Khan Academy Best Practices for Elementary School

Hey everyone, this is Jeremy Schieffling with Khan Academy. I'm so excited that you joined us today, not just because Khan Academy really wants to support you during this challenging time, but as a former kindergarten teacher, this session that's dedicated to elementary school education and elementary school students is one that's near and dear to my heart.

That's why I'm so excited to introduce you to Lisa Orcutt, who's one of our amazing Khan Academy ambassadors. Like me, Lisa is based in California and is currently in the same boat as everyone else, trying to serve her fourth graders remotely with the tools that are at her disposal.

So, that being said, we'll get into Khan Academy in a second, Lisa, but if you wouldn't mind opening up a little bit about your background as an educator, I think that would help folks understand where you're coming from.

Lisa: I started off as a sub when I was working through my master's program. At the time, I didn't want to be a teacher; it was just an easy way for me to do all the curriculum that's required for a master's degree while having the ability to be flexible in your schedule.

Anybody who's taken a master's program, even if it's online like mine was, knows it's a lot of work. What ended up happening is it backfired—I fell in love with teaching and decided that that's what I wanted to do. I finished up my master's program and then entered my credentialing program, and if everything goes right, even with the shutdowns, I will be inducted next year.

I've been teaching full-time in the classroom since 2017, so I'm on my third school year teaching pretty much as the teacher of record, and that's where my journey has taken me so far, but it's five to six years counting my sub years.

Jeremy: Very cool. I'm guessing when you were back in your teacher education days, it never prepared you for teaching remotely during a pandemic. So here we are!

Lisa: No. Well, that being said, if we just rewind the table, they prepared us for—

Jeremy: That's right! If we just go back a little bit to your sort of beginning with Khan Academy, tell us a little bit about why you chose Khan Academy and why it was sort of useful for you and your students.

Lisa: I was long-term subbing at a Russian charter school, and I had a student. For people who wonder why there's a Russian charter school, the Slavic community in Northern California is very large, and a lot of them want to keep their culture and their language because we know through social science that that's something that gets lost very quickly.

They didn't want to lose that, so they set up a public charter school where they could take any students, but one of the things that is mandatory is they have Russian class, which teaches the language and the culture and the food. I got hired on to long-term sub for them in a fourth-grade class of all things.

I had a student who was testing sixth, seventh, and eighth grade in math. Well, at fourth grade, when most of your students are classified as English language learners, you're pretty slow going on math because this is where the word problems get really intense. But she was breezing through the work, and we all know that when kids get bored, they act out, they get distracted, and they start doing things they shouldn't.

I went and got one of the middle school books and was having her work on those. She was breezing through that. Everything was coming out, and I started looking at things that my husband had recommended, and those were more geared towards college students, so it didn't work for her either. Finally, I reached out to a colleague and I was going, "What do I do for this young lady? She is too fast for the rest of the class, and if I go at her speed, the rest of the class is going to fall behind."

She recommended Khan Academy because she used it to study for her CSET, and for those of you not in California, the CSET is what we use to test for our initial credentialing process in California. So I pulled it up, and I was like, "Oh, this is amazing!"

I set her up on grade four, so on our grade level, and at the very bottom of the grade level page, it has something called Course Challenge. What that is, it tests you on all the major standards of that grade. I said, "Start here. Take this. If you get less than an 80, that's where we're going to figure out where you need to do your work."

She hit seventh and eighth-grade word problems, and that's where she kind of hit the brick wall. But she spent the rest of the time listening to our math lessons and doing the Khan Academy to work on those seventh and eighth-grade word problems. I was able to slow down and go to the pace of my fourth graders, and she loved it!

Her mom loved it; her mom especially loved it because when she went back to her dad's, because her dad lived out of the country during the summer, she would have some way to stay up on her schooling. I fell in love with it after that, and when I got hired on as a teacher where I work now, I started doing it to help backlog and support my students because I teach in a very low-income, low-academic-scoring demographic.

So, I use it to kind of help catch up my students who are struggling as well as my students who are advanced, so that I can focus our solo math time where I am teaching in the classroom on grade level stuff, but they still have that extra support and scaffolding that they may need.

Jeremy: I love that story because it really brings out sort of the essence of why Sal Khan built this in the first place—not just to have a bunch of worksheets online, but to actually differentiate and serve students at scale, whether they're far ahead or far behind.

I have a couple more questions for you, Lisa, before we go to the audience questions. I want to cut to the chase here and address the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which is, you know, if someone was starting with Khan Academy today, and there are literally thousands of elementary educators trying to do exactly that this week, what would you recommend for them to get set up quickly? How can they bring Khan Academy to their students in an effective way, even in this remote learning environment?

Lisa: No. First of all, don't panic. There is a learning curve for Khan Academy, even for teachers. Thankfully, though, Sal and his team of developers—bless them!—because they have made it so smooth. You can import your Google Classroom if you already have one set up.

The only thing you have to do manually is, like our district, the Google names in Google Classroom are actually the students' student ID numbers, so you, as the teacher, have to go in and manually change to their first and last name.

But you can actually import everybody, which means you don't have to send out invites; you don't have to wait for them to log in, and you don't even technically have to assign anything. You can just tell them where to start. So that's what I usually do at the beginning of the year.

I import my students before the first day, and then I don't assign anything yet because what I do is, for the first couple of weeks, we’re getting in standards, what I expect of you, what our expectations are, what our behaviors are, and I introduce them to Khan Academy.

I tell them to play with the website, have some fun, get used to it, figure it out. If you have questions I'll help you because I'm teaching what we call intermediate elementary level, so my students are a little bit more independent. They can play around with it and figure it out, and then I can be a little hands-off.

After that, I explain what we're going to be using it for. One of the things that I instruct them on is I tell them, "This is how you're going to be using it," and I show them how to find that challenge test.

Then I get out the toys, and as an ambassador, I have several pencils that were gifted to me and I have some other prizes, like I have some pencils that my students have gotten over the years that they don't want to keep from parties and things like that. I put some of my crocheted goodies in there because I make my own stuff.

I buy a lot of stuff off of Wish and Geek, so like I have stuff like this, and I get them in bulk and I tell my students that for every grade level you complete, you get a prize. If you complete the one for our grade level, you get one of the Khan Academy pencils and another prize from the prize bin.

So now there’s this incentive for them to want to do it, but the rule is you have to have an 80 or higher on the grade level challenge test, and you have to complete all of the lessons for fourth grade. I kind of let the kids go that way because when they hit that 80 percent, that means they're proficient. I'm not expecting perfection; these are children.

It's not going to work. Kids are going to get bored; they're going to mentally check out. When they hit less than 80, I tell them that's where your struggle is, and it'll tell you what section of that grade level you are struggling with. Those are the mastery lessons that you need to take that will help you get caught up on our grade level.

I don't use it as my sole means of teaching; I use this as a scaffold. This is strictly for support because, by law in California—keep this in mind—by law in California students have to be exposed to all grade level materials.

So this is my scaffold. If I have a student, when we do our initial tests—because in California, we do those kind of benchmark testing where we find out where they are at the beginning of the year, the middle of the year, and the end of the year—if I assembly test being higher, I have them start at fourth grade and work their way up, and this is my way of giving them those challenges because, again, higher performing students get bored easily; they start getting in trouble.

Jeremy: That's great! So just to recap a couple of the key things there, I think first of all, you're definitely not in a rush to sort of roll out Khan Academy, no matter what you're hearing from your district, because it does take time. Even when Lisa has her students right in front of her, it takes them a few weeks to sort of get them acclimated to this.

So one thing you could say is, "Hey, I've rostered you on Google Classroom," or "I've rostered you manually in the student section. Now all you're going to do for the first week is just come in here and search for the things you're interested in, whether you want to search for multiplying fractions or addition or what have you. Just play around with it."

That actually sort of leads into another question which is coming to us from Courtney. Now I'm going to switch some questions from the audience here. Courtney says, "These exercises are really cool, but I also see that Khan Academy has all these videos. Would you recommend using the videos as well or just focusing on the exercises? How would you prioritize?"

Lisa: Sure, use the videos! So, story time: our district had some issues with curriculum for the last few years, and I was using Khan Academy a lot to show the demonstration videos because Sal and anyone else who's doing the videos with him really breaks it down into nice, easy-to-digest chunks.

For some students, they are visual learners; just doing the problems for a visual learner isn’t going to make any sense. They need to see someone doing the work so they can follow along, and for some students, they need to hear that audio instruction. For other students, they just want to read because Sal is really cool and he puts everything in closed captions on the bottom.

So it's very adaptive; it has all four modalities of learning built into the videos. I encourage the kids to watch them, especially when they hit that brick wall of struggle. When they're struggling with word problems, I say, "Here's the video on how Sal shows you how to break out all the important information," and Sal walks through it step by step, and the kids can walk through it with him.

Then they can try it again on their own. Don't skip the videos; the videos are very, very vital, and they are amazing to help your students, particularly if you use this for small groups or math centers.

What I've been using it for before we went on hiatus is I would pull a small group after the main lesson; we would work on what they needed to work on, and I would have some students on our curriculum digital site because, again, our curriculum's slightly hybridized, and then I would have others doing Prodigy, all that good stuff, and then I would have another group doing Khan Academy.

They would cycle through all three or four or five depending on how many you want to use, so they're getting the same stuff from multiple sources to kind of build on those skills. The videos are something that I love about Khan Academy because I do have those students who have to see it being done, and they can slow it down, they can pause it, they can look at what he's trying to pick out and try to figure it out on their own.

Then they can get that courage to ask for help.

Jeremy: Very cool! Now Silvia, your fellow California educator, has a sort of advanced level question for you which is, "Okay, if we played this all out, you know, we've started with Khan Academy; our kids have started watching some videos, doing some basic exercises, maybe they've taken those course mastery challenges at the end of each course just to see where they are. But now we're going to fast forward a little bit, maybe like six months from now, and our kids are hopefully coming back to school in September, and they're way behind because it’s been tough to sort of fill in those gaps over the next couple of months. What can I use Khan Academy for to help my students be ready for that next grade level even with all the challenges in our way?"

Lisa: Use it to fill in the gaps. Have the kids do it as their homework. One of the things that I've taken as a philosophy for homework is if your child—if your student— is on grade level, it's fine to send them grade level homework.

If your student is performing below grade level, I try to send them home remedial homework to develop those skills. I've had students where they're still struggling with number sense. I'm not going to send them fractions when we're working on fractions in class. Homework is homework because I don't know if their family or anyone in their family knows how to help them.

I don't know if they even have anyone who can help them. So, I'm going to send them stuff on number sense to build that up, and if I know that student has access to a computer at home, I'm going to be going, "Alright, I want you to work on number sense on Khan Academy."

If you can't find it, send me a message on Dojo; you have my email address, you can email me and I will assign it to you because you can do assignments, and then you don't have to worry about trying to find it, and then my students can build that sense of independence studying.

We are coming up with something that I've discovered, and I think a lot of teachers have discovered, is over the last few years a lot of students have slipped into this passive learning mentality of just "tell me what you want me to tell you," and I want them to build that sense of independence and that sense of taking ownership of their education.

So that's one way that I do it. If you can't do this without me holding your hand and just giving you fill in the blanks, I'm going to give you what I know you can do, and I'm just going to increase the hardness a little bit because we're building that strength.

If I can only lift a five-pound weight, why am I going to go home and try to lift a 25-pound weight? Totally! So I'm going to go home, and I'm going to work with a six-pound weight, and then when that gets too light, I'm going to go up to an eight-pound weight, and then I'm going to work up to that 25-pound weight because if a kid is working and they can only lift five pounds and you send them home telling them to bench press 25 pounds, they're not going to do it; they're going to give up.

It's always having that sort of zone of proximal development—that's sort of the right next challenge, not too much, not too little.

Actually, this idea of empowering kids sort of feeds directly into a question from Sandy, and this is such a great question from Sandy because it speaks to the dilemma for elementary educators in particular during this time. You know, it’s tough enough to motivate and keep students engaged in an elementary classroom, but now that we’re in this remote learning environment, how do you actually hold students accountable, given all the other distractions and the difficulty you have reaching out and engaging them?

Lisa: You can't, not in the sense that we could in the classroom. You gotta remember their parents are stressed. Some of their parents have lost their jobs. Some of these kids—maybe the older sibling is looking after the little siblings. What you can do is just encourage them to take that independence.

“Look, I know you're stressed, you're scared, you're afraid you don't know what's going on; your parents are freaking out, your parents are at work and you're by yourself. Just use this as a focal point. Give me 10 minutes a day, and that's all I ask. That way we don't fall behind.”

I'm going to tell you right now, if you start calling parents, "Bobby didn't do his math work this week," most of the parents are going to be like, "I really don't care; I'm more worried about feeding Bobby at this point."

So it’s about understanding and being patient that for some of these kids, they're not going to do it, but for some of these kids, they are going to do it, and they are going to thrive. So it's understanding that it's our zone of control now. They are no longer directly in our proximity. We can do our best and call it a day on that; we can adore them from afar and encourage them and remind them that we want them to succeed.

Just hope they'll take it upon themselves to finally listen.

Jeremy: And I actually want to pick up on that thread of parents and families because, as someone with two young elementary school kids myself at home, I know that I'm struggling personally to keep them engaged and to stay in touch with their teachers.

Any tips for making Khan easy for parents? Obviously, to your point, they're stressed; they've got a lot on their shoulders. How can we explain this whole Khan thing to the parent community?

Lisa: Make it very well known that this is free, because the second you say it's free, guaranteed, most parents will relax just a little bit. Explain to them, you know, "It's really easy to play around with; just go have fun. The kids can figure it out; it’s very independent and easy to use. If you need help, please email me.

There are lots of help pages; there are videos on how to use it, and it’s just a matter of take your time, click around, play with it, and if you still have questions, I can help you.

For those of you wondering how you talk to parents, if you don't want to do email or you need to talk to them over the phone, 67 or set up Google Voice; it'll mask your phone number, no muss, no fuss.

Explain to them that you can assign work if they're worried about the kids not finding the stuff that's good for them because you, as the teacher, can actually see specifically where they're growing and how they're doing and what they're working on. So it's not fully independent because you can still monitor and check on things.

Jeremy: Cool! And then sort of continuing this theme of making sure that folks feel supported on the home front, I think you could probably speak to this, Lisa, given the underserved community that you teach in.

Kristin says, "The struggle for me is that many of my students don't have the technology or their internet access to do online learning. Any recommendations for filling that sort of digital gap?"

Lisa: Most digital learning programs, such as Khan Academy, have apps. I think it's called Khan Kids or something like that.

Jeremy: Yeah, I'll just clarify there. So Khan Academy has an app that very much replicates the exact thing you see on the website for iOS—you know, iPhones, iPads, Android phones, and Android tablets—and those are all free, and you can download those from the app stores.

In addition, there's a separate app called Khan Kids that's really dedicated to the sort of two-year-old to six-year-old set.

Lisa: Yes! And if you have an EL student, the Khan Kids is a really good way to help them develop their English skills because it teaches that phonetic awareness that is very hard to teach in distance learning.

For the lack of technology, a lot of districts are stepping up and letting students check out Chromebooks and computers. If your district isn't doing that, I'm afraid they're going to have to rely on mobile devices.

As for internet, a lot of ISP providers are providing students with months of free internet hot spots. I know here in California, Xfinity is doing it; it's two months free.

I'm a little lucky in that our district has already formed some contracts, so we have some hot spots that we're able to give out to the kids. Our district is 99% one-to-one; we have like, I think the adult learning and a few others might not be.

So we're able to check out the Chromebooks and send them home. But again, they're going to have to rely on mobile devices and get creative.

I wish there was another way to put it, but here's the cool thing: Google Classroom and most of these apps are also compatible. I haven't tested it with Khan Academy, but I do think it would work because it's not Flash enabled or anything like that.

Most game systems have a built-in web browser; you can use 90% of digital learning activities on these game systems using their web browser. So even if your kids just have a PlayStation 4, there's a way for them to get into distance learning. They have to figure it out and take the time to play with it, and trust me, 80% of our kids are better at technology than us, and I'm in my early 30s, and some of my kids have figured out things that I don't know.

Jeremy: Cool! And so I'm seeing a lot of questions pouring in here where folks are saying, "This is amazing, but can we take one big step back and just talk about how do you even assign stuff in the first place?"

So if you wouldn't mind sort of walking us through that, I'll mimic what you're saying on the screen here, Lisa.

Lisa: So, I first of all sign into my teacher account, and then there is a nice fancy little tab that says classes, students, and resources. Your student ones are individual, and that just lets you monitor their progress.

Resources are ways you can use this, how you can use it, different things like that; it's kind of like a help button for the teacher. Then under classes, you pick your class.

So we have all of these neat little classes; we're just going to go with Algebra One. Under assignments, you see a little button; it's a drop-down button, so you have to click it down if it doesn't auto drop, because it'll look like that.

You go to assign, and it allows you to pick things based on the topic at hand. I always pick fourth grade, and then I pick whatever we're working on.

So early math is usually a good one to go with. If I have specific students that I know are struggling with something, I'll click around to where they need to go. Let’s go with counting small numbers.

You click the little check box, and it will assign everything under that window, but in here, you've only got the worksheet. Now, if you look at counting the lesson, it does all the videos plus the little quizzes.

I always pick the whole lesson unless I just need a student to review; then I just pick the video. Then you hit assign, and it will show up to the students that you choose or your entire class.

I always have the randomized option for the questions. I don't do the same question set because then the kids can share answers; it's a way to discourage, you know, fibbing.

If it's only one or two students, I'll find them in the drop-down menu under students and just click those students. If it's all of my students, I do it. I try to give them a large window when I'm doing the whole lesson because they need that time to digest the video and go back and review it, so I usually give them about a week—yeah, about a week.

Then you hit assign, and what ends up happening with that is it pushes it out to the students, and the students can check on it.

Now, the way the students check on it is a little different.

So if you go to—is this a fake student profile?

Jeremy: Yeah. Just to be clear, you can always see what students see by going up to your name in the upper right-hand corner and going from your teacher dashboard to your learner home because you also have a student view.

Lisa: Yes! And so it'll show all of their little goodies, and if you look, there are little badges and prize points and all that mastery points. If they go, they can go, and they click assignments, and that's where all the teacher assigned work is.

So here they have everything they did; it shows what they did. The videos always show as completed; the lesson overall shows as completed, but the actual work shows the percentage they got correct or completed.

So in this case, the student is scoring hundreds; I would start applying much harder work to find out where that student is struggling so I know where the student needs to focus when they are within the classroom.

Jeremy: Very cool! Hopefully, that gives folks a sense of how to get started. One last question for you before we wrap up here. I know there are some more questions coming in. If folks want to sort of get to the next level—okay, I've played around with Khan Academy, maybe even my students have played around with it now, but I have more questions. I want to get more help, more support. Any recommendations, Lisa, based on all the resources out there?

Lisa: YouTube! Sal has so many videos on YouTube on how to use Khan Academy. They're actually linked on the Khan Academy website again under that "My Resources."

There are training videos that show you how to use it. There's also, I believe, a "Contact Us" option where if you're really, really stuck, I think you can email. I've been lucky; I've never had to use it.

Jeremy: Yeah, and let me actually just pause you for one second because this is so important. I was actually on the phone with Comcast for about four hours this weekend, and I know that, like, everyone is struggling to provide customer service. Khan Academy, however, has completely ramped up our offerings here.

Now, if you go to the help section—again, it's your name and help right over here—you can come over to the section called "Report a Problem." It could be a technical issue or it could just be "How do I assign assignments? I forgot what Lisa told me."

We are happy to answer any and all questions, and here's the really incredible part: even in the midst of this crisis, even as a nonprofit, we typically respond within a couple of hours. So, if you have other questions that were not answered today, this is a great place to go and get some support!

Lisa: Yeah, and I'll tell you right now; we used to use this support program in my district, and I had this student, oddly enough, he was an EL, but his math skills were amazing. The scaffold program that we had built into our curriculum he beat in four months into the school year, so less than a third of the way through the school year he was done.

I put him on Khan Academy. I still to this day give him assignments even though he's now in sixth grade because he is breezing through our current curriculum. So I've reached out to his grade-level teacher and I'm like, "Yo, he's still in my Khan Academy classrooms. I'm still seeing his work; would you like me to assign him other challenging things?"

His teachers are like, "Yes, please!" Oh my goodness. He's already done with our curriculum stuff online, and I'm like, "Okay, cool, no problem."

So it's also a good way if you're a parent intent; you can set up a parent account through your teacher account, and you can actually set your kids up on this if you want to give them extra help too.

It isn't just for teachers, and it's amazing, and I am so grateful that Sal took the time to go from doing this just on YouTube to doing this on his own website.

Jeremy: Absolutely! And, you know, Lisa, I want to thank you for sharing so much expertise and knowledge with us today. If you were just sort of finishing up with any words of wisdom as educators across the country are thinking about, "Wow, I've got a lot on my shoulders right now. How do I move forward in this challenging moment?" Any last sort of words of advice you want to share?

Lisa: Breathe. Take it one day at a time, one lesson at a time. Remember, the kids are just as up in the air as we are; the districts are just up in the air as we are; the parents are just up in the air as we are.

Give them work that you know they can do; give them work that will challenge them, but don't expect them to be 100%. Just breathe and let them learn at their pace because now we don't have to teach the test. Standardized testing is suspended. Let them learn at their pace; they've got this; we've got this. We need to be calm for them.

Jeremy: Wow! I couldn't say it better myself, Lisa. Thank you so much for leaving us with a little inspiration on our otherwise tough day, and thank you everyone for investing time in this session.

You will have a recording after this in your email. Feel free to share it with fellow colleagues, and thank you again, Lisa, for making us all a little smarter!

Lisa: Not a problem. Everybody, good luck! Have an awesome rest of the year, as best we can. Cheers! Bye!