Khan Academy Sample Zoom Class

Hey everyone, this is Jeremy Shifling at Khan Academy. Um, thank you so much for making time out of your busy back-to-school season to join us today. You know, there's a ton going on in your class and in the world, and so I want to make the next 30 minutes really valuable.

To that end, I'm going to focus not on just another lecture or another presentation, but specifically a guide to making those Zoom lessons, those Google Meet lessons, those live video lessons you're going to be doing all fall really effective for your students. I'm going to be presenting a sample lesson to you as my quasi-students right now.

That being said, before we get started, I do want to lay out a couple of things. Number one, the question I always have on my mind whenever I'm starting a webinar is, "Can I get a copy of this? Can I see the slides?" Absolutely! So, it'll be recorded and shared in your email inbox in about an hour, so look for that no matter what.

Then number two, the most common questions I got from folks leading up to the session is, "Hey, I teach seventh grade, not sixth grade," or "I teach social studies, not math. Is this still relevant?" Absolutely! I was actually a former kindergarten teacher before I joined Khan, so even teaching sixth grade math is a little bit out of my comfort zone. But the key is not about the content itself but the pedagogical principles about how do you use this new format, this new kind of Zoom session to be really effective.

Speaking of that, even though we now sort of use Zoom as a generic term to encapsulate all video conferencing, the way we used to do for Xerox with copy machines or Kleenex with tissues, what I really mean is whether you're using Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex, or some other platform like GoToWebinar, just know that all these principles apply because they're less about technology and more about human psychology—about how students learn and how teachers can teach their best in this new environment.

So no matter what you teach, no matter what tools you use to teach, this will be highly relevant for you heading into the fall. Okay, that being said, the frame for today's session is this: a really awesome op-ed that Sal Khan wrote a couple weeks back. I'm not just saying that because Sal is my boss and he signs my checks, but because I really do believe, again, as a former kindergarten teacher who is all about engaging his students and getting them interacting in the classroom, that when we think about teaching in this new environment, it's so easy to psych ourselves out and say, "Hey, I'm really uncomfortable and unfamiliar with these technology tools." You know, I'm going to have to fall back on sort of the lowest common denominator—giving lectures, broadcasting my lessons.

I think that if we push ourselves a little bit as educators, we say, "We know what great education looks like, especially in a regular classroom. We know that it's not about lectures and monologues; it's about conversations and dialogues, getting students thinking, getting them talking, getting them learning." Sal's kind of clarion call is how can we bring that same level of interactivity, that same level of engagement from the in-person classroom to the online classroom? That's what I'm going to try to demo for you today.

So, the first thing that it really calls out in this op-ed—and I'll share this out in the email afterwards; you can read his op-ed directly—but I pulled out some valuable quotes here is that maybe because of the school district pressures folks were getting in the spring or because we were all sort of running around with our heads chopped off, I know I certainly was trying to get stuff done at Khan Academy, we kind of got into this mode of "let's record a bunch of videos, send them out to our students, and that'll be the best way we can engage them in this really difficult moment."

The reality is that if you're spending a lot of your time recording videos but not actually interacting with students, you're kind of reinventing the wheel because Sal and others have been making these videos for 10 years or more at this point. So, if there's any topic in the world that you want to share with your students, chances are you can find it on Khan Academy, you can find it on YouTube, you can find it on other platforms. So why just replicate those lectures? Instead, use that scarce time you have online to really get your students plugged in—thinking, engaging—not just sitting back with their minds turned off. So, number one: prioritize interaction.

The best way you can do that—to give you a little sort of hint—is you can assign all sorts of video and practice content to folks on Khan Academy even before your Zoom session. I mentioned in my email, if you saw this meeting into this webinar, I said, "Hey, do me a favor, watch this video on multiplication word problems, and then also do this exercise on multiplication and division word problems."

If you want to replicate that same thing with your own students, you can come right over here, say "check this, check that," and then assign to my students. I can give you more information about how to sort of use Khan, but actually that's not so much the focus today—is to get that out of the way, get that taken care of, and then move on to the more important things, the more fun things, frankly, which is engaging your students.

So to that point, let's move to Sal's second point, which is when you prioritize interaction, don't just immediately go into academic mode. Okay, we're going to talk about math, or we're going to talk about social studies. Instead, give students a chance to really process things on the social-emotional front.

I know that SEL has been hot in the last couple of years academically speaking but never more so than the last six months because we know that our students have a ton on their shoulders right now. We want to give them an outlet for creativity, for imagination, for social connection, for joy—all those things that can seem really hard, especially in a digital environment.

To help you with that, Khan has put together a brand new tool called Khan Academy Refresh, and basically what this is is over a hundred conversation starters you can use at the start of a long Zoom session or if you're changing between two topics and you need a little chance to again refresh and shake things up.

What I would love to do to start off this session today, again putting you in that student mode, is everyone check out this really good prompt here. I love this one: describe the year 2020 as a food. What would it taste like and why? If you can share that in the question section, that would be amazing.

So, on GoToWebinar, there's a little section called "questions." We can actually put in your questions and just describe that year as a food. What do you think 2020 would taste like if you dug into it, and why? Go ahead and answer that there. Obviously, you can do the exact same thing on pretty much any video platform. Zoom has chat, Google Meet has chat, Webex has chat, so it should be a very familiar kind of way to get your students talking.

I'm going to shout out some of the stuff that I love. I love the fact first of all that Connie and Karen both said liver; they were the first ones to answer. Obviously, as educators, we are all tuned in to sort of the way that 2020 tastes right now. Hopefully, it's also nutritious like a liver in some ways, but we'll see.

Greg says haggis. Definitely hear that. If I think 2020 was described as a food, talking about it as a boiled pig stomach or a lamp cow stomach certainly makes sense. Tiffany also says liver. Meridian says Sour Patch Kids—sweet and sour. I love that Meridian was able to find some sweetness amongst all the sour experiences. Gloria says cod liver oil because it's so nasty-tasting. Adriana and Cheryl both say lemons. Adriana adds, "Because it has some sour times and sometimes we were not too happy about." Absolutely.

Donna says moldy cheese. "It should be so good. This should be the most amazing year 2020—it sounds like the future—but it just ain't." Then I'm going to say a couple others here. We've got Raymond saying ghost pepper. Definitely, we feel burned this year. Becky says broccoli, and I'll leave that open to interpretation. I know some people love broccoli out there. John says sauerkraut and bratwurst because it takes a lot of gumption to eat it, but it ends up being satisfying if you try it.

Okay, I have to end on that one, John, because you've nailed it. This is definitely the most challenging year across every industry, across every part of our society. But I think what we're going to sort of learn from this experience over the next several months is we can actually teach ourselves new skills as educators, and they can actually make us stronger as teachers for years going forward if we invest in them now. So, I love that attitude.

I want to build on that going into the next section, which is bridging the offline and online experience for your students. One of the things that Sal says is like, "Look, realistically, you can't be on Zoom all day, no matter what your district tells you to do." It's going to be too much for your students, too much for you, and so you're going to have to have some work done asynchronously. In other words, have students watch some videos offline or do some work offline, kind of like I was suggesting in that first step.

But here's the key: I think you have to then use the information you get from assigning all that stuff offline and then reconnect it when you reconvene as a class in your Zoom sessions. So that way, for a student, they don't feel like, "Okay, this is just some busy work to get me through the day," and "It has no bearing on what my teacher is talking about." Instead, this stuff that I'm working on on the side offline is absolutely critical to what we're going to do online when we come together as a class.

To sort of demonstrate what I think is possible there, I want to show you what it looks like on the Khan Academy backend. This is available to everyone on this call as a teacher because it says, "Hey, you went ahead and assigned some practice to your students." The same way that I assigned practice to you before this session, I said I want you to go ahead and do this multiplication division word problem practice so you can come in ready to go.

One of the really cool things that Khan Academy will show you, once you've had students do this offline, is now online you can look at their performance. Better yet, you can see, number one, which of these questions are students really struggling with. So in my sort of sample classroom, every question was awesome except for question three. Specifically, you can show your students what the responses from the class were so they can say, "Hey, that's my response. I'm not alone. Others are thinking the same thing."

Once you start to identify some of the challenges and the understanding of the problem and how to process it, now you can tackle it as a whole class. This is kind of like x-ray vision for teachers because unlike before when maybe you just had to guess who was thinking differently or who might need a little extra help, now you can see in a single place this is the sort of common area where our whole class is struggling. Let's really focus on that with our limited time together.

To sort of walk you through this, I want to make it really interactive again to Sal's point. I'm going to give you some poll questions along the way, and I'm going to show you how you can do it in any platform in a second. So let's look at this question together. Class, I talked about Ron and Hermione from one of our favorite books, and they're using their new magic skills from Hogwarts to lift feathers into the air.

Now, Hermione, the problem tells us, can lift a feather 3,525 centimeters into the air—not too shabby! She knows her stuff. However, it's really impressive because that is five times as high as Ron can lift his feather. Our question is how high can Ron lift the feather with his magic?

Now, to really break this down, I want to do this first one as a class. I want to ask you an initial question—you're going to see this on your screen in a second—which is before we even get into the mechanics of it, what kind of problem is this? Is this addition? Is it subtraction? Multiplication? Division? Is it some kind of Hogwarts-y magic problem? Let me know what you think. I just want to get a sense of where everyone's heads are at before we dive a little further.

Okay, I see a lot of folks voting. This is awesome! And really, don't worry about whether you've nailed it or not; just go ahead and guess because I want to get a sense of where we are as a class community before we dive in. All right, three, two, one— we're going to close this poll. I'm going to share the results with you, and you can see that the majority of the folks in class are saying division, but a big chunk are saying multiplication. Some are even saying magic!

So let's talk about it a little bit. Before we talk about it, let me just explain this. Yes, this is a cool feature of GoToWebinar. Zoom has something similar. Google Meet may not have polls built in, but no matter what platform you're using, using free Google Docs tools, you can come over here and basically add any kind of question onto your screen and have students vote either through the chat function or through this.

Here's a cool little hack for you: If you ever want to start a new Google Form you can send to your students to test how they're doing, all you have to do is type form.new into your browser and that will start a brand new survey that you can send out. So whether you have fancy technology or non-fancy technology, it doesn't matter; there are always ways to work around.

Okay, that being said, let's talk about this question a little bit, class. It's definitely tricky because we're studying multiplication and division word problems at the same time, and you can easily see it going one way or the other. Especially because it uses this word "five times," which sounds kind of like multiplication, but the key thing here is we're saying that actually Hermione is lifting hers higher than Ron is. If hers is higher, this has got to be a division problem because we got to figure out how much less Ron can lift his feather with his magic. So the division folks are right on in this case.

But now I want to ask another question, which is okay, we know it's division because we're focused on breaking this bigger number down into something smaller—in this case, Ron's number. But how would you go about setting it up? Again, check out a couple different ways to do it on your screen and think about which one of these approaches is the correct one based on the fact that we now agree it's a division problem. Should we start with a larger number, start with a smaller number? What makes the most sense and what should we divide by? Of course, by five times as high? By two characters? What do you think?

Okay, thanks everyone for voting so fast, this is awesome! Go ahead and share those results, and this time I'm really happy to say you all nailed it. We know that Hermione got her feather an astonishing 3,525 centimeters into the air, so that's going to be the top number in our formula. Then we also know that Ron was five times less, so that's going to be the bottom number in our formula. So that's what we're going to focus on—beautifully done.

Now we're going to actually talk about the last step here. So hold on one second—what is the answer? I want to have this be a little more interactive. So first of all, go ahead and do your own calculation. So let me know what you think: is Ron at 705 centimeters, a little more than 17,000 centimeters, 881 and a quarter centimeters, or is Ron just bad at magic in general so it's not even worth calculating?

Okay, I love everyone answering so fast, this is awesome! I'm going to close the poll. I'm going to share the results, and you all nailed it! I'm definitely going to send you some digital certificates after this, so thank you for your awesome work today—great job, class! Now just to explain for those who might feel a little bit frustrated at this point. Okay, 705, that sounds good, but how do we get there?

What I actually want to do is I want to draw now. I want to show you exactly how I got this answer by coming over to the draw section. I think this is so powerful for your students because you're amazing on the whiteboard of the chalkboard in your class, but a lot of times it can feel like, "Oh, I don't have that in my classroom digitally." So what do I do?

The nice thing is if you're sharing your screen—and again, you can do that on pretty much any platform—you can always come over to the draw section and literally just start writing on the screen. What we'll do is we'll set this up, so we've got 3,525 right there in the middle. We're going to divide 5 into that. We know 5 can't go into 3, but 5 can go into 35 seven times. So we put in our 35. Bring that down to zero.

Five can't go into 2, so we're going to put a zero there, but it can go into 25 five times. So we have 705. 5 times 5 is 25, and we're down to zero with no remainder. So I have to apologize for my sloppy handwriting. I will say I'm doing this completely with my mouse over here. But if you want to pick up a Wacom tablet like the one that Sal Khan uses to make videos, it's about 50 bucks right now on Amazon, I noticed. We're also always giving them away from Khan Academy as well, so that will definitely make your handwriting a little bit more legible than mine. You can just imagine how my poor kindergarten students fared given my handwriting.

But definitely a cool tool to, again, get that whiteboard feel back in your class. Okay, that being said, I want to move on to the last point that Sal made, which is you want to get your students thinking, and you especially want to get them thinking aloud. That's because, as every math teacher knows out there—even if you don't teach math, even if you teach anything else—you know that the best learning, the best sort of progress and growth comes when students struggle—not just guessing an answer and being lucky—but really forcing them to not just sit back passively but to engage actively.

Sal highly recommends asking your students questions, getting them to share their thinking, even cold calling them a little bit in a friendly sort of non-antagonistic way just to make sure that they feel plugged into what you're doing, and they're not just sitting back passively watching the show. To do that, I will say that Khan is a real sort of wealth of really great questions you can ask your students—some of them in the practice section, as you notice, are fairly easy, and that's by design. We don't want to intimidate students, but in the videos, we have some pretty juicy questions.

I think you can always steal these and just put them on your screen if you really want to give a really interesting brain teaser to your students. So we're going to pull up this question, which is, "Blair scored 144 points this football season." So fingers crossed the football season still goes on! Blair scored all of his points with 50-yard field goal kicks for three points each—not bad! Blair sounds like quite the kicker. He played in 16 games this season. How many field goals did Blair make in each game?

This is a two-step problem now, and it's going to take a little doing. Now, here's what I'm going on a limb as a facilitator of this class. Is there anyone in the audience who would be game for me to turn on their audio right now and we can just go back and forth on this question, and I'll diagram out your answer on my little digital whiteboard as we go along? I would just love to sort of talk with you about your thought process, how you put it together, and we'll use this as a learning moment for all of our classmates who are also trying to figure this out.

So if you're interested in being our volunteer today, all you have to do is click the hand raise button on your GoToWebinar control panel. I will go and open up your audio, and we'll have a quick chat. So again, raise your hand and let's dig in. Okay, I believe that Eric was first, so let me give Eric a shot. Hey Eric, are you there?

Yes. Hey Eric, are you willing to be a brave volunteer today?

Yeah, let me find you on my screen. I can't find you. I went to—I was—I went to the Khan Academy site. There, there you are! Okay, yeah, oh yeah, don't worry. Sorry for all the multitasking here. Eric, tell us a little bit about what you teach and where you're based.

I teach high school geometry and calculus in Freiburg, Maine.

Oh wow, so cool! Well, you are going to crush this one, especially compared to a former kindergarten teacher. I wasn't—I was off task for a minute. Let's see.

Okay, no worries! While you look at this question, I want to pull up another cool little hack for you all, which is again if you've got Zoom, there's a built-in whiteboard feature, but there's no built-in whiteboard feature for GoToWebinars. What am I going to do?

Well, I find a hack, I find a workaround, and sure enough, there's this free site called whiteboardfox.com. You just go there, you start a new session again without paying a cent, without even registering, and now you have a whiteboard to draw on.

So Eric, if you had a chance to look at this question, just tell me how you get started. How would you even begin taking on this problem?

So there's, they have some extraneous information. He explored all these points with the 50-yard field goal kicks, which are worth three points each. He played 16 games. There they scored—all his points were field goals.

Okay, he played in 16. How many field goals did he make in each game? Wow, 144 divided by three is—all right, let's do that!

Yeah, okay, uh, 4, 12, 24. Three goes into 48—let me just check—48 times 3—yeah, so he scored 40. He kicked 48 field goals.

Okay, beautiful! And if he played in 16 games, then you would divide that by 16.

Okay, so now we have 48 divided by 16. And of course, it might be easier just to sort of think about multiples of 16. So the answer is, uh, well, 32, uh, 3. Three field goals per game—not bad at all!

Yeah, and so Eric, like that was amazing! You totally just sort of walked us through how to break that down!

Yeah, but then you want to check, you know, you want to check. So if he scored three field goals per game, he scored nine points per game, correct?

That's right! Exactly! So now nine times 16 and see if that adds up to—that's right! There we go.

Yeah, okay, beautiful! Um, so Eric, I want you to live—if you don't mind—do you feel like this would be a doable strategy for your students, or are you doing it already, or planning to do it?

I plan on doing it, but what I'm really interested in is all the technology—how you showed your writing and all those little icons up above there that you're clicking. Are they available on the Khan Academy lessons?

Yeah, great question! So I highly, highly recommend using this sort of review format with your students. The reason is that you're able to sort of again connect the online to the offline by saying, "Hey, here are the questions that we all just did as a class."

Yeah, hear everyone's answers, and then without going to another site or even pulling up the Zoom whiteboard feature, you have this draw section built right in. So it's really like one-stop shopping.

Okay, it's great. It's beautiful! Yeah, and if you're like me and you're like even struggling with like, "Oh my goodness! How do I explain all this?" you can even go to the sections and kind of break it down a little further if you want.

Wow, I think you all will probably be many steps ahead of me mathematically!

Yeah, that's beautiful! Yeah, and I think it just, you know, lets students know also that there's like hunger for connection right now. Like they're feeling like, "Oh my goodness! Is my teacher even seeing what I'm doing? Do they care what I'm doing?"

The fact that you can literally show their responses on the screen, albeit anonymously, says, "Hey, they're paying attention, and it does matter what I'm doing."

Cool! Okay, so Eric, thank you so much for being an amazing volunteer! You totally rocked this one! Thank you!

Okay, so I'm going to mute Eric's line for a second here. I want to come to sort of the recap of what we just discussed and also give folks a chance to ask additional questions as well.

If you come back to sort of Sal's call to action, if you will, he was really calling out four things for educators. He was saying, number one: let's go back to first principles. No one got into teaching to be a lecturer. You got in it to be a stimulator, an inspirer—getting students interacting every day in your class. Let's prioritize that before we do anything else with technology.

Number two: recognizing that times are tough. Can't just be all academics all the time, so use tools like Khan Academy Refresh or just conversation starters or "how was your weekend?" to have students have a chance to talk to each other, share their ideas, be creative.

Again, number three: offload a lot of the heavy lifting lecture-wise to asynchronous work. So assign those videos on Khan, assign those practice sessions on Khan—get them doing stuff before they come into the live session.

When they come in, make that bridge between what they've done offline with what you're going to talk about online. So like Eric was just talking about, show them what they have done, explain where they might need a little help, and get them thinking and sharing their ideas. Lastly, don't just say, "Sit back and answer a lot of poll questions," because that's a good start, but get them really talking about their thinking, talking about their process.

You can do that by cold calling students, by giving everyone a chance to talk during the course of a session—just get them talking and sharing, which is always the most engaging way to get those brains turned on and activated. So that being said, I would love to answer any questions you might have about the technology, about the pedagogical approach, or about Khan Academy itself. I'm happy to answer those via the question section, so I'm going to go right down to that right now.

I'm just going to start taking them as they come in, so if you have a question, feel free to type it in and I will respond right away. So, Font says, "Can Google Forms give you immediate poll feedback?" Absolutely! So, if I was to go ahead and share this with my students, what I could do is I could actually generate this link. So I click send, I say I've got my little poll ready, I'm going to copy this and paste it into the chat or whatever I'm using, and then what I'll see on the backend is the responses live as they come in. That's again pretty powerful, even if you don't have some fancy poll function built into your platform. So definitely check it out. Again, the shortcut is form.new, and you can start a new form at any point. Great question, Font!

Okay, let's see here. So John is asking, "What kind of digital pad does Sal Khan use with a pen?" I'm actually going to share this with you all right now. So check this out. So first of all, I'm going to share a couple things. Number one, this is the Khan help center where if you ever have any questions, you can always come and get your answers answered.

So in this case, I'll say Wacom, which is the tablet he uses, and sure enough, here's all of Sal's current setup: Camtasia, Smooth Draw, Wacom. Again, you can buy one of these for 50 bucks on Amazon. So if you're interested, feel free to grab that.

Lastly, I do want to call this out. If you're not finding what you need, please let us know right away. I know it sounds negative to report a problem, but know that you can come here for questions, for ideas, for suggestions, and we typically respond in a couple of hours. So please take advantage of this feature if you're getting stumped with anything along the way. Great question, John!

Okay, oh, Vicky—so Vicky is actually our head of development at Khan Academy. She's asking, "Is there an ideal number of students for a lesson like this?" So here's the interesting thing, Vicky. We actually have more than 200 educators across the nation live right now, which just shows that anything is possible if you sort of plan things out and focus on that interactivity. That being said, I think it would be even more fun if you were doing this with a class of 25 or 30 or 35 students and you could see your students' video people who were talking more frequently.

If you do have a large lecture, maybe you teach at a community college, totally get it! It's doable, but obviously a smaller class allows for even more interactivity. Great question, Vicky!

Um, let's see here. Gloria said, "What is the name of the tool for writing on the whiteboard?" Again, if you just want to use Khan Academy's built-in tool, that's under the assignment score section. So let me show you how to get here just so it's super easy for you. If you ever come to your teacher dashboard and you're looking at your class, you're going to come down to the assignment section, come over to scores, and then you're going to choose the specific assignment that you gave. In this case, here's the one that I gave to you all before the session, and then you click "draw," and you've got that whiteboard ready to go. That being said, if you want a brand new one, you can come over to whiteboardfox.com, say "start drawing," create a whiteboard, and voila—without registering, without paying a cent, I've got a whiteboard to use on my screen right now.

Again, I don't necessarily endorse one product over another, but I think in this moment we all need really good tools, really free tools. That's one that I highly recommend. Okay, great question, Gloria!

Um, let's see here. Rosemary is saying, "What do you think about assessing how well students know their basic multiplication facts?" I have always increased fluency with "How many facts can you answer in five minutes on paper and pencil?" So what I might suggest, Rosemary, is you could use something like Google Forms because I totally agree, you know multiplication facts are so foundational to everything that we do—including the problem that Eric and I just worked on there.

The fact that Eric knew his multiplication facts from having an amazing third-grade teacher means that he was able to do that question so quickly. I think you really do want to focus on that speed of processing as well as the memorization. You could actually build out a whole question bank right here. You know, five times five, seven times nine, etc.

You could give it to your students, and you could literally put a timer on, "Hey, you've got to get this done in a certain amount of time." Here's another cool little hack. If you want to have a timer on your screen, come over here to five-minute timer in Google, and Google will start a timer for you automatically that you can share on your screen so your students know how much time is left.

Again, super easy way to get started and get your students working really fast. I'll share a link to that technique in the chat. Great question, Rosemary! I love multiplication facts.

Um, let’s see here. Don is asking, "What did you mean by the review section? Is that a part of Khan Academy?" Absolutely! So, um, this scores report is again baked into every assignment that you give on Khan Academy where it's going to tell you a couple of things. Number one, it's going to tell you which of the problems were the toughest for your students. Then it's going to show you the actual responses from your students.

In this case, we could start to say, "Ah, students are consistently getting this wrong with the exact wrong answer. Maybe I can intuit where they're going wrong—they're doing multiplication instead of division." Then we can get into all the other stuff that we've already shared, and that's all available, all free for every teacher out there.

It's a great question, Donna! Let's see here. What is the name of the one on Amazon? Says Georgina. So, um, Wacom, I would say, is sort of like the—again, the Xerox or the Kleenex or the Zoom of tablets based on what I've seen. They have a new one called the Wacom One, O-N-E.

The one that we have given out in the past or the one that Sal uses is often used by professional designers; it's got tons of sensitivity, you can do shading, new gradients—all this fancy stuff, and that's great if that's what you're trying to do. But if all you want to do is draw on the screen, this Wacom One is only 50 bucks and it does allow you to sort of get all the basic stuff done without a lot of fancy features you don't need. So you might want to check that out.

Okay, um, Adriana says, "You mentioned Khan giving away some tablets. Where can I find that?" So I'm happy to say that our Khan for Educators campaign—which was a little contest or giveaway tied to the launch of our new Khan for Educators course—just gave out 15 of those fancier tablets, and we will absolutely do more like that in the near future.

In the meantime, if you want to check out any of that training material, here's what that course looks like, and it'll go way more in depth on all the things we just talked about—how do you give assignments, how do you look at those reports, how do you figure out what your students are doing. I highly recommend Khan for Educators; it's the best way to learn Khan. You can do it all in an hour or two, and you get a certificate for your time.

Okay, great question, Adriana! Um, let's see here. Oh, Ed has a great point: "Probably you always have math examples. Can you provide an English sample?" Absolutely!

So I promise that my next session will be focused on maybe ELA, maybe social studies. My wife is a historian herself, so I'm going to be in big trouble if I don't focus on that. But if you ever want to find our full breadth of curriculum, you can always go to the courses tab, and this lives everywhere you go on Khan Academy. No matter whether you're on the teacher side or the student side, you can always find the courses menu in the upper left-hand corner, and you can see this full spectrum from math to science to ELA.

So, for example, if you're teaching not sixth-grade math but sixth-grade ELA, we've got a ton of stuff already built out for you. So I highly recommend checking that out as well as our additional ELA content. Great call, Ed, and I apologize about that!

Let’s see here. Timothy says, "Parents at our board meeting said they don't want that flipped classroom structure—in other words, having students watch videos offline and then assuming they're coming in already having watched. What would be a good blended strategy instead of that?"

I totally get it! You know, given the sort of low participation rates we saw in the spring, there's a legitimate fear that if you assign something ahead of time, there could be 25 or 30 percent of your students who never even see it, never even do it. You don't want to leave those students at a disadvantage.

So what you can do is you can maybe give it out as some optional pre-reading—just sort of throw it out there—but then you can kick off your class after you do the refresh section with a live demonstration. Kind of like that example of, "You do one, we do one, you do one." Maybe you do the first example, and you solve one of these challenging ones that Sal has thrown out. But then you quickly go from just pure sort of lecture mode into an interactive mode—ask some poll questions, get the student's intuition, have a student answer the question all the way through to really demonstrate that process.

I think the more time you can spend having students think actively, the more engagement and the more learning you're going to get. Great question, Timothy!

Let's see here. Linda, that's a really good question: "If I have a group of students already signed up for Khan and I've linked the class to Google Classroom, what's the most efficient way to get others to join?"

We'll talk about this more in our next session next week, where I'm going to actually have teachers log in as students to my own class and see what Khan looks like through the student prism. But one thing that I highly recommend if you haven't seen this before is that we have this nice Google Classroom integration where if you come over here to the students tab in your classroom, you can say, "Hey, my district, or I have already done the hard work of getting everyone integrated into Google Classroom. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I don't have to register them all over again."

So what you can do quickly is come over here, click "add new students," click "invite your Google Classroom," connect to Google Classroom, and you're off to the races—basically pulling in your existing Google Classroom class right into Khan Academy.

So hopefully that's the fastest way, Linda, to get your students up and running.

Okay, that being said, I see that there are a bunch more questions, and I don't want to sort of go too much beyond my welcome, given that I did promise to end at the bottom of the hour.

Let me end with this. Number one: If you've got any burning questions and you want the absolute fastest way to get a response, please reach out to our world-class support team. Here's the amazing thing—thanks to Vicky and her team's work—even as a non-profit at Khan Academy, we are able to field requests in often under two or three hours.

So I want you to take advantage of this team's awesome availability by submitting questions right here, and I'll put that in the chat. That being said, if you don't get your question answered here, you can feel free to reach out to me directly. My email address will be in the email that comes to your inbox in about 30 minutes with a copy of the recording, a copy of the certificate, and all the next steps to get started, and I promise I'll get you an answer even if you don't get it through this function.

That being said, I want to close with something that I really like that Sal mentioned in his op-ed, which is what is the point of school? At the end of the day, yes, it's about academics. Yes, it's about learning and growth and all that good stuff, but it's also where we learn how to be effective members of society—where we develop those first friendships, where we get inspired to take on big things.

I think if you can model for your students your excitement and your passion for these topics in a way to get them engaged and plugged into what you're excited about, they're going to come out of this year, yes, with having overcome so many adverse challenges, but also with so much excitement for what's possible, and I believe that's truly what school is all about.

So thank you for all that you do. Thank you for your amazing questions and participation tonight, and I wish you all and your students tremendous success in the year to come. Thank you so much!