Homeroom with Sal & Dan Tieu & Sophie Turnbull - Wednesday, August 19

Hi everyone, Sal here from Khan Academy. Welcome, uh, again for joining our homeroom live stream. Uh, before we get into what's going to be a really fun conversation with some internal Khan Academy team members to talk about all the new things we have for back to school, I will make my standard announcements.

First of all, a reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about making a donation at khanacademy.org/donate. I also want to make a special shout out to several organizations that, when they learned that we were running at a deficit even before COVID, and that deficit only grew because our server costs have gone up, we're trying to accelerate a whole series of programs and content here at Khan Academy. They stepped up to help us fill that gap: Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fasting of Artists, and also thanks to the Amgen Foundation.

Even with that very significant support, we are continuing to run at a gap, at a very large gap actually, as we go into next fiscal year. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about making a donation to Khan Academy.

With that, I’m excited to introduce two of my colleagues, Dan and Sophie, to talk about some of what we have going on here at Khan Academy in the coming months.

Hey Dan, hey Sophie.

Hi Sal!

Hi Sal!

So, Dan, we have to come up with better terms because we have Khan Academy kids and then we have the rest of Khan Academy, which we're starting to sometimes call big Khan Academy. But you don't have to be big or physically big to use Khan Academy. But let's start with big Khan Academy. I'll turn to you, Dan, for that. So what do we have going on? And I also want to remind everyone watching to put your questions. You can view this as an ask us anything, not just of me, but also of Dan and Sophie for everything going on with Khan Academy. It can be related to what Dan and Sophie are going to be talking about or anything that is on your mind.

So we have team members who are going to help surface some of those questions. So, sorry I interrupted you, Dan. What do we have going on?

Dan: Yep, thanks Sal. Um, so for everyone, I just wanted to call out, you know, at Khan Academy here as educators, as parents, and as lifelong learners, we empathize with all that you're going through right now. Many of us are going through the exact same things, and Khan Academy is here to help.

So first of all, all the resources that we created when this whole crisis started in the spring, we've updated them all, and they're still all available. So from the daily schedules to how to get started with Khan Academy, everything is located on the "Keep Learning" at khanacademy.org, which is also available in Spanish right now.

And I would say I’m really excited; one of the things that we heard loud and clear from teachers, students, and parents for back to school is, the number one thing that's being requested is, how do we keep motivated to learn in a distance environment?

And so I’m excited to announce two things that we're doing for back to school. The first one is LearnStorm. So LearnStorm kicked off this Monday, and for those of you who don't know, LearnStorm is our engaging, fun, motivating classroom campaign where students work independently, but it's towards a shared classroom goal.

It really has academic content; it focuses on growth mindset, and it has motivation mechanics. For this year, we're really excited because we adapted it for distance learning. So we're connecting teachers and students to one another, really trying to ensure that learning continues to spark that joy, and we're emphasizing digital prizes and tips to keep distance learning successful.

All of that is available on our LearnStorm hub, and that's at learnstorm.khanacademy.org. And then secondly, most excitingly, that I'm really excited about, is the Distance Learning Survival Guide for Parents. So we heard loud and clear from parents that there's a really big challenge in getting kids motivated throughout for distance learning.

The guide really has three areas: the setup, which also includes things like how to set up your space and how to set up your time for distance learning; the second piece is all around motivation. So Kristen, who's our Chief Learning Officer, wrote a starting article on how to kind of set goals and how to keep your kids motivated, and that's a section that will build on over time.

The third piece is around self-care. So we recognize as parents, you know, if you're not in a good place, the kids will recognize that, and they won't be in a good place as well. So we want to be mindful to help you as parents and caregivers to be mindful about yourselves.

And so I want to highlight the motivation piece because there's one piece that's really exciting: how to set up your goals, how to think about motivation, and for that section, we'll be adding new pieces and new articles throughout the entire fall. So that's available at khan.co/distance-learning-survival-guide.

Sophie: And I’ll just add to everything that Dan and the incredible team here that's been partnering with schools and families to put this out has been doing. But, and we've talked about this at previous live streams, but just a reminder: everything Dan has talked about is on top of everything else going on at Khan Academy.

Obviously, we have all, especially in math, starting with pre-K; we'll talk about Khan Academy kids in a second, but going to elementary, middle, high school math. Kids can learn at their own time and pace; teachers and parents can have dashboards to understand where kids are. We also, over the summer in preparation for back to school, especially this COVID back to school, launched our Get Ready for Grade Level courses, which we've talked about before.

But that's a way to make sure that kids have a strong foundation and to really understand, are they ready for the grade level courses or not? If they are, great! If they aren't, they can go back up and work on those things.

Sophie: I'll turn to you now. Khan Academy kids is still a relatively new thing. It's been out for almost two years now. But if you could just, before we even talk about all of the new things we have for back to school, just give everyone a reminder on what Khan Academy kids is.

Sophie: Yeah, hi Sal! Khan Academy kids is Khan Academy's program for two to seven-year-olds. So it’s for our youngest learners, and it’s a mobile app, so you can download it on your mobile device, your tablet, or touchscreen Chromebook from whatever app store you use.

And it’s really designed to get kids ready for kindergarten and to thrive beyond that. It’s full of activities, so it covers math, reading, social-emotional learning. We get kids up moving so they’re not glued to screens. There’s a creative corner; it’s really diverse. The whole idea being there’s much more than just pure academics when it comes to getting kids ready to thrive at school.

And so, we've been around, like you said, for not so long, for a couple of years, and been beloved by families. I don’t think anything could have really prepared us for the school closures in March and the demand that we would see, not just from families who were using our app for a long time at home, but also from teachers who needed a way to keep kids learning even from a distance.

They needed to somehow connect with little kids who were stuck at home and make sure that they were learning everything they needed to be ready to go to school and get through school and thrive.

So we've got some exciting things that I'd love to share with you. We launched teacher tools for teachers to connect with their students, and we're seeing a little demo of it here. We’re seeing a teacher who's setting up their teacher account.

One of the really cool things, Sal, is that teachers can actually add their students at different developmental levels. So that’s going to help teachers personalize learning for kids who are at home even from a distance.

They can have kids who are about to see it now. You know, who are in kindergarten, they can accelerate to first grade, and then teachers can search by standard. We're aligned to the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework and Common Core standards; they can find activities that they want to assign to an individual student, a group of students, or their whole class.

And we're scanning through all that beautiful content now that they can assign. Crucially, they can see how their students are going. They can see by student; they can see by standard, and checking on their entire class. We're about to see that now for an ad equations assignment that a teacher's assigned.

We can pop that up and see, oh, you know, John hasn't attempted, Ringo's struggling, Kim's struggling, and we can really get a good sense of where our kids are at even while we as teachers are at home and our kids are stuck at home too.

So I’m excited about teacher tools. It’s the first time Khan Academy kids has done something for teachers. It was designed by teachers with the help of teachers. If you’re a teacher and you’re interested in checking it out, download the app and set yourself up as a teacher. If you’re a parent and you’re interested in using Khan Academy kids at home with your child’s teacher, then I’d encourage you to check out khankids.org. That’s khankids.org, and that link there to distance learning is where parents can go to find everything they need to get started, and you'll see right behind it is the link to teacher tools where teachers can go to figure out how to get their class set up, add their kids, and get learning.

So over to you, Sal. That’s what's happening at Khan Academy kids this back to school.

Sal: No, super exciting, and I want to emphasize everything Sophie mentioned and Dan mentioned. This is all free, non-commercial, non-profit; there’s no catch here. The catch is my earlier announcement: we're philanthropically funded. So if you're in a position to do so, please donate.

So there's a bunch of questions that are coming in over YouTube and Facebook. This first one is for you, Sophie. This is from Facebook. Shannaz Galani asks, “After long thought, I’ve decided to homeschool my first grader for the upcoming year. Is Khan Academy’s offered program sufficient to help him through this process and prepare him for second grade for the next year? Or should I look for other curricula as well to supplement his learning? How do you think about that?”

Sophie: Yeah, so, hey Shannaz! So our content is fully aligned to the Common Core standards for first grade, so you’ll see all the math and ELA standards that your child needs covered in our program.

I think with anything, though, with this distance learning, having a balanced curriculum and having different resources to supplement things is always a great idea. I would say Khan Academy kids is an excellent starting point. You can rest assured that it’s fully aligned to those standards that your child will need to be learning to get up to second grade and thrive.

It would be great to be supplemented by other great resources out there, and lots of balanced play and outdoor time and life skills at home as well.

Sal: And just to underline what you said, Sophie, is, uh, you know, obviously you wouldn’t want to just stick a kid in front of Khan Academy kids and then leave the room, so to speak. But Khan Academy kids does cover math, reading, writing, and social emotional learning aligned with the standards.

So if a child is able to work on those standards over the course of the year, and you know, we’re talking about maybe a couple of sessions of 20 minutes a day or, you know, maybe 15 minutes and a couple of sessions of 15 minutes a day, if you do that over time, we have some efficacy studies that it does seem to for sure help kids learn a lot.

And then the parents can feel pretty confident that they’re familiar, that they know the standards, and really they’ve mastered the standards as they go into second grade.

Sophie: Yeah, that’s right.

Sal: So let’s see, there are other questions here. So a lot of folks, and I could probably take this one from Facebook. Heather Reading Mafioli asks, “Any chance of elementary science based on the Next Generation Science Standards for K-5?”

So we hear you, and we would love to do it. Obviously, COVID has made the need for having elementary and middle school science that much more important. We have a lot of high school, and I would say early college science already on Khan Academy.

But unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to work on that just yet. And so, you know, the resources to do that properly, actually, would be pretty significant. So if you know any foundations out there that are interested, especially in, you know, I think this was a huge need even pre-COVID, but you can imagine the need has only grown so that we can hopefully build out our science progression eventually from K through 12, which is our goal and our mission.

As I said, we already have a lot at the high school level.

So there's a question, and this maybe I could take it, but I’m happy if Dan and Sophie want to jump in. From YouTube, Yumna says, “Can you help me resolve one of my problems? My eldest son does not take his studies seriously; he avoids studying. I think this is a central problem."

I think in most academics, the main barrier to actually learning the academic material is just engagement. I think students at different ages, at different stages in their academic development, disengage for different reasons. I fundamentally believe—and we’ve seen this, I’ve seen this anecdotally at Khan Academy—we've even seen a little bit of data that kids disengage when they feel like the content is not for them, when they feel like the content is either not applicable to their life; they feel like it's too easy for them and they're bored, or they feel like it's too hard for them.

And so I think a lot of what we try to do at Khan Academy is first of all offer content that can be personalized to where the student is. So what I would do is, I don't know how old your eldest son is, but have them, if they say they're entering sixth grade, have them take the course challenge on Khan Academy for the Getting Ready for Sixth Grade course.

That way you and your son will be able to understand how ready they are for sixth grade. And if they aren't, they can fill in those gaps over time. Then they can work at their own time and pace at the sixth grade.

To motivate them, you know, I would remind them—you could hopefully they’re watching—you can remind them that this is really interesting stuff that's going to be really valuable for their entire life.

But what I’ve seen is as people get their legs under them and they start to master the concepts, they actually really start enjoying the learning process.

I’d also recommend, you know, making it a point of interaction between you and your child. Maybe you're doing your work from home now. Do it right next to them. So they say, “Hey, let’s work together for 20 minutes,” and then we’re going to take a 10-minute break together. Let’s work together for 30 minutes, then we’re going to take a 10-minute break together.

I think that might make it a lot more fun for your child, or they could do that with some of their friends to kind of keep them going to have some positive peer pressure. So those are my thoughts on that.

Sophie, Dan, any ideas on if a parent has a particularly a child that seems to be a little disengaged?

Sophie: Yeah, I would echo a lot of the things that you already mentioned.

So in our article on how to motivate, Kirsten’s article on that, I think the two things you call out are: one, people are more likely to do something if they think they're successful at it. And then number two, they're more likely also to do it if they value that activity.

So in our motivation article, um, there are a couple of recommendations. First is to make sure that you talk to your child about the goals and making sure that there's a shared goal. Number two is just making sure that the child is actually working towards this goal. So, monitoring progress.

And I think most importantly is also to make sure that you talk to the child about how those goals relate to their values—so is it a passion that they’re interested in, or what do they get out of it in the long term as well? So I think those are important things.

And then also, if they get stuck at something—so this speaks to being successful—if they get stuck with something, that you have a process to help them get out of to be unblocked.

Dan: Yeah, for younger kids, one thing that we’ve seen that’s really worked, and you touched on this, Sal, is really linking the learning with play and what's going on outside of the online experience.

So we’ve had, you know, over the summer, we had a summer camp, and one of the most popular things was a scavenger hunt. It really was teaching counting, you know, there’s a counting exercise, a grouping exercise, but what it amounted to was kids really getting outdoors or even in their apartments or wherever they were, getting moving, being curious, finding things, getting up and about, and talking to their family about what they were finding.

And that has been one way that we have seen kids really get into the learning.

Sal: Yeah, and the summer camp you mentioned; it was a digital summer camp, and so you’re able to engage kids even given the not-so-ideal circumstances that we are now facing.

So this next question from Facebook, and I think I could at least take a first stab at this. Sally Vorheis says, “Are there tests to see what math level I should start with?”

So, Sally, I don’t know if you’re a student or if you’re a parent, but let’s say whether you're a student or parent, we’re talking about you’re entering, let’s say, seventh or eighth—let’s say seventh grade.

What I would recommend is, we have, in math, something called a Get Ready for Seventh Grade course. And what you can do is go to that course, and it’ll actually prompt you to take what’s called a course challenge, which samples from the entire course for the Get Ready for seventh grade.

If you do well on that, say you get an 80 or 90 percent, that means that you’re ready for seventh grade, and so then you can start working at your own time and pace on the seventh grade course. If you aren’t doing well on that initial course challenge, if you’re getting a 50 to 60 on it or even lower, that means that you have some gaps in your knowledge that are prerequisite skills for seventh grade, and then you can use that Get Ready for Seventh Grade course to go focus on the units that you’re having trouble with and then get mastery in those skills so that you can have a strong foundation, and then you can feel confident going into seventh grade.

If you’re already starting seventh grade, there are two ways to do it. You can front-load with the Get Ready for Grade Level course, like I just talked about, or you could do it in parallel while you’re doing your seventh grade course at your own time and pace.

So I would say, generally speaking, if you’re a student or if you’re the parent of a student, you know, the school system has some grade that the child is entering. But we know that everyone has different gaps in their knowledge; they have different levels of preparedness, and so that’s why we created these Get Ready for Grade Level courses so that you have an opportunity to fill in all your prerequisite gaps that you need, so that you have a strong foundation for your grade level.

And clearly, if you find if you're ready for seventh grade and maybe even, you know, a lot of the seventh grade material, you could take the course challenge there. We have a bunch of acceleration mechanics: course challenges, unit tests, mastery challenges, so you can move through that quickly if you know that material.

And you can imagine some seventh graders might be even ready for eighth or even ninth grade material. So everything we do here at Khan Academy is to help you find your learning edge. But I would definitely start with whatever grade level you're entering in math, and we have these Get Ready Grade Level courses all the way through pre-calculus.

And obviously, we have grade level all the way through calculus, but whatever grade level you're starting, take the course challenge on the Get Ready for Grade Level course. If you do well, go into the grade level course. Learn that at your own time and pace. If you didn’t do so well, focus on the Get Ready for Grade Level course so you have a strong foundation.

Anything to add?

Dan: Yes! I would just say that the course challenges are not particularly long, so it's not like that you have to invest three hours to take the test to take that little quiz. So I think that’s a great way to start to just orient yourself with the material.

So the next question, I think this is for Sophie, from Facebook. Maria Mong asks, “I have an eager four-and-a-half-year-old who’s beginning to read. Do you suggest any particular courses? He will not start school until he’s five and a half due to the age cut-off. Really eager to begin. Do we test him first? What do you think, Sophie?”

Sophie: Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to Khan Academy kids, an eager four-and-a-half-year-old who's beginning to read is exactly the target market we have. We have thousands of books, and they can be read to your child, or your child can read aloud.

I would really encourage some co-play or getting involved in that and having a parent or a caregiver working with your child through that. I think it's a great place to start, and it will, you know, obviously take him beyond reading; it'll be the full range of those pre-literacy skills that your child really needs to be ready for kindergarten and also math and social-emotional learning and a bunch of other things in there.

So I would recommend an eager four-and-a-half-year-old start with Khan Academy kids, and I think you'll see that reading really pick up in no time. A lot of our research shows that, you know, we see really big gains over periods of like 10 or 12 weeks when kids are that young and learning that quickly with their pre-literacy, so that’s an exciting time.

Sal: Yeah! Couldn't agree more, and many of you all know I have a five-and-a-half-year-old, so I can—he was actually in those original, I guess you could call them ads, for Khan Academy. He’s a kid that keeps screaming every time I’m trying to talk properly, but yes, Khan Academy kids has been very effective with him. It’s very engaging. Sophie and the team have done a really incredible job. I really can’t take much credit for their work.

Another it’s a related question from Facebook. Grace Han asks, “Can you offer an audio function for math, at least for the early years? My daughter’s still learning to read, going into first grade, but really enjoys math. It would also be so helpful to include a function that reads the question to her so that she can work independently.”

So I have—I’ll take a first stab at this, and Sophie might have something to add. So Grace, I think what you’re referring to is if you go to our, I guess you could call it big Khan, if you go to our website, or if you use our formal Khan Academy mobile app or tablet app, what you see is we have content that goes as early as early learning, you know, kind of the early kindergarten, first grade standards.

And it's offered up—the practice is offered up in a modality very similar to the rest of Khan Academy, where there are questions you might have to input either a choice or input a number in some way, shape, or form, and you can imagine for kids who are five or six years old, they might not be literate enough or have necessarily the motor skills to fully do that.

And so I have two points of advice. One is Khan Academy kids is a great solution. It sounds like your child or your daughter is entering first grade. So Khan Academy kids already has the first-grade standards in math on it, and Khan Academy kids was designed for that age group. So it's very visual; it’s audio, it's video; it’s everything these folks—these kids need that are kind of right at that little cusp of early reading and literacy.

If you want to use kind of big Khan Academy, you know, a lot of that material we see as a use case of maybe a slightly older child who needs some remediation. They might use that, but it can also be used if you find that modality—that's kind of a more traditional modality of getting a lot of practice and then getting some support videos when necessary.

I would recommend being able to sit next to them and, uh, work with them that way. Unfortunately, we—the audio functionality is a great idea; we just haven’t had the bandwidth to do that yet.

Sophie: Yeah, I would say on the Khan kids side, it has been really important to have that narrator, Cody Bear, really reading the questions out and guiding our younger learners through their learning. And so there are certainly audio prompts explaining the question and helping students along on Khan Academy kids.

Sal: Yep, super helpful. So from Facebook, there’s a question: Sandra Sultana asks, “Would you say Khan Academy is inclusive to support students with disabilities?”

So Sandra, it’s an excellent question, and one that we’ve gotten many times over the years. I mean, it really depends on what the needs of the child are. I would say that, you know, there’s an ongoing process to make Khan Academy as accessible as possible.

We, you know, there are different thresholds of accessibility and we’re on that journey, so I don’t want to claim that we are fully accessible for everyone yet, but we’re constantly striving there. For students who are hearing-impaired, we have subtitles, closed captions on our videos that are actually, for the most part, done by a lot of volunteers—so thank you all, volunteers.

We’re trying to make the site itself much more useful and consistent and be able to work with various kind of aid-type apps. And, uh, you know, and we’ve heard analytically, depending on the special need learning needs of the child, that it can be very useful depending on where the child is.

But we’re on a journey, is I guess a simple way to say that. We definitely aren’t as far as one could be, and we also haven’t done, you know, we’ve done many efficacy studies; there are over 50 efficacy studies that have been done on Khan Academy, but these have been more with kind of larger populations.

So we haven't had a chance yet to do it with special needs populations, but we've heard some anecdotal things depending on what those special needs are. But you know, that’s our current state of affairs.

So there's a question from YouTube. Joshua Cataville asks, “How should we know what courses to follow on Khan Academy based on what we want to learn at our current grade level? Is there a career we want to follow? How do we know what classes to take on Khan Academy?”

So the first part of it, you could look at your grade level. Let’s say, I’ll use the same example I used a few minutes ago—let’s say you’re a seventh grader. You could go to Khan Academy; we have Get Ready for Grade Level courses, and there you can take the course challenge.

And if you do really well on that, that means you have the foundations needed to enter into seventh grade. If you're not doing so well on it, not a big deal; you can go into that course and then focus on the units and the skills so that you can get mastery.

So you have a strong foundation for seventh grade. Then you could go into the seventh grade course, work on that at your own time and pace, and you’ll be able to progress.

And if you feel like the seventh grade course is easy, you could take the course challenge there, the unit test there, and accelerate through that and move on to eighth grade. So that would be my advice on, you know, start at your grade level and the Get Ready for Grade Level course.

If you’re ready for grade level, just move right into that at your own time and pace. If you need help, get ready for grade level.

If you're ready to move ahead, you can go obviously beyond your grade level. In terms of connecting the learning on Khan Academy 2 careers, really, the second part or interest of your question, we don't have super robust mechanisms for that right now.

I would say, and you know, feel free to add what career you're thinking about; I could give you more specific advice. But, you know, I will tell you that pretty much any career that you go into, people are going to want to ensure that you have strong analytical and critical thinking skills.

And it isn’t just that people are trying to give you a hard time; strong analytical and critical thinking skills are really valuable in almost every career. And it is true that there are certain careers where you actually might solve a system of equations or actually might solve a quadratic.

I actually did find myself doing both of those things every now and then when I used to work in finance and when I used to work in computer science. But the ability to learn these things and think through it, and really understand it, are skills that are portable to almost any field.

And that’s why so many folks, I would say especially care about learning things like algebra. I remember one of the early supporters of Khan Academy ran a large restaurant chain—a very large, publicly traded company—and he used to say that he divides his employees based on whether they know algebra or not. He actually, you know, that’s his main deciding factor on whether they have the critical thinking skills and the independence and the agency to be able to become a manager, a regional manager, eventually become an executive in the organization.

And that’s for, you know, a restaurant business; that's not for someone who’s, you know, a software firm or an engineering firm where the math or finance where the math or the science is that much more valuable.

And that's just the math side. I would also say, you know, at Khan Academy right now, we definitely have the whole pathway in math from pre-K with Khan Academy kids all the way through elementary, middle, high school, and early college.

We have sciences and things like SAT prep in high school. But, you know, even the things where Khan Academy does not offer things, I encourage you to get as strong as possible. You know, during COVID, try to write as much as possible. Write blogs, share things with folks, write stories, get feedback, journal as much as you can because I can't tell you how important that writing skill is in your life.

I do—in pretty much any career today, you’re going to do more writing than anything else, especially a lot of the careers that I suspect you might aspire to. Same thing for reading: you cannot read too much, and I would say that’s pretty much true of every career.

Just be able to read, communicate, have the critical thinking skills—going to be very, very, very valuable for you.

So, oh, it looks like Joshua is in an engineering-related career. Well then, it’s even more directly valuable. You actually will use the algebra, the geometry, the trigonometry, the calculus, the statistics in your engineering.

So it’s directly applicable, and the humanities and the language arts are also going to become very important. My original degree was in computer science and electrical engineering. I worked in technology as kind of the first wave of my career, and I can’t tell you how important it has been to be able to write, communicate, have strong reading comprehension.

And, you know, now Khan Academy—a lot of our team are engineers, people with technical backgrounds, and one of the top skills is obviously they need to be able to design and write code well and engineer well, but a lot of it is collaboration, communication, being able to read and understand the direction of the organization.

So, you know, all of this stuff really matters, especially if you’re going to become an engineer, but pretty much any career.

So let’s see if there are other questions from Facebook. Lee Ram asks, “If students are behind because of the pandemic, how are they to manage their time to do grade level assignments, homework, and assignments they are behind in?”

I think each student will need an individualized learning plan with organizational skills.

I agree with you, Lee. I actually think what you described is, in any year—even if we weren’t dealing with a pandemic—we know that kids show up the first day of school at all different levels.

And in the ideal world, we would be able to personalize the pace, the scope, what we cover to their individual needs, make sure they can fill in their gaps. And that’s why so much of our resources at Khan Academy are focused on not only creating content, not only creating exercises and videos that are helpful, but creating software that students know how to navigate it and navigate at their own time and pace.

They get different levels of mastery on the skills; parents and teachers can monitor where those kids are. And that's also why we created these things—these Get Ready for Grade Level courses.

We’ve always seen really good results when teachers have students start at the basics on Khan Academy, fill in all their gaps, and get to grade level.

And the Get Ready for Grade Level course has really streamlined that process. So we’re hoping that, especially in this pandemic, but even beyond this pandemic, that Khan Academy really is the place that people go to for free, non-commercial, not-for-profit, but really world-class personalized practice with immediate feedback that has other supports—videos, hints, solutions, information to adults—to help that student so that kids can learn at their own time and pace, fill in any gaps they need, and then keep going.

Let’s see, other questions here.

From Facebook, Jin Sugar Brown asks, “How can Khan Academy bring inclusive education across Africa? Any initiatives happening here that you can share?”

A great question, Jin. So I—we have 46 translation projects of Khan Academy around the world. These are for the most part volunteer-driven. I know that there are several going on in Africa.

I believe there's one in Afrikaans; there’s one in Swahili. And obviously, we have projects in French, as there are large French-speaking populations in large parts of Africa.

But I would encourage you to look at the Khan Academy Advocate Program. The advocates are the volunteers who’ve been doing these various translation projects.

So depending on what region, what language in Africa you are thinking about, there might already be a project to translate or to redo Khan Academy in that geography. And there are all different levels of fidelity, depending on where they are in that journey and how well-resourced they are.

And if you don’t see your language and wanted to see it, maybe you could be one of the advocates, or you can find a group of folks who can start that effort in your geography and your language.

So let’s see from—this is a question from Facebook. Praveen Pal asks, “My daughter is three and a half years old. We'll be taking nursery class. Can we start with your course material?”

And I think Sophie might have had to drop off. I can take a first stab at this simple interest.

Oh! Sophie’s there! Even better! So Sophie, Praveen’s daughter is three and a half years old. Can we start her on Khan Academy Kids, and how would you recommend doing that?

Sophie: Yeah, so absolutely! I think starting on Khan Academy Kids with a three-and-a-half-year-old is a great plan.

So the logistics side of it: you download our app from your app store, and you can quickly set up an account and add your child's profile there. And then what I would recommend is there's actually a big play button in the center when you come into the home screen, and that is a personalized learning path.

So if you set up your three-and-a-half-year-old, say, as an age three profile on Khan Academy Kids, that personalized learning path will actually serve up a mixture of reading, of math, of social-emotional learning—all the things your child needs to be kindergarten-ready at their pace.

And it will adapt. It will get smart to where your child is at, and I think that’s probably a great way to start.

Obviously, lots of parents differ on screen time for a child of that age, and we really defer to the American Academy of Pediatrics on that. What our research shows is that between about 15 and 25 minutes a day, depending on the age of your child, maybe three to five times a week, is where we start to really see those learning gains pick up.

And, uh, enjoy! I would say go for it!

Sal: Awesome! Well, I just noticed the time goes a lot. I thought we were like 10 minutes into this; we’re already at 12:35.

So, I will wrap it up. We're going to continue to be here. We have an exciting conversation tomorrow with Linda Darling-Hammond, an education expert, Stanford professor involved in government as well to talk about distance learning. So excited about that tomorrow.

But I just want to remind everyone, you know, all of us here at Khan Academy—I want to thank Sophie and Dan—you know, we’re trying to do everything we can to support you, you know, even pre-COVID, but especially as COVID is forcing people into distance learning, to support you, your parents, and your teachers so that we can all hold hands and get through this together.

It’s going to be a hard year in a lot of ways, but I think it’s also an opportunity for us to try new things and to make sure that we can all, you know, collectively support each other and keep learning.

I will make the announcement just for my folks that if any of y’all have been enjoying these podcasts or these lectures or these live streams and want a podcast version of it, there is a podcast version: Homeroom with Sal.

I guess the podcast actually wasn’t involved in naming, but I like the name—The Podcast, Homeroom: The Podcast!

You can get it wherever you find podcasts, whether it's, you know, you're on Android or Apple or wherever else people get podcasts.

So take a look at that. It's not all of our episodes, but many of them are kind of edited for podcast in kind of a listening format.

So with that, super excited to see y’all tomorrow, the conversation with Linda Darling-Hammond. And as always: if in a position to do so, please think about making a donation to Khan Academy.

Thanks, everyone!