Remote Learning Best Practices from a Cyber School Teacher
Hi everyone, this is Jeremy Shifting at Khan Academy. Happy Monday! I hope you had a restful weekend—or at least as restful as we can get under these circumstances. Um, I want to thank you for joining us earlier this week for a great conversation with Mark Laser, who's bringing expertise not only as a Khan Academy ambassador—someone who has used the site really deeply in his own school—but also as someone who's been using it in a cyber school environment for years now. He really can speak to the sort of new world order that we've all found ourselves in. We're trying to teach across the great divide and reach our students wherever they are.
So, Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. As folks have probably gathered from previous sessions, we're going to do a little bit of an interview just to get started, and then we're going to turn it over to the audience for some live questions to finish up. But before we get there, I would love to know more about your background as an educator and then specifically with Khan Academy.
Mark: Sure! Happy to share that, and uh, thanks Jeremy. I just wanted to say to everybody that's participating, we're all in this together. If there's anything we can do to help each other get through the current situation we're in, reach out to each other, and we'll do that. Um, I think Jeremy mentioned there are about 500 people online now, so I guess we can't introduce ourselves now. But yeah, thanks Jeremy. I'm glad to be a part of this.
My background isn’t...
Jeremy: Hey Mark, here's one thing we can do really quick if you're curious.
Mark: Sure! Would you rather know what grade level folks teach or what subjects they teach? Or I can ask both if you're curious.
Jeremy: Yeah, I think both would be very interesting for sure. Let's do a very quick poll here. So hopefully you're seeing on your screen now the chance to choose your grade level. This will just help Mark really tailor his comments to the specific challenges you may be facing. So go ahead and fill that out. If anyone is having audio issues, you're probably not hearing this, but there is a message in the chat that will give you a number to dial in, and I will replace that for your benefit.
Okay, so thank you everyone for filling that out so quickly. We'll go ahead and close that poll. We now have 640 people online, which is amazing! 82 percent of you voted within 10 seconds. Awesome! We're going to show those results.
What we're seeing right now, Mark, is that it's 40% elementary, 25% middle, 26% high, and 9% other.
Mark: Okay, definitely a nice split but with a little skew towards elementary.
Jeremy: Yep! And then we'll do the same for the subjects. We'll go ahead and launch that. And again, my apologies for not including every possibility here. As you are discovering in your own teaching practice, there are definitely limitations to what technology offers, so we are trying to make do as best as possible. But yeah, let us know what subjects you teach and we will use those to tailor upcoming content.
Okay, we'll close this out in a second. I have to say, Mark, if ever there was a recruiting ground for future Jeopardy contestants, this would be it, because people are digging those buzzers quickly! You're at 78% of the vote, and it's looking like 46% are teaching all—not surprising for the elementary crowd.
Mark: Okay. Right, sure, a huge chunk teaching math, and certainly that’s how Khan Academy got its start. Yep, and then a smattering across social studies, ELA, science, and others. Um, and we can speak to those as well, time allowing.
So, that being said, I'm sorry to cut you off before, Mark, but please tell us more about yourself.
Mark: Oh, no problem at all! I've been teaching in a cyber environment for about 10 years. Prior to that, I was a strategic account manager for Corning, so I worked in the business world for about 20 years. Then I left when it was time to start student teaching when I was getting my master's in elementary education. So, I've got some experience in the business world and some experience in the teaching world, but have specifically been teaching in a—excuse me—a cyber environment for about the last 10 years. This is our sweet spot, that's me!
If you just want to flip to the next slide, I can construct... um, kind of—you asked about why we're using Khan Academy and why I'm using Khan Academy as an educator. About four years ago, I'd been using Khan pretty heavily up until that point. We had a pretty traumatic rollout of a new curriculum that had been designed exclusively for our school. It was kind of problematic. So, what we decided to do was focus on... Um, I was already using Khan Academy pretty heavily to start with. I decided to put all my wood behind one arrow, as they say, and build my entire curriculum, my assessments, my homework, and everything around Khan Academy.
So, I've used Khan a lot over the past 10 years, but I'm almost exclusively using Khan Academy to teach eighth-grade math for about the last four years.
Jeremy: And in terms of how to teach, we'd love to hear more about what that looks like day to day, even before this whole crisis started.
Mark: Right, yeah! I wanted to share this with you because I think you'll find it doesn't look that much different than what a brick-and-mortar teacher's schedule would look like. You know, a morning session where we have prep and then some targeted learning time for students. Then I teach three 50-minute blocks of math at 9 o'clock, at 10 o'clock, and 11 o'clock with a break for lunch.
The afternoon is set aside for meetings, planning, IEPs, that sort of thing. In fact, I just came to this meeting from office hours, so I have office hours with students where they can stop by to ask questions about anything that they didn't get in class in the morning. The end of the day is set aside for planning and grading, so it really doesn't look that much different.
We do teach asynchronous classes, so—excuse me—synchronous classes, so I actually do have a room full of students in front of me every day. If you're unfamiliar with how we teach in the cyber environment, it actually looks exactly like what Jeremy is sharing here. My lesson each day is pretty much a PowerPoint presentation. I prepare slides every day and go through with the lesson for the day—questions from the previous day, data about how students are doing.
We have interactive tools just like we do in this session where students can communicate and we can talk back and forth to each other. One of the questions I get a lot, Jeremy, and I don't know if you want me to jump in that now or I can focus on pretty much any slide you'd like me to address here. Were you going to speak to the grading piece?
Jeremy: Um, sure, yeah! That came up in another session with Mr. Vandenberg. He addressed grading and how he grades by progress, and I've hit on this way that I think works pretty well for me. I use the assignment feature heavily, and what I'll do is post weekly assignments—typically about five per week. If we have a five-day week, I'll post an assignment that's due every day and I assign each one a standard point value—typically 10 points.
So there'll be 50 points worth of Khan assignments in a typical week. When I say grade once, twice, and then per student request once, the due date has arrived, I will grade. You can see the typical scores that I—not typical scores, but this is what my grading would look like for a particular student. She would receive 10 points on each of those, so she'd get 50 points for the week. I'd look at that, I'd load that score in the grade book for that student. I typically go back and look at it one more time, you know, give them a chance to turn in any late work.
Khan has a really great feature—if you could go to settings—here we go—settings and then download CSV—that allows you to download all of the work that students have done since you created the class. What I can do is use that to extract data that was done since the last time I graded it, so I don't have to go through the entire grade book and grade again. I can just pick the students that completed work since the last time I looked at the grade book.
It's turned out to be a pretty efficient way to grade. So I grade once where I have the bulk of the grading that I do. I go at it again to pick up any stragglers that there might be, and then if students turn in any late work, it's on them to notify me and I can do updates to the grade based on that.
The reports that are available—I think you just started to hit on one—you were going to scores, right? So there's some really cool reports you can get out of the assignment function and Khan. You've got the actual scores themselves, you can go in and see how students did on particular assignments, and also—could you pop over to—oh good! Yep! So you can see how students—and what Jeremy is showing right here—could you go back to manage? So we look at the report for a particular assignment.
When I mentioned putting my slides together for a particular class, this is pretty handy because it shows how many students completed the assignment. I know the present—this, um, Jeremy, is what I use to build slides for the next day. I can look at question seven, two students missed that one, got it correct. I know there's not a lot of data here, but I can look at the gray bar and the green bar. If I've got a big green bar that everybody got it right, that's not a question I need to spend much time on, but if I look and see, "Hey, everybody is missing question number seven," I'm going to snip that question, put it into my slide deck for the next day, and review that with the students.
So, by using assignments, you can extract that data and use that to prepare your lesson for the next day.
Jeremy: Great! So, I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of questions about grading coming up.
Mark: Sure! And you know, a lot of folks are coming to us totally brand new to Khan, wondering, "Okay, you know, you've got this awesome advantage, Mark, in the sense that you've been doing this for years now. If you're just starting this week for the first time, what kind of recommendations do you have for someone in that position?"
Mark: Okay! Um, first off, there's a ton of resources within Khan Academy where there's new teacher guides. That question is asked all the time, so there are some pretty good resources that Khan has available. And I think, um, yeah, so... Jeremy is steering you to that right now. But I guess I couldn't really give a blanket answer to that. What I would say is assess your needs. Are you interested in using Khan for assessment? Are you using it for your curriculum? Is it enrichment? Is it practice? Is it remediation?
I guess most of us aren't doing standardized tests this year, so there's probably not as much test prep. But I think thinking about how you plan to use Khan—the answer will vary based on what teachers are planning to do and what needs Khan can fill. I will say that the, um, Khan can meet the needs of all of these things here. So, I think that I've used it successfully for all of those things, um, so if your need is in any of those areas, Khan could work for you.
That's great! I'll just take sort of the most simple use case where maybe a teacher has not been in touch with their students for a couple of weeks now because of lack of technology or equity issues, and they've only now just gotten the green light—like you've shown on the screen here—to actually move forward. If they just wanted to get started, just get a class set up, just get maybe an assignment or two out there, how would you even begin that process?
Mark: It's so easy! Could you just walk us through setting up a new class?
It really is pretty simple! What we're seeing here on Jeremy's screen is that he's got these classes created already. In the upper right-hand corner, it says "Add New Class". So, we'd click on that and give the class a name—just call it "Demo Class" or whatever we want to call it. Yep, click next, and then this will give you some courses to choose from. I want to teach kindergarten math today, so let's choose that. That's what I want to set.
So we just choose that class, click next. Just to be clear, like you can actually choose multiple of these, and Tim Vandenberg, the other ambassador you were talking about, actually takes his sixth graders and has them work grade by grade to fill in any gaps they have in their learning foundation. So it could be a way to cover those kinds of gaps using this time.
Jeremy: Yeah, and actually, I'm glad you mentioned that. Our school is now using Eureka Math for our curriculum, and it's super that Khan is aligned with Eureka Math. So for my Eureka Math curriculum, I can use Khan's content that is designed for Eureka Math every day.
Then, this area where we add students to our class and create the class—there are a number of different ways to do that. What I do, Jeremy, is have students join with a class link. So with eighth-grade students, I'm generally fairly successful with getting students to create accounts on their own. I don't... you know, after a week or so, I really don't have any stragglers. If there are students that kind of lag, I bring them into a meeting—a one-on-one meeting—and help them through the process and get them set up. But it's really... getting it set up is pretty straightforward, and there are a number of different options that have worked for teachers to do that.
So you could just copy and paste that into an email or an LMS or a reminder—class dojo style tool—and send that out.
Mark: Right! So that link will put the students into the class, and then what I can do as an instructor—if I have assignments created for the kids—then I can refresh my class list, and that automatically gives our active assignments to the new students that have joined the class.
So, just to fast forward, just one final step here—if you want to get that first assignment out, how would you even take that first step?
Jeremy: Uh, let's see! So if we want to— we're just starting the year, we're starting Algebra 1, and I want the students to... I want them to watch that video about the origins of algebra. So I would click "Origins of Algebra" video. I don't think algebra is that beautiful, so I wouldn't assign "The Beauty of Algebra". You know, just kind of scroll down through...
And in the assignments, you can assign videos like we've done there. Can we scroll down a little bit here? If you guys look over on the left-hand side, you'll see a triangle that indicates that it's a video that's being assigned. The little thing that looks like a piece of paper is an article about the topic, and then the pencil indicates a practice exercise. So, you know, I want to assign the video, the article, and the practice exercise for that one.
So we assign all three of those. If you look at the top, you'll see how many things are being assigned—there are three assignments that we're creating. We click that, and then we can choose the due date for the assignment. You can see that right there, what class I'm assigning it to, if you have multiple classes, when you want it turned in, which students you want that assigned to, and what time of day it is due.
At the top is kind of interesting because you have the ability to choose whether it's randomized questions—so questions are pulled from the bank of questions and each student gets different questions—or you can choose so that all the students are working on the exact same questions. I typically do randomize for easier assignments, and then we'll do the same question for all students when it's a more difficult assignment.
Mark: Great! Okay, so that's definitely the sort of one, two, three steps of getting a new class started, enrolling your students, making the first assignment.
Now let's come back to that sort of next thing you were going to speak about, which were other ideas for extending your teacher's pedagogy into this new digital world.
Mark: Right! And maybe let's see—do I want to do this slide? Do you want to do more specifics or general here, Jeremy? The last slide of the day is kind of... um...
Jeremy: No, let's do this. This is fine!
Mark: Um, what I would say—and this is something that I've learned from cyber teaching—is that the snipping tool that most students have available is part of the Windows tool suite and is so important. I use that a lot and train the kids early on in the school year how to snip a question. So they're looking at something in their Khan assignment; they can snip the assignment and then post it on my screen so that I can see exactly what they're looking at.
Students aren't trying to type in or write on the board what their question is because a lot of times they'll do that; they'll forget a negative sign, then they enter the answer and say, "Mr. Laser, this answer is wrong!" Well, if you use the snipping tool, you can see exactly what the students are looking at and we use that day in and day out in my classroom.
Then what Jeremy is showing there is just the Microsoft directions for how to use the snipping tool to snip and post on a page. That's what I use for static content. Here at my desk, again, since I just got out of office hours, I have my bamboo pen and digital pen. It's kind of like what Sal uses when he does his lessons.
Again, this is something that is just invaluable. It allows me to write on the board, work through problems with students so that I can share—I can actually write on the screen and it's a lot less cumbersome than trying to write with a mouse or trying to do things in a chat.
Jeremy: Yeah, I've noticed Sal using his Wacom tablet and his Wacom stylus, and he's just super fast with that—I think you're the same way, Mark!
Mark: So definitely cool! It really comes in handy. I would be lost without it. I really use it every day. Then, when I say static, I mean if it's just a fixed question—if it's just one plus one equals, and I want to snip that question and then write—I do that.
I use screen sharing or application sharing for dynamic content. Some of Khan's content involves rotating things or moving things or doing translations, transformations, that sort of thing. When the content moves, when you want to move it around, that's more difficult to do with the snipping tool.
What I'll have students do is share, and then I can kind of walk students through or answer questions looking at it live. I think there were some questions about that, like how often students are doing screen sharing or sharing their screen versus how often I use the whiteboard.
Probably 80 to 90 percent of the class is the whiteboard and the snipping tool, and then when we get into lessons where the Khan content is dynamic, then we'll use the screen sharing.
Just to be clear, like, are students sharing their own screens, or are you primarily the share of your screen?
Mark: I share my slide deck, so like what we're doing right here. So we'll share that. Students in my class don’t often share their screens. They'll take a snip and share something that they're looking at, or if I want them to share, if we're trying to troubleshoot something, they'll share it. But more often than not, it's just static, and we're using the snipping tool.
Jeremy: Cool, that's great! And obviously, a lot of folks are being trained up right now on Zoom and Google Hangouts and all these different tools, and they all have screen sharing built-in.
Mark: Yep! The rule of 24 is just something that one of our math teachers, now administrators, taught me about preparing presentations for class. That's just to use a minimum font of 24. And that obviously may vary, but just the idea is to keep your slide deck screen clean and presentable and not have too much small print on them.
Just something to make it easier for users. Checking for understanding—one of the things that is a disadvantage in the cyber environment is we don't have cameras on the students. For privacy reasons, we're not doing what you and I are doing right now, Jeremy, where we can look and see each other.
I can't see the student, so it's more difficult to check for understanding, because I can't look out at a classroom of faces and see, "Oh, they're getting this," or "Oh, man, they are totally confused!" So, it's very important to check for understanding using any kind of tools that you have available within your software platform for presenting it or something like Google Documents.
I use pretty heavily for exit ticket questions to check for understanding at the end of a lesson to make sure that students understand the concept and the content that's being presented.
Jeremy: Would you use a Google Form or something?
Mark: Exactly! I typically use Google Quizzes just to make a real simple quiz that asks them their name. It can be anything you want; you could be, you know, "Did you understand today's lesson?" or you could take a question from Khan, snip it and put it in there, something from another learning resource, something from a state assessment.
I typically don't do super difficult questions for the exit ticket question because we're not there to discuss it. Sometimes we'll do a challenge or a bonus question as part of that, but checking for understanding is pretty important, and even more so, I think, in a cyber environment than a brick-and-mortar, just because it's more difficult to do in a cyber environment.
Jeremy: Great! Personalizing, just making sure that you kind of fit the needs of the class. That's why I use those... um, you know, I am typically updating my slides right up until the moment the class starts with the latest data on how students are doing and any problems that they might be struggling with.
I really try to keep my lesson presentation simple. I don't use a lot of video; I don't do a lot of even screen sharing like we're doing because that can tend to bog things down, and students that don't have a good, robust internet connection will start to... they'll start to glitch out.
So, I really try to keep things with a pretty straightforward slide deck for the presentation of the lesson and keep things light. Once students start to understand your sense of humor, and you understand theirs, you can make it kind of a fun environment.
Great! And you know, I know that we're running a little short on time. Would you be okay, Mark, for some questions from the audience? I know our time goes fast here.
Mark: Yeah, why don't we just—if we can just kind of zoom through the deck and see if there’s anything else that we absolutely positively had to share from the deck?
Oh, this is something that's really important. We kind of talked about this, um, Jeremy, a little bit. One of the things that for teachers that are new to Khan or just joining, one of the things I really, really like about Khan is that I never hear Khan is down, like, "Oh, we can't do what we wanted to because kids can't access the website" or that kind of stuff.
That just—in the years and years that I've been using, that is just so infrequent. That's not something you really even need to plan for. And also, and this is really nice, I rarely have a situation where students say, "The answer is wrong!" No—wait; I shouldn't say that. I rarely have situations where students say, "This answer's wrong, and they're right about that." A lot of times they'll say, "Khan doesn't have the right answer here."
And when you dig in, you find out it's right, so you can present this material with a high degree of confidence in that. I would anticipate, Jeremy, lots of questions about how to set up the class roster, about navigation. We've had some difficulty in matching the Eureka curriculum with the exact Khan lessons that we want to teach.
So, some things like that where you need to work to massage the curriculum—figuring out exactly what your routine is going to be. And there's some data that I'd like to be able to export from Khan that we can't currently, but those are kind of the main challenges. When I surveyed my teaching colleagues at Agora, those are some of the things that they mentioned.
Yeah, I don't think there's anything super important here that we need to share if you want to jump into the questions. These were more general things that...
Mark: I will hide out this.
Jeremy: First of all, I think this is so important. I actually have stats from inside Khan that says something like only 10 or 20% of new teachers to Khan ever play with the content themselves before starting to assign it. I think that's actually a huge missed opportunity—that's on our shoulders at Khan for not making it easy.
But one of the first things you should absolutely do is just put yourself in your student's shoes, see what the content looks like, what it feels like, how the hint system works. That way, when you give it out, you have that confidence that Mark was talking about because you've been there and you've developed that empathy with the student experience.
Mark: Yeah, that brings up something really interesting that I didn't touch on before. When you create your class roster, I always add myself to whatever class I create, so that when I do assignments, I see exactly the assignments that are going to students.
And the third bullet there, do every assignment that you give to your students. Just make sure that you know what the questions look like, how Khan goes about solving them. Again, that's kind of that empathy that Jeremy mentioned.
So you understand what students are going through. And Jeremy, just as an aside on that, after Mr. Vandenberg’s presentation, I’ve been working with my students on third-grade content. I had never looked at Khan's third-grade content. There’s some really good stuff in there that I’d never even seen before, but it's, uh, it's some really good stuff!
Jeremy: I love that! Okay, so on that note, let's take some of these questions because these are really great questions for you. So, I want to start with an awesome one from Hamang. Hamang says, "How do you help students track their own progress when we're so distant from them? We're so disconnected from them, but we want to empower them to direct their own learning at this moment. So how do you get them evaluating how they're doing?"
Mark: Sure! Is this a student or a teacher? Do you have a student loaded?
Jeremy: Yeah, so we can definitely come into the learner mode here.
Mark: So yeah, let's go!
Mark: Okay, so if I’m Megan Patani and I want to know how I’m doing, one thing that's really important, you guys, as you’re getting to know Khan, sometimes students will say, "My data's not recording, you know, I answered this." Make sure that in the upper right-hand corner you see the student’s name. Make sure that they're logged into Khan! Sometimes students will accidentally log out, and they're working away and they don't realize that they're not logged in.
But let's say that we want to find out how Megan is doing. This is Megan. Megan wants to see how she's doing in Algebra 1.
We can look right there at Algebra 1. We can click on that. You see that she's mastered 16% of the course so far—the course wraps up on May 15th. We can open that and we can see Megan did extremely well on Algebra Foundations, earning 700 out of 700 mastery points.
So, kind of those assignments that we looked at earlier with the origin and history of algebra and that sort of thing, she's done a little bit of work on solving equations and inequalities. Let's click on that and see what's going on in that particular module.
So, this shows, as Jeremy scrolls down through this, you can see she’s done very well in equations with variables on both sides. Now as we get into linear equations with parentheses, it looks like that's where she stopped. We don't have any work for equations with parentheses and decimals and fractions. So, Megan could go in and see, "Okay, I've mastered this first module; now it's time to go into the second module."
Khan is pretty good about prompting, and once you kind of teach students how to do the navigation, they'll be able to figure out where to go, you know, where the next step in their learning progression is.
Jeremy: Great! And so really, if you teach students to sort of review these summaries on the left-hand side, they can start to think of this as, "Hey, I want to have all these bars filled up; I want to master every single core skill here." It's almost a challenge to them for the rest of the year. Can they make it to that point of mastery because that could be a big point of pride?
Mark: Yeah! You want to see a lot of purple over there, that's right!
Jeremy: Um, here's another technology question. I don't know if it's one that you face because maybe your students will have laptops, but any recommendations for teachers out there who know their students don't have computers at home but may have access to a mobile phone—their parent's smartphone? Do you feel like the Khan Academy app is a worthwhile thing to look at? It's coming from Daisy.
Mark: I can't really comment on that. I don't—I haven't worked with students specifically on—I know that students do access it. Our students all have laptops, and I know when students have a dentist appointment or something like that, they'll say, "Hey, Mr. Laser, I'm doing this on my mom's phone" or something like that. But I don't really have enough track record with mobile apps. I know it's available, but most of our students don't access it that way.
Jeremy: Okay, makes sense. And I'll just say for the benefit of Daisy and everyone else out there, this can often be a lifeline to you if there is only one single device in the house and there's a smartphone. While you can't use teacher tools on the app—so everything that Mark has just talked through is limited to the online website—students get a complete view of everything on this course right there on their phone, so it is a way to sort of make sure that there's more access, a little more equity.
Mark: Great question! So, um, and one thing about that: Khan tends to be pretty thin bandwidth-wise. It runs pretty well on a wide variety of devices. I rarely have any problems with students who, you know, have extreme problems with the speed that Khan's loading or anything like that.
Jeremy: Cool! Um, this is a lot of technology questions coming your way, Mark, because I think you've definitely shown your credibility here. Kakai wants to know if you have any recommendations for best practices with integrating with LMS’s, be it Schoology, Google Classroom, whatever.
Mark: No, I don't! Unfortunately, my Khan gradebook doesn't speak to my gradebook currently, so I have to export from Khan and then re-import that into my gradebook. The curriculum that I do, I've built pretty much in Khan, so it doesn't need to link with anything else. I've pretty much turned off our school curriculum and then I use a Khan curriculum that I've built based on Eureka for that. So, I don't really... I'm trying to think. I don't really do much integration, but...
Jeremy: Any digital integration between Khan and the other systems that our school uses?
Mark: Makes sense! And I think all I was going to add was that, obviously, while there's not a very formal integration, I have seen students—or teachers—come right up. After making an assignment, they will actually choose a specific piece of work because the nice thing is that everything on Khan has its own individual URL, and they'll copy this URL and they'll paste it into an LMS or paste it into Google Classroom.
That way, not only does the student have the assignment in their email or on their app, but they also have it in that LMS—that central source of truth.
Mark: Okay, so you've just prompted me for something there. That's exactly what I do—I’ve got a big spreadsheet that has the date, the topic, the Khan help resource for the day, and then the Khan assessment resource for the day, and that's all loaded into our school system. It doesn't happen automatically, but, like Jeremy said, the URLs are there, so that students can access that.
Jeremy: Great! And then I want to finish up with two final questions, if you don't mind, Mark. I apologize for going a little bit over. I'm curious—number one is for the folks who didn't have a chance to answer their questions today. What resources would you recommend to continue the learning around Khan or continue the learning around remote learning as they go into the next few weeks?
Mark: I would direct every question to Jeremy—that’s Jeremy Khan! I think Jeremy is going to be sharing his home phone number with us also, so call him any hour of the day or night—24/7.
Jeremy: No, I would reach out to the Khan user groups on Facebook. Super helpful group of people there. And then, the online help in Khan is... you know, within the Khan website, uh, is the Zendesk help. There's so much good information there, and the same questions get asked so many times that there are some really good printable resources on how to get started as a teacher, how to get started as a student, if you're a parent trying to figure this out how to get started as a parent.
There's some really good guidance there that does serve as a really good starting point. Again, we've all been where everybody is right now; we've all been just trying to use it, trying to get started, trying to get things figured out, and there are a ton of resources there that are quite helpful.
Mark: Very cool! And then, last question is just, if you were in the shoes of many of the educators in this country right now who are trying to figure out, "What am I going to do next? How am I going to get through the next several weeks or even months?" Any words of wisdom that you can offer folks as we begin this week?
Mark: It's going to make a great story someday, right? Once we get through this, we'll remember—we'll certainly remember 2020! No, just—I think I might have put that in one of the last slides that we're all in this together. You know, the goal here is to help our kids and help keep moving them forward using whatever tools we have at our disposal to do that.
You know, I thought that I'm always looking for different ways to use Khan and to improve it. Mr. Vandenberg's discussions just within the last two weeks have been super eye-opening, giving me some things that I want to try. So, you are not alone—we're all in this together, and we're all here to help each other out. So, boy, good luck to everybody! Um, you know, we're all in this together.
Jeremy: Awesome! Well, I think that's definitely the right theme to start this tough week on. I want to thank you, Mark, for really embodying that advice by taking time out of your own teaching schedule today to share your expertise with others. I hope that you will take advantage of all the resources that Mark has shared.
We'll share this deck and we'll share all the slides with you right afterwards, and wish you all a good week and a good start to the rest of the month. Thank you all so much!