Khan Academy Ed Talks with Sophie Bosmeny - Thursday, August 19

Hello, welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy, where we talk to experts in the field of education. Today, we have with us Sophie Bosmany, who is with Khan Kids, and she's going to update us on what's going on with Khan Academy Kids, our app for two to eight-year-olds. So we are looking forward to hearing what she has to say.

Before we get started, a reminder that Khan Academy is a non-profit, and we rely on donations to keep up the work that we are doing. You will find at khanacademy.org/donate the place where you can make a donation. Whatever you can give is appreciated, and thank you for helping us to continue to do this work.

We also want to recognize a few companies that really, in the time of COVID-19, stepped up to help us make sure we could meet the increasing demand for what we do. That includes Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, and General Motors. Thank you!

And finally, if you have missed some of these Ed Talks or homerooms, you can find us in your podcast app at Homeroom with Sal and replay the audio versions of these discussions. So we look forward to seeing you there as well.

With that, I will welcome Sophie. Thank you for joining us today!

Sophie: Thank you for having me, Kristen. It's great to see you, and I'm really excited to be talking about Khan Academy Kids.

Kristen: Excellent! So let's start off. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your role at Khan Academy Kids?

Sophie: Well, it actually goes back a little way when I worked at Khan Academy. I started out working on Khan Academy, thinking a lot about how we get into school districts around the country. I worked as a partnerships manager at Khan Academy for a few years, and then just after Khan Academy acquired Duck Duck Moose, which was a for-profit suite of early learning apps that wanted to have even more impact, I joined Khan Academy. I found the pool of early childhood education and those littlest learners so exciting that I came and worked on Khan Academy Kids. Now, I work on strategy and our partnerships with preschools and school districts around the country.

Kristen: That's great! So we often have students who are watching, and many of us are in careers that maybe aren't the things that students who are in middle or high school think about. How did you end up in this role of partnerships and linking people together?

Sophie: Oh, that's a good question! I think it's something that I like to talk about a little bit because it was kind of a roundabout path, and it's not like when I was in high school I thought, “You know, I want to go and work for what I think is the best ed tech company in the world and do partnerships.” That certainly wasn't on my radar. I grew up in Australia—I don't know if you can tell from my accent a little bit—and I had really supportive parents who wanted me to pursue whatever I was interested in. They had a really strong preference for that to be medicine or law, that I would maybe become a doctor or an attorney.

I did go down that path and became an attorney in Australia, and I loved that work. At some point, that work brought me out to the U.S., and that was to study and to work. I was an international student out here, doing a graduate degree, and that's when I discovered Khan Academy. I thought a lot about, “What is it that I really love doing?” It's connecting people, like you said. It's thinking about, “Okay, what are the big problems that we should be solving?” and trying to prioritize things because we can't quite do everything.

A job in partnerships and strategy made a lot of sense, but I don't want anyone to think that that was a neat path or that that made a lot of sense at the time. There were certainly times where I thought, “Oh gosh, I spent all this time going to law school. Maybe I should use that.” It's turned out that I do use my law degree, and I use a lot of other skills as well. My message would be, enjoy that journey and get excited about the fact that you might not even know what you might end up really loving doing in five or ten years, which was definitely my experience.

Kristen: That was totally my experience as well! I can tell a story now from where I am of how I got here that sounds like it was all a plan, but it was not. At any particular time, there were different forks that would have led me in different directions. So I totally agree, and I always like to tell people to just be open to what might come down the path and as opportunities arise as well.

Sophie: That's trust me, I had no idea you'd been to law school even though we have worked together for a while, so I'm glad I asked.

Kristen: Let's switch over to Khan Academy Kids. For those who aren't familiar with it, tell us a little bit about it. How is it different from the Khan Academy main site that folks go to? Fill us in!

Sophie: Yes, so Khan Academy Kids is a part of Khan Academy. We all work under one umbrella on the same mission of providing a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Khan Academy Kids takes that mission and says, “Okay, in order to deliver on that, it's going to be really important that kids arrive at third grade able to read and able to be in the classroom, and feeling like they're enjoying math.” The way that we approach that at Khan Academy Kids is we've built a program that covers all of those things.

It's not just one subject, and it's in a mobile app, which is really important for younger learners to be able to drag and drop things and have something that meets their needs before they can read and actually navigate a desktop computer. I think you're seeing some of the footage of just how fun, bright, and cool it is.

The big differences I would say are Khan Academy is for grades 2 through 12, and it has math and ELA for grades 2 through 12 and a range of other subjects for middle and high school. Khan Academy Kids is for ages two years to eight years. It goes up to and through second grade, getting kids ready for third grade when they would move on and use Khan Academy.

That's one big difference. I mentioned that Khan Academy Kids is a mobile app, so the way that you access Khan Academy Kids is through the app store that you use. That could be the Apple App Store, it could be Google Play, it could even be Amazon, and then it would be on your mobile device. So here we can see there's a tablet being used, but it could also be a mobile phone or even a Chromebook. Khan Academy is also available on the app store as an app—it's a different separate app—so you would search for Khan Academy versus Khan Academy Kids in the app store; they're two different apps in the app stores.

Khan Academy is also available on the web, so on your desktop computer, that's one big difference. I would say though there are more similarities than there are differences. The idea is to make learning really joyful to meet learners where they are at, whether they're struggling with something or really accelerating and loving a particular area of their learning. Then also increasingly, the goal is to support teachers and their students in classrooms, and both Khan Academy and Khan Academy Kids are doing that. So I think that's some of the main similarities and differences between Khan Academy and Khan Academy Kids.

Kristen: I love that! Yeah, I usually think of it as thinking we're headed towards the same goal, but kids who are two to eight years old developmentally are very different than older kids. Just designing one experience really isn't possible, and so having these two separate experiences really gives us the strength of being able to, really, as you said, meet students where they are. So love it! That sounds great.

I've been poking around in the new content, and I saw some new yoga videos that I was really excited to see. There's a fun one where they do animal poses—yoga poses that are named after animals and all of that. So with that and other things, what have you folks released over the past few months?

Sophie: Well, yeah, I'm glad you noticed the yoga! I'm so excited about that. So at Khan Academy Kids—and it's the same at Khan Academy—this time of year is really busy for us because we are releasing a lot of new content and features in time for the new school year so that teachers and students can get excited about them as they get learning after the summer.

We worked really hard this past year to build a lot of new content. You mentioned the yoga; that was part of Khan Academy Kids. It's really about thinking about the whole child, not just their ABCs and 123s. We've always loved getting kids up and moving and fostering this idea that being ready for kindergarten and ready to thrive at school is about more than just academics. Kids need to know how to be in the classroom; they need to be confident and healthy.

We partnered with Alo Yoga, and they have a part of their program called Alo Gives. Alo Gives is now fully featured in the Khan Academy Kids app. It's a set of videos—they're a few minutes, anywhere up to about five minutes long—with real people, real kids, real yoga instructors in them, which I'm excited about.

Cody Bear does yoga; it's not pretty rare doing yoga as much as we would love to see that, and Cody certainly loves yoga and loves to keep fit and healthy. We thought our friends at Alo Gives could really help show us. It's been amazing, Kristen! We have had lots of families sending in the most adorable videos of them, you know, the whole family sometimes getting involved in doing their movement and mindfulness each day.

For teachers, we think this could translate well too because we're seeing lots of teachers projecting the app on their screen if they're lucky enough to have one in their class, or if they're teaching remotely to share their screen over Zoom or whatever platform they're using, and then we can all do yoga together. It's something that we're seeing used at home; we're seeing it used a little bit in classrooms, and we're just super excited about it. I know yoga is a really important part of my life and my mindfulness, and so I can't wait for kids to discover that.

Kristen: That's fantastic! So you talked about some of the new titles that are available too. Can you give us a little bit more detail on some of the books that are available now?

Sophie: Yes, so a big part of the latest release that we're really excited about for back to school is covering second grade. We had a bunch of kids who were just flying through our app; they were quickly running out of activities, and we couldn't keep up with them. They were going to get through all of the first-grade content for sure.

So we have built out second-grade content! We added over 200 second-grade lessons, and we added over a hundred new animated videos that are in the app. All that animation is done, you know, sort of right behind me; you can see the little corner where we put together the animations of our characters. You can see Sandy the Dingo, Peck is the bird, Olo the Elephant, and Ray the Red Panda, and Cody the Bear. Cody narrates and takes us through the app.

We added all those animations that cover a range of activities, and we added more coloring pages in our Create section, which is really, really fun. We talked about the yoga that we added, and we've added new books. Khan Academy Kids is a combination of our original books that are all created here in-house and then also some partner books as well.

We partner with National Geographic for Young Explorers and Bellwether Media on our nonfiction books, and we added a ton of new nonfiction books. Some of them get really deep into the science of things and are just super interesting. If you go into the app and then go into the library, you will see most of the new content if you're in second grade, and you'll see these banners that say new, and you'll see the yoga videos, and you'll see the new Bellwether books, and you'll see a bunch of new original readers as well.

So we're just really excited! We think we might have a chance this year, Kristen, of keeping up with all those learners who are just racing through our content. It's a good challenge to have, to try to reach them and keep up with that.

Kristen: That is great! Excellent. So you talked about classrooms and teachers, and I know that that's been a push too. What are teachers told you that they want, and how have you met some of those requests?

Sophie: Well, firstly, I just gotta say—and it doesn't get said enough—I don't think—that teachers are absolutely incredible and amazing. We had teachers during school closures last year reaching out to us, and they were so quick to adapt to online learning. They were sharing their screen with the Khan Academy Kids app, and then we built an assignments feature so that they could assign targeted lessons for students who are working at home.

Then they have progress reports where they can see what's going on. We got a lot of feedback when we launched those features—the assignments and the reports—really designed for remote learning at the time, that the teachers were enjoying it; they were loving it. They wanted even more data, and they wanted even better ways of assigning the right thing to a student at the right time, which we were really happy to hear.

So we just launched a new set of teacher reports. This is accessible if you log into the app as a teacher. You'll see that there's an assignment section and a report section, and now teachers can assign directly from these reports. That's one of the biggest changes we made.

You can imagine if you're a teacher and you see that a student's struggling with something and you want to reassign it; you don't want to go back out into the library, find that thing, and assign it. That would be really clunky. So now you can assign directly from this report, and it's really quick and easy.

The other thing that teachers were asking for was they wanted to see a student's score history on each lesson. They didn't just want to see their latest attempt or their best attempt; they wanted to know, you know, did they exhibit a growth mindset? Did they really work hard at mastering this? How can I see their journey to getting to that checkmark, if it's a green checkmark?

Another big thing—and this is especially important when there has been suspected learning loss—is that teachers and parents, for that matter, can see how far a student has progressed in a particular learning domain. They can start to see, “Okay, that might have been a little bit disrupted. We spent some time out of school; we spent more time outdoors. We learned more things around the house—all those were good things—and now, it's great to have a sense of where we're at on a particular learning domain.” A learning domain might be a component of ELA, or it might be a component of math, like counting; that might be part of a learning domain.

We'll get a good sense of where a student is at. All I can say is hats off to our teachers! Every year it feels like they're getting smarter about our product, Khan Academy Kids, than we are. They're teaching us a ton about what works and what doesn't when you actually take it into a classroom or a virtual learning setup. Yeah, it's just a joy! We have some Khan Academy Kids ambassadors as well, and they are just a really amazing group of teachers who are spreading the word.

To that end, if anyone listening—whether you're a student or a teacher or a district administrator or a parent—or none of the above—if you know of districts that would like to work with us, preschools particularly, Head Start preschools, we're so interested in reaching them. If you know teachers, if you know parents, I mean spreading the word—anyone who is involved in the education of two to eight-year-olds should know about Khan Academy Kids. I think that's excellent.

Kristen: I know in the report that got flashed up there on the screen for a minute the folks managed to catch that one of the things that we talk about a lot is mastery learning. It’s not just about getting a score on a particular assignment, but thinking about mastering a skill. So when you're talking about domains like counting instead of saying, “What was my score on this assignment?” it’s thinking about how well do I understand counting. It looks like your reports are designed to help teachers do both of those things: understand how a student did on a particular assignment, but also that broader domain and understanding how they're making progress on that. Is that a fair statement?

Sophie: Yeah, that is a fair statement! It wasn't always that easy to aggregate up to the skill or domain level, and that was something that our teachers asked for. So that is really part of this new release that we launched just a couple of weeks ago, and that teachers are starting to use. Yeah, that’s exactly right!

Kristen: Great, great! So you talked a little bit about last year and the challenges teachers faced, and where they were. Unfortunately, it looks like we're not out of the woods yet on some of these challenges in getting kids to school and where things are. I'm starting to see some headlines about what attendance is looking like coming into school, particularly for young learners. What are you seeing related to that?

Sophie: Yeah, I think we had heard throughout the summer all about the excitement about heading back into the classroom. We are still really hopeful all the amazing work that's going on at the state and district level to make that safe for students I think is just incredible. There is some hesitation when it comes to getting kids back into classrooms, and we are seeing—and I think that's what you were referencing, Kristen—that the absence is really concentrated in those younger years.

Some of the numbers coming out of places like Stanford University in the last couple of weeks show that when it comes to enrollments in public schools, there are lower enrollment levels across the board, and there are even lower enrollment levels for lower grades. Kindergarten is looking like the hardest hit, and that is really a key age group for Khan Academy Kids. Some of the numbers we have is that there are a million children who were expected to be enrolled who are not enrolled and not turning up to school thus far.

Time will tell, and close to a third of them are kindergarten students. What I can say to folks about that is that Khan Academy Kids, whether there's learning happening at home or learning happening in the classroom, Khan Academy Kids is a tool that can support both arrangements. We have parents who are working on a lot of learning with kids at home, and they are able to chart the progress of their child at home and then share it with their teacher, whether they're learning remotely through something like Zoom virtual school or whether they do, in fact, make it back into the classroom.

That is one way we’re supporting parents and teachers at this time, particularly with younger kids, particularly if they’re not ready to be back in the classroom yet. I think we will be able to show up on the screen here some resources we have, and we'll put a link in the chat. We’ve got a link up there now: khan.co/khan-kids-parent-resources. This is where parents can go to get a list of resources, and really these are around things like structuring time—how might a parent plan the week or the day?

There's a link there. You can see now called Printables, and that will link to a bunch of activities that really go beyond being ordinary worksheets. They will link to the app; they will have activities that are out of the app and get kids moving. They will have cutouts, they will have crafts, they will have creativity. You can see some of these printables are really helping parents at home because we want to balance that screen time on our app, learning with our characters and working through printables.

So they're just some of the ways that we're supporting learning at home! Let me pause. Ashley Clark on YouTube, hopefully, that answers your question of whether Khan Academy Kids can be used for parents who are homeschooling their kids.

Kristen: So you're going to interrupt you, but that question had just come in and thought it was right in line with what you're talking about.

Sophie: Yeah, great! No, I think Ashley, you saw that URL there. Reach out to us at Khan Academy Kids support if you have any trouble finding anything, but I think the beauty of it is it's not all in-app. There's a lot going on outside of our app as well for those little learners, and we've got a lot of parents who are relying on these resources for a good part of their learning program with their kids at home.

Kristen: Excellent! Let's take a look at kids who are going back into classrooms and what we can do to support them.

Sophie: Well, I think one of the big things—and it sometimes feels a little bit counterintuitive because there’s a lot of stress about learning loss going on—one of the big things that we're hearing is let's take this slow when it comes to picking up new resources and getting right back into learning. Let's make sure kids are feeling confident in the classroom. Everyone's been through a lot this past more than a year now.

We are really, really excited for kids to get back and to meet their friends sometimes for the first time to meet their new teacher, and then as learning begins, we're working with teachers to weave Khan Academy Kids into the school day and into homework or in work that's done from home. We are partnering with school districts, and we are partnering with preschools, particularly Head Start grantees across the country to support teachers and to deliver Khan Academy Kids to as many students as possible.

If you are a school district administrator or you know of one, you can email khanKidsPartnerships@khanacademy.org, and that's where you can reach one of us who will help support your district or preschool to get Khan Academy Kids out there for parents, teachers, and most importantly, for students.

Kristen: Excellent! Alright, I'm going to take another fun question from YouTube. Cokie wants to know, “Why is Peck a baby bird?”

Sophie: Well, I think I don’t—I—this is actually putting me on the spot. I don’t know how old Peck is. Maybe one of our super users knows more about Peck than I do. Peck is certainly the smallest of our characters in size, but you know, he’s certainly a very, very interesting diverse character. Don’t let size fool you when it comes to Peck! But I’ll have to check with our creative team, our animators, our illustrators here who created Peck to really check in on why he seems younger.

I’m not sure that he is, but I’ll check!

Kristen: Excellent! It’s always good to stump the hosts and the guests sometimes, so good question!

We are just about out of time. Let me just close by asking, what are you most excited about in the year ahead?

Sophie: Oh, I think it’s gotta be seeing kids back in school! I mean, I think I took it for granted, you know, going out and visiting schools and all the noise and the mess and the joy that goes with a classroom that's in full swing, and I'm just so excited, Kristen, to see that again—to see kids spending time together and to get off Zoom! We might have to wait a little longer, and I'm glad everyone's being really patient, but I’d have to say that that is my dream for this coming school year.

Kristen: Excellent! Thank you so much for joining us!

Sophie: Thanks to all of you who have been listening. Khan Academy Kids, you can find it in whatever app store you use and prefer for your devices. Thank you, and we'll see you all next time!

Sophie: Thanks, Kristen!