognizes them, but it's going to work in the same way to log in? Absolutely! Even if you've totally made up these Google accounts just for the purposes of getting your students enrolled, everything is the same. They come in, they log in with those fake credentials that you created for them, and they're going to see that same Learner Home, those same assignments, that same course mastery goals regardless of how they log in. So definitely you're going to see very similar results.

Let’s see here. Melissa says, "Is the drawing tool available for English?" Yeah, great question! So let’s actually try that out together. So we’re going to come back to Khan Academy; we’re going to come back to our student experience demo, and we’re going to go back into that sort of gradebook, if you will, Identifying Nouns. And what I’m happy to say is that voila, here’s this virtual whiteboard even for grammar!

So if you want to do any sentence diagrams, if you want to break out your digital red pen, by all means, go ahead and take advantage of this tool, because it is a nice way—even if you don’t have a whiteboard built in like Zoom has and you're using a different platform—you can absolutely start drawing right here and get your students off to the races. Great question, Melissa!

Holly says, "How can I unassign something? Oh, I signed too much not knowing what I was doing!" And I totally get it, Holly; I was in that same boat when I was playing around with Khan Academy at first. But what you want to do is you want to come back here to the Assignment section—you want to say Manage this time, so that’s the last of these three options—and then you want to come in here and say, "You know what? I went a little bit overboard." Let me go ahead and edit this assignment.

In this case, you know, maybe I’ll go ahead and delete it. In that case, you don’t have to have all these students suffering under all these assignments; you can keep it way more simple. Hope that helps!

Okay, great question! Let’s see. Stephanie says, "I am an instructional math coach with no kids of my own to experiment on." Thanks, Jeremy! Okay, absolutely! I have to tell you all, in addition to being a former teacher, I have two little kids at home, and they are my Khan Academy guinea pigs! So they are so sick of all this stuff, but I have tried it out all on them! Definitely, kid-tested if not parent-approved!

Okay, Rosemary says, "Can I assign mastery in small chunks with a short deadline? For example, I want to see how a new fourth grader understands third-place value." Yeah, so I actually have a really cool new resource for you, Rosemary! Right now, it is sort of an admitted flaw of course mastery, which is that it operates at this course level, which can often feel too massive, especially at the start of the year.

But brand new on Khan Academy this year is the ability to come in, click Courses, and then see these things called Get Ready courses. And what that is is our attempt to get your students up to speed for grade level given that so much was up in the air this past spring. And so you're going to find very curated cuts of just the most important skills for third grade, or for algebra, or for pre-calculus, and so you can assign course mastery for these courses, and that can be done in a couple of weeks, not in 26 weeks. And hopefully, that’ll get you moving a little bit faster! Hope that helps, Rosemary!

Alright, Stephanie says, "Wahoo!" Wahoo indeed! Diane says she's excited to be joining! Thank you for being here, Diane! Thank you for being such an awesome student! Tamara says, "Can you please explain a bit about leveling up or down?" Oh, such a good question! I'm taking the government class, and I went through a practice set today; I scored maybe like three out of four or four out of five or something. It was the first time I had taken it, and then I was surprised to see the red arrow—the red down arrow. What’s going on?

Well, it’s so funny you mentioned this, Tamara, because Sal Khan was actually on this radio show this morning I was listening to, and a parent called in with the same exact question, which is like, how demoralizing is it for my kid if all of a sudden I see the scores going down? Well, the reason that that happens is that what Khan is trying to do is trying to always assess the mastery level of your students, and it wants to be pretty clear-eyed about this.

It doesn't want to say, "Hey, you mastered something in the past, but when we gave you some space repetition, when we showed it to you again, and this time you totally didn't get it?" Well, we can’t really still call you at sort of that mastered level. So when in doubt, I highly recommend coming back to your skills report.

So here’s Activity Overview, here’s Skills, and check this out: for every single level, we will give you the definition of what attempted, familiar, proficient, and master means. So if you're ever wondering, "Why did I go from master to proficient or familiar to permanent?" We will give you that intel and that definition right here. So hopefully that’ll be the Rosetta Stone, if you will, to explain some of those conundrums.

Great question, Tamara! Alright, let’s see here. Well, Diane says, "How is Get Ready for fourth grade different than using Learnstorm?" I'm so glad you asked this because Learnstorm is more a sort of key motivational thing that runs across all the courses we offer. So you may notice at the top of Khan Academy in this course directory, we kind of have this—there's a massive spectrum of content offerings, everything from math to STEM to arts and humanities, even career courses.

And so what we say is no matter what you teach, we want to make sure that you get credit for getting your students going, and your students get motivation, especially in this tough moment. And so anytime you make an assignment and your students make progress, you will start to see that Learnstorm tracker grow. And that's true for Get Ready courses; it's true for AP Art History; it's true for everything.

That said, these Get Ready courses were built specifically this year, given the fact that so many teachers said, "I'm a little bit worried about the fall. You know, my own class in the spring didn't end the way it would normally; we didn't cover all the content we would normally get to." So I can expect that some of my students coming in may be a little bit less prepared or a little bit less unready than they would have been in a normal year.

And so this is specifically about plugging those holes, catching them up on those key skills so that in the middle of the year, you don't run into those Swiss cheese gaps that might be holding your student back. And again, if you assign some of this work, it will also count towards Learnstorm, but it is a little more focused on content than motivation because Learnstorm is about motivation at the end of the day. Great question, Diane!

Okay, so let me sort of come back here and give you a quick recap. I love that you all totally rocked my class today! It makes me feel really good as a teacher to see that so many folks were getting proficient in mastery on all those key skills. What's more important to me, quite honestly, is that you are ready to rock your own classrooms this fall. If there's anything we can do to support you along the way, please let us know!

Ask questions to our support team, connect with us online, or even let me know in the survey after the session what you want to see next. I have a team of a bunch of ambassadors around the country who are just chomping at the bit to share their expertise with you in response to your needs. So if you let me know that you need a webinar about motivation or you need a tool focused on XYZ content, we will get to work on that.

In the meantime, I wish you all an amazing and well-deserved long weekend this weekend, and then a great start or resumption of the year next week. I know there's a lot resting on your shoulders, but I also know you're going to knock it out of the park. Thank you so much for all that you do, and here's wishing you tremendous success! Cheers, everyone!