yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Khan Academy in the classroom | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

We have this big moment, and the moment is that for 35 years of my teaching career, I walked into the classroom having no idea if the kids had done the homework or what their commitment was to this subject. And then suddenly, there's this coaching platform on KH Academy that was a total game changer for me. I wasn't imagining that the Khan Academy calculus content would become a big part of our curriculum. I imagined, frankly and wrongly, that we'd use these exercises, suggest kids use it for review, and then when we discovered the coaching platform and how powerful that was, a group of us said, "Let's give it a go. Let's try using Khan Academy as a major part of our curriculum."

My goodness, it changed the way I teach. For instance, five minutes before I walk into class, I can go to the platform and I can look through my list of students to discover that all but two of them had done the homework or had watched the videos, had cleared the, you know, had cleared the hurdle, if you will, of the exercises that I had given them. So when I walked in the room, I didn't have to go over homework anymore, and that was liberating. If there were two students who didn't do the homework, it gave me the opportunity to pull them aside and say, "Hey, I see you didn't get to it," or, "I see you struggled with it. Is there a way that you and I can meet later today?" It's because I don't want you to get behind in this.

And the first 15 minutes of class, now all of a sudden, we're breaking new ground; we're doing harder problems. The kids responded so well to it because I think they had years and years and years of Math teachers going over the homework for the first 15 minutes of class, and the poor kids must have been bored to death or thought, "Why bother doing the homework? Because he'll do it on the board anyway." So that was just totally liberating and gave me the opportunity to really think hard about teaching.

Since we started using Khan Academy, the one thing that we can't help but notice is that we're having more kids make it to the end of BC calculus. It's clear to me that we're having more girls and more underrepresented kids finish our BC Calculus class than we ever did before, and I got to believe it's our new way of thinking about teaching. Using Khan Academy in the classroom and for homework assignments has got to be a big part of that.

More Articles

View All
Linear vs. exponential growth: from data | High School Math | Khan Academy
The number of branches of an oak tree and a birch tree since 1950 are represented by the following tables. So for the oak tree, we see when time equals 0 it has 34 branches. After three years, it has 46 branches, so on and so forth. Then for the birch t…
The Atlantic slave trade
Hey Becca, hey Kim! So in this video we’re going to continue talking about how this arbitrary racial hierarchy was established in America, specifically about the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and how our society became so stratified by race so ear…
Cellular evidence of common ancestry | High school biology | Khan Academy
Perhaps the most mind-blowing idea in all of biology is the concept that all living things we know of, based on current evidence that we have, all originated from a common ancestor. So it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a simple bacterial cell,…
Introduction to "Meet a chemistry professional"
Have you ever wondered what a chemist really does? In this series, we asked people with chemistry backgrounds to share their stories. We have people from all different fields and careers. For example, we have an interview of someone who works in forensics…
Charlie Munger: We're Playing With Fire (Interview)
[Music] Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. We got something really cool to talk about today: Charlie Munger. As you guys know, one of my favorite investors, he recently did a 45-50 minute interview with the California Institute of Technology, which i…
Dave Bautista Makes a Log Ladder | Running Wild With Bear Grylls
[music playing] So the terrain here is definitely getting steeper and more committing. But you know, so much of survival is about just trying to be resourceful. I just wonder if maybe we maybe use that old trunk. Use that, get that down, and then we can d…