How to Use Khan Academy's Free Courses for Texas Teachers and Students

To share valuable free resources with you today that I believe will not only benefit your students but also lighten your load as you manage the many decisions and tasks that come along with teaching nowadays. I really truly appreciate everything that you do, and I hope that these tools that we discussed today and these resources will help simplify your workflow and give you more time to focus on what really matters most.

All right, so for today, we'll be exploring the Con Academy platform together. We're going to start with the teacher dashboard and the newly added TEKS aligned courses, which also come with a downloadable printable teachers guide. We're also going to introduce you to Conmigo, your AI powered teaching assistant. And before we wrap up, we'll also go over some practical ways that you can start integrating Con Academy into your classroom right away to complement your existing instruction and all of the great things that are already going on.

We also have joining us today from Con Academy, Jennifer and Naiv, who will be supporting by answering your questions in the chat, so please feel free to ask away. And as a reminder, we are recording this webinar; we will be sending it out to anyone who registered so that you can revisit this information anytime you need. At the end, we'll also include the information of our help center where you can also get answers to your questions.

So before we get started, I'd like to introduce your dedicated Con Academy Texas team. We are all based right here in Texas and are committed to supporting districts and schools throughout our KH Academy districts program. Now, while districts do have the option to partner with us for additional benefits like automatic rostering, professional development, data and reporting, as well as ongoing implementation support, today we'll be focusing exclusively on the free resources that are always available to all educators.

Oh, you know what? I went too a slide too far back. So if we could just quickly check in with everyone, and if you could please drop a one, two, or three in the chat to let us know how familiar you are with Con Academy, where one means that you're just starting out, you haven't really ever been on the platform, don't really know much about it; two means that you have some experience; and three means that you're very familiar with our platform. So if you could just take a minute to please go ahead and drop that in the chat.

And while you're doing that, I'm going to go ahead and talk to you a little bit about what Con Academy is. We are a nonprofit organization, and our mission is to provide free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We do this through our online platform. We offer personalized learning experiences for students in grades second and up, which is the platform that we're going to be exploring today. We also have Con Kids available as an app for our little ones.

We do focus on mastery learning, allowing students to progress at their own pace and ensuring that they fully understand each concept before moving on, because our goal is to empower learners and help them reach that grade-level mastery and beyond. So I'd like to, before we go live into the platform, take a moment to explore this concept of mastery learning, which is at the cornerstone of KH Academy and how KH Academy is structured.

As I said, we embrace mastery learning. This approach ensures that students fully understand a skill or concept before they move on to the next one. This method not only fosters a deep understanding, but it is also supported by robust evidence showing its effectiveness in improving long-term retention of skills and knowledge. It does this by providing thorough understanding in combination with timely feedback, and pacing that is appropriate for the learner and where that learner is at, while embedding those strategic scaffolds along the way.

Especially here in Texas, you know this type of approach is essential for success on assessments like STAAR, TSA2, and of course the SAT for our high schoolers as well. So to illustrate this further, let's take a look at this brief video that explains mastery learning in more detail.

Have you ever really tried to learn something, and you just couldn't? It can make you feel like you're not so smart, right? Well, it's not your fault, and it's not your teacher's fault, it's just our traditional approach to learning. We go through school and we accumulate gaps. You're a bit shaky on pre-algebra, but you move on to algebra anyway. By the time you get to calculus, you got lots of gaps. If enough gaps build up, you eventually hit a wall; calculus makes no sense and that can be frustrating.

But what if there were a different way to learn? That's mastery learning. Unlike traditional learning where all students move in lockstep, with mastery learning, you go at your own pace. You progress through questions at just the right level for you. If you get 50% right the first time, it's not a big deal. Try as many times as you need, get feedback as you learn, and help when you need it. Teachers can track your progress, identify any gaps, and give you one-on-one attention. Decades of research shows mastery learning works. Now you have the tools to make it possible. Are you ready to learn anything?

All right, so now we're going to go ahead and switch over so that we can do some of the fun exploring right on the platform. All right, let's go ahead and switch over to the platform and there we are.

So we're going to go ahead and start. Once you log in and create your account, you will see this teacher dashboard. Depending on whether or not you've added classes, you may or may not see this class section. But we're going to go through how you can add courses. The first thing you want to do is come here to the explore section. The explore section is going to give you this dropdown that has the list of all of our course offerings available to you and to your students.

As you can see, we offer a wide range of courses. A couple of things that I want to note here: The SAT, the digital SAT test prep courses, have been widely utilized across the U.S. for many years because we are the official partners with College Board. So with the digital SAT, either you or your students could come here. We have the digital SAT Math, and we also have the digital SAT reading and writing as two separate courses. The domains are broken into foundations, and then the questions get harder with the medium level and then all the way into advanced.

So that is one that I wanted to make sure to point out because it is very popular here in Texas with our teachers and our students. All of the courses are designed to complement your grade-level instruction. They offer activities that encourage students to think deeply. They can access various instructional materials within the courses to help scaffold that learning and support them as they go through the practices and the exercises. These include videos, the famous videos by Sal Khan that I'm sure a lot of you have already heard in the past.

It also includes articles, and there are also opportunities to check for understanding through quizzes, unit tests. We also have course challenges that can be done three times a year if you'd like as a beginning-of-year, middle-of-year, or end-of-year checkpoint. Those course challenges are going to give students about 30 questions, taking approximately 30 to 45 minutes, and they will provide students a sprinkling of questions for the whole course.

So again, there are definitely various ways that students can check for understanding, and you, as teachers, can have data and reports on how your students are doing. Additionally, our content is also available in 24 languages, which I think is an incredible feature and resource, especially for our emergent bilingual students. If you have emergent bilingual students that you would like to see the content in their native language to help support what you're doing in the classroom during their transition to English, this is another option that you can assign to those students and have them go through the content in their native language.

In addition to browsing by course, as you see here, you can also, for math only, browse by standards. If you come up here to browse by standards and select Texas, you now see that we have alignment from grade 2nd through 8th: Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, Precalculus, Mathematical Models with Applications, Advanced Quantitative Reasoning, Discrete Mathematics for Problem Solving and Algebraic Reasoning. I'm just going to go ahead and select Algebra 1 to give you an example of what this looks like.

So here you will see, by standard, the standard is written out, and then you have a list of all the resources and activities that can be assigned to students to help support that standard. So if you know this is something that you're going to be teaching and you want to maybe use one of our videos as an opening to your lesson and show it whole group, or maybe you want to strategically assign it to your students for them to complete it during independent class time or homework, this is another way that you can access the content so it aligns to your scope and sequence and to what's happening in your classroom.

Here on the left-hand side, you can see all of the courses that this is available for you. You can always open up the dropdown so that you're able to see the standards that are aligned and the activities that go along with it.

Now I'm going to go ahead and shift over to our new Texas TEKS courses. We're going to take a deeper dive into those. Thanks to the Open Doors project and a generous donation that was provided by the ExxonMobil Foundation, our content team has created courses just for Texas that align to the TEKS for math in grades 5 through 8, as well as Algebra 1, high school biology, high school chemistry, and high school physics.

With the continued support of ExxonMobil, we do have plans next year to expand these Texas courses to include third and fourth grade math, as well as Algebra 2, Geometry, Pre-calculus, middle school chemistry, and integrated sciences for 6th through 7th grade. There are plans to add even more courses for 26-27, so definitely be on the lookout for those as they get added to our platform.

Now I'm going to go ahead and just select one of these courses. I'm going to go ahead and go into fifth grade Texas TEKS because there are a number of additional resources that you're going to find exclusively in these Texas TEKS courses, which was part of the work that the ExxonMobil grant was able to provide to Con Academy.

When you open the courses, all of our courses, it does not matter what grade level or what subject, are all going to visually look the same, and they're all going to structurally look and feel the same, right? The flow is going to be the same. We're going to have the units for that course on the left-hand side. You, as the teacher, are able to go to each of these units and again assign at the course level, at the unit level, or by individual activities, as you saw earlier with the videos and the articles.

Now, here you have these white boxes, right? The white boxes represent skills. A white box is a skill that has not been started yet, right? A student has not interacted with any type of content for that particular skill. Once the student clicks on the box or the skill and starts their practice, it's going to take them through exercises that have embedded many times the specific video or article that will help support them.

If they're in the problem and they're struggling, they don't remember, instead of having to go back through the list of units or exercises available, the platform has already linked for them a related content video or article that they can quickly access. They will open in a new window so that the student can get that just in-time support as they're working through these exercises.

Once students complete exercises, quizzes, or unit tests, these boxes are going to get one of these four colors. They're either going to get a burnt orange, a lighter orange, a lavender purple, or a dark purple with a crown. When they get this burnt orange color box, it means that when the students engaged in problems or quizzes, tests, etc., with that particular skill, they got less than 70% of those questions correctly.

In a light orange, they got 70% or more correct within that skill. If you see the lavender (the proficient), that means that they got 100% of the questions correct when practicing that skill. Now, you might say to yourself, "Wait a minute, but if that's 100%, then what could possibly be mastered?" So mastered is when they see that skill; they're assessed on that skill in context with other skills, right?

So it's a mixed skill assessment, and they still get 100% of the questions for that skill correct. In proficient, they're at 100%, but that skill is being assessed in isolation. With mastery, they get 100% of that skill correct, but they're seeing that skill mixed in with other skills. So it's a little bit more difficult because it's now out of context.

What we want to see and aim for—what our research shows—is that students that can reach these purples, two at least two purples per week, so two skills, two proficiency per week, are going to be on track to accelerate their learning by at least 35%. In many cases, we see even bigger gains than that.

So as you're thinking about those student data chats and assigning goals, and really trying to engage your students in purposeful learning, what you really want to aim for is for students to level up to these purple skills, at least two per week. A common question that we sometimes get from educators is, "Well, how long do the students need to be on the platform?"

With KH Academy again, you know, mastery learning is our cornerstone. It's not about time; it's really about the learning that's happening. So it's difficult to say, you know, give you an exact amount of time. However, what our research has shown is that it typically takes students anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes per week to reach that minimum of two skills to proficiency.

You want to think about again, everybody learns at a different pace, and there may be skills that they are much more adept in than others. A good time frame to have in your mind is providing opportunities for 30 to 60 minutes per week. Again, that can look a variety of different ways; it can be assigned as independent classwork, it can be assigned as homework.

But definitely giving students an opportunity to engage weekly on the platform. All right, before I move on, are there any questions in the chat, Jennifer? Naiv? That we should address whole group?

No, we're good at this time. Thank you, Francis. Awesome, excellent. Okay, so with that, I want to go ahead and dive into these special teacher resources that are part of the Texas TE courses. You can access them right here from the home dashboard under "Check out our teacher resources." You can also access them at the very end of the left nav menu under "Teacher resources."

Once you select that, it's going to take you to this landing page, which is going to give you a guide on how to use the teacher guides. It's also going to give you access to these downloadable and printable guides that are organized by unit. So I'm going to go ahead and open up Unit 1: Extending Whole Number Operations.

It gives you the standards that this guide is going to cover. Once you click on that PDF, it is going to provide you with objectives, strategies, and common misconceptions. It's also going to link you out to any resources that are referenced. Once we scroll down into the actual unit resources, these are all going to align to the content that's on Con.

So it's going to tell you here not only the objective and the teaching tips to help you with your lesson planning and as you're delivering this instruction in your whole group, but it's also going to tell you how many videos are available, how many articles, and how many exercises to support that particular lesson and standard. You're also going to have a best practices section; it's going to walk you through with very specific examples as well as verbage on how to think through, teach, and support this in your classroom.

It will give you links to additional general implementation resources that you can use to support these standards, and this unit, and these lessons in your classroom. So I'm going to go ahead and go back here. I'm going to go ahead and just select this unit just so that you can kind of see how it's structured.

So now instead of seeing all the boxes for all the skills and the entire course, which are 161 skills, you see that information here underneath grade five Texas TEKS. Again, all the courses will have that. Now I'm only seeing, for that specific unit, how many skills are available. So here students would work through these three and then have a quiz after those exercises for that skill.

Then they're going to work through this skill, there's two exercises, and then they'll take a quiz. That is how it's repeated. These little lightning icons represent quizzes after each skill, and at the very end of the unit, they're going to take the unit test, which is going to give them questions from each of the skills that they worked through in the unit.

Again, the really great thing about Con is that you, as the teacher, have the flexibility to assign course mastery goals. So if you want to make sure that the students have a goal to get through the whole course by the end of the year, you can do that. You can assign by unit if you want to chunk the material for them and have it aligned to your scope and sequence, because maybe unit one for you is going to be something that you're teaching in January.

So that's okay, you can assign these units out of order however they best fit with your scope and sequence and what you're doing in the classroom to help support you. You're always going to have access to the assign button from there; you're going to be able to assign at the class level. So if you want to assign it to all students or if you want to assign it to a select group of students, you're also able to do that, and you're able to give specific due dates, which would create that assignment so that the students then see that information on their dashboards when they log in as students.

All right, let's see from here. I'm going to go ahead and go back. One thing that here, like I said, you can assign the course. Again, you would be able to select your class and your students. There's a way that you can provide a link to students, so that students can link their accounts to your class. With that, some of the additional benefits of adding that information is that you will get data and you will get information on how your students are doing based on things that you have assigned to your class and to your students.

All right, so we're going to go ahead now and shift over to Kigo. Very, very excited to share with you all things Kigo, because this is the new AI-powered teaching assistant that has been integrated into Con Academy to help support you as teachers in not only instructional pieces but also administrative tasks that we know teachers are asked to do as part of their everyday workload.

So we're going to look at different ways that you can leverage Kigo to help you. There are a couple of ways that you can access Kigo. I'm going to show you one way, and then we'll look at the second way that you can do that. The first way is Kigo is always going to be hovering here on the lower right-hand corner anywhere you are in the platform.

So if you wake Kigo up and initiate Kigo from one of our courses or from somewhere in the platform, it is going to automatically know where you are. The prompts that it's going to give you are going to be specific to wherever you are on the platform. I'm going to say that I'm in algebraic reasoning. I know that this is coming up. I'm trying to think through what to do. I can open Kigo and go ahead and ask it questions directly, or I can use one of these automated prompts, and Kigo will go ahead and give me information based on what I ask it.

One thing that I want to point out, a couple of things here: You're going to see this battery; right now it says that I'm at 95%. I've been using it quite a bit today. Kigo does run on something called AI tokens. It is sort of like a battery; there's a 24-hour limit. We've never seen the battery run out, at least not up to this point, and we work with Kigo every day. Just in case, we want to make sure that you guys are aware of that. It does, it's like Cinderella; it resets nightly, so no worries if you're ever low, it's okay, the next day you're back to 100%.

The other thing that I want to point out for you are these leave feedback buttons. You can either leave us a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and that'll be the end of that, or you can click on where it says leave feedback and you can be a little bit more detailed with the type of feedback that you provide. There’s actually somebody on our team whose job is to analyze this feedback. This does not go somewhere in a cloud or to a robot or something that nobody ever sees; this feedback actually goes to a human person on our KH Academy team, whose job is to ensure that we are making improvements and that we're constantly ensuring that Kigo is doing what it needs to do. So please, you know, don’t ever hesitate to reach out to us via the feedback.

Now I want to go ahead and go into an actual lesson. Right, so here I'm in understanding factor pairs. Again, I can open up Kigo. As you can see now that I'm in a specific skill, Kigo's prompts have changed. Now Kigo is giving me the option to summarize this video, help me explain this video, suggest an engaging activity that will pair with this skill, or help me write a lesson plan.

Again, I can ask it any open-ended question that I want. However, there are also other things you can do. You can come here to the very top, where it says assign lesson hook, exit ticket, lesson plan, and then there's even an option for more tools. What we've done here is we've already put front and center the tools that we know teachers use the most when engaging with specific exercises and skills lessons.

Most of the time, teachers want to create a lesson hook for a lesson or an exit ticket, or a lesson plan specific to this standard and skill. You can automatically, right from that specific skill or lesson, click on lesson hook, and it's going to already populate for you the information right from that particular skill or lesson. You can go ahead and click on "Write some lesson hooks," and Kigo is going to provide three different ideas for you to use as a lesson hook for understanding factor pairs.

Now of course you are the teacher; this is an assistant, this is a resource for you. If there is something that you don’t like about this, or it didn't really fit with what you were wanting, you can interact with Kigo. You can click on the little purple, it'll highlight that section, and you can ask Kigo, "Make changes to this," and you can tell Kigo what kind of changes you want it to make.

Or you can say, "No, I don't like this at all, go ahead and give me a different idea, give me something else," or you can discuss this with Kigo; maybe you have questions about it, right? You can go ahead and open up the "Discuss this" and discuss it with Kigo. You can also make changes directly on here; I want to add an extension to this, so you can go ahead and make changes, you can delete. This is for you to make it your own.

Once you're happy with whatever you have, you can print it. You have the option to print any of the resources that you get from the Kigo tools. You can also export; you can export to a Microsoft Word, you can export to a PDF, you can save it to Google Drive, and you can also save it to Microsoft OneDrive. In addition to that, there's a cloud built-in and it's called "My Documents," and it will save anything that you do on Kigo tools here as well for you to access in the future.

So there are multiple ways that you can save anything that you do with Kigo. Now I'm going to go ahead and show you this lesson plan tool live because this is another very popular tool. Again, I'm opening it directly from a particular skill or lesson, so it's going to already auto-populate that, but you will see here shortly where you can put anything that you want on here, and it will give you a lesson plan.

I'll show you how to do that here in a few minutes. Now with the lesson plan tool, I want you guys to think of this as a buffet. When we go to a buffet, there is absolutely no way that we can try and eat every single thing that's in the buffet because there's just so many options. Typically, we go, we look at what's available, and we select what we want and what is the most appetizing for us. Same thing with the lesson plan tool.

There’s going to be lots of things to choose from. Again, you are able to interact with Kigo at any point with whatever you've selected that you want to interact with. You're able to delete, you're able to add, you're able to print, export, and save to the cloud—all those great things. You're always going to have the objective; it’s going to give you activities in the form of warm-ups, direct instruction.

It's also going to give you guided practice, independent practice, exit ticket ideas, and differentiation. For advanced learners, striving learners, maybe I have a lot of emergent bilingual students in my class; I can go ahead and ask it to give me ideas to support English learners. Kigo is going to go ahead and provide support for that.

The more information you can give Kigo, the more refined and detailed it can be. That's something that you will learn as you start using the tools. You also have definitions, extension activities—it gives you links to ways that you can extend learning for students, things that you can go ahead and directly assign to your students. Then it gives you a lesson summary, so that's an example of the lesson plan tool.

Now remember I said that you could access Kigo in different ways: directly from the content with the little Kigo icon at the bottom right, but you can also come here to the very top menu where it says Kigo. You would click on teacher tools, and it's going to default here to all the tools available. This can be a little bit overwhelming, so we're going to chunk this out a little bit.

I want us to look at these categories up at the top. So we have tools in purple that are going to specifically support your planning. We have tools color-coded in green that are going to specifically support when you're having to create things. For example, maybe you want to do a class newsletter; this is one of my favorites, especially because it will translate the newsletter for you.

Kigo is trilingual; it speaks Spanish and Portuguese, and let’s just say it’s conversational in other languages. You could send without errors. Here you would give the name of your class; you would quickly paste or put something in about what you did last week and what's coming up next week. I'm just going to say something very quickly; obviously, the more details you put, the better it is going to be.

Then maybe I'm going to put here, "I want to do a field trip reminder." It’ll write the newsletter. You would be able to translate from here; you would be able to export, print directly, or save it to your preferred method. With the create tools, you also have things like letters of recommendations—if we have any high school teachers on the webinar—I know that that's something that can be quite popular in the spring with some of your students.

You can generate multiple-choice quizzes, English teachers, science teachers, any project-based learning rubric generator. This rubric generator will go ahead and create a rubric for you based on what you give it. You're also able to support your emergent bilingual students or maybe students that have an IEP with certain accommodations. Clear directions is another great tool to help support that.

Here with these red tools, you have the differentiation. You can chunk text; leveler will adjust the complexity of any given text. We've tried it out with things as complex as the Declaration of Independence to short stories, poems, etc. Leveler is another one. "Make it relevant" is another favorite of mine because we're always trying to connect and build relationships with our students in our classrooms.

So here you can go ahead and put in your standard or your objective or whatever it is that you're going to be teaching. Using maybe like a class survey or what you already know about your class, you can say, "Linear—let’s see—maybe that your class is really into the Dallas Cowboys." I don't know; I feel like the Dallas Cowboys have lost popularity lately, but it will connect that skill or that concept of linear equations with the Dallas Cowboys so that you're able to hook and engage your students accordingly.

Let's see. Supporting the blue tools can help support this IEP assistant. Here's another example of the way that you could again leverage Kigo to help support your IEP meetings, or help support you in preparation for IEP meetings. Again, this is not meant to replace you or replace what you are writing, but simply to help because Kigo may have access to research and ideas that maybe we as an IEP committee do not.

It will never ask for any identifying information on a student, but by providing information on these prompts, you would be able to get recommendations and suggestions from Kigo that may be something you find helpful to incorporate into a student's 504 plan or IEP. The SMART goal writer—I would highly recommend this as you're creating your T-TESS goals.

This could help support you in writing those. With "Learn," you have "Refresh my knowledge," and with "Refresh my knowledge," if you're new to the grade level, new to the content area, new to teaching, Kigo can help refresh the knowledge for teaching that linear equations lesson. This is Kigo.

I'm going to go ahead and pause in case there are any questions that have come in or anybody has any questions that they'd like to drop in the chat before we go back to our slides. We're all good? Francis, thank you.

Thank you! All right, so now we would like to wrap up with some ideas for implementation. Here you have sort of a matrix on good, better, and best ways to implement Con Academy. As a reminder, those two skills to proficiency per week is what we really want to aim for with students. Some schools may encourage students to go through the course on their own, and, you know, like at home as homework during advisory or when other teachers may decide to incorporate and integrate Con and have it as a part of structured time given to students.

We have found that the most effective approach includes completing the course challenges because that's going to give you a baseline and the student a baseline of where they are for that course. Again, that's recommended three times per year: beginning, middle, end. Setting those mastery goals, again, you can set it at the course level, right, assign the course because you want the students to work through the content of that course throughout the school year.

Or you can decide to set unit goals in addition to a course mastery goal that align to your scope and sequence. You want to always encourage students to track their progress and for them to understand what they're working towards.

In our dashboard, actually, I'm going to go ahead and quickly just go back because I want to share with you that you do have access to printable resources that you can use to leverage the implementation. So here on your main teacher dashboard, in your main dashboard, you have access to resources. This is where you would access the documents for Kigo that we talked about, that cloud. You also have access to all of these printable resources and they're organized by topic for you.

If you are wanting to learn more about how to get started with Con, you also have this getting started with Con for educators that will show you how to add courses, how to add goals, how to look at your reports and the data. You also have this Kigo for educators where you can get certified. You'll get a certificate at the end of that course so that you are able to leverage that as well.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and switch back to the slide. I know that we've been monitoring the chat for questions. If there are no questions at this time, I'm going to go ahead and leave you all with our social media and our help center information. We have lots and lots of blog articles that you can type in a question, and it should take you to how-tos and directions on how to do things in addition to those self-paced courses that I showed you could access on the platform.

We'd love to have you also join our Con Academy Facebook group. That link is available for you there as well. The last link is a blog article that has videos specific to Kigo and Kigo teacher tools that you're able to access. They’re very brief, short, and engaging and will help you use Kigo.

All right, that is our presentation. We hope that this was helpful for all of you, and we look forward to continuing our partnership and continuing to be able to provide educators and teachers with resources that can hopefully help both students and teachers. Thank you so much! I hope you have a wonderful rest of your evening. Take care. Bye-bye!