Camp Khan Parent Webinar

Hi everyone, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you're joining us um in the country. My name is Roy, and I'm here to give you a quick overview of Camp Con, our new summer camp. Quick agenda here: we're going to do intros real quickly, talk about Camp Con, the details kind of from the 30,000-foot view all the way down to the ground level view, talk a little bit about these new courses, or get ready for grade level courses, and then have some time with questions. We're going to do all this in about 30 minutes.

First, some intros. As I mentioned, my name is Roy; I am on the district partnership team at Khan Academy. I'm joined by my colleague, Patti Sullivan Panda; she is also on my team on the district partnership team. Patty's going to be kind of moderating your questions, and we'll reference them and go through them during the Q&A session. Lauren Quan is on our marketing team; she does a lot of our parent marketing, so it's great to have Lauren here. She's also going to be monitoring questions, so feel free to type those in throughout the next 15 minutes. We'll get to them either in the chat or as we do the Q&A a little bit later.

And please note that this webinar will be recorded and sent to you after the session. You'll also see that there is a handout, a one-pager that just has some details on Camp Con right on your um GoToWebinar dashboard there. It's titled "Camp Con Article Webinar." That's who we are, and we don't have time to do intros for every single person in here, but we have been talking with and hearing from parents throughout the school year, particularly in the spring. What we heard from them was this particular school year was surprising, it was unexpected, it was overwhelming, it was hectic, and really it was just a lot.

Recognizing all those things that the school year was, we want to first thank you, parents, for being a caregiver and a teacher, a coach for your children, a juggler really of all the different responsibilities you have, and really just for being there for your family, for your children. With that in mind, we start at Camp Con, which is our real first summer camp that we're doing virtually, of course.

We're trying to think of what could be a way that we could prepare students for math next year, do some things that might help to build their confidence, and also do it in a fun way that recognizes, hey, it's still summer vacation, even though this past school year was all these different things that we didn't really expect. We want to make sure that Camp Con does prepare students for math and builds the confidence, all while doing it in a way that's kind of flexible for parents and for children too. That's kind of like the 30,000-foot view of what Camp Con is.

I'm going to just go a little bit lower to say like the 15,000-foot view and give some details on Camp Con. So, Camp Con runs from June 22nd—this Monday we just launched—you might have received an email from us about it, actually—and it'll go all the way to August 28th. So a total of 10 weeks, and it's intended for students entering grades 3 through 12 this fall. And just like I mentioned before, we want to make this flexible for folks, so participants can join and stay whenever and for however long. We also want to make this accessible for everyone, so we've made sure that it's free for everyone too.

Down below, you'll see kind of our four "stinky pinkies"; these are like our mascots for Camp Con, and here are the ingredients of Camp Con. So one is the get ready for math courses—get ready for grade level courses. These are our math courses that we're going to go into in a little bit more detail. In addition, Camp Con is going to deliver some strategies for real self-driven learning, so thinking about how children and students can really be kind of owners of their own learning and really drive their own learning.

Part of what we want to make sure is that you know parents aren't being asked to do too much because we know you have done so much throughout this school year. And then also, like I mentioned, we want to make sure that Camp Con gives suggestions for fun and motivational things that you and your children can do over the summer. We think we can combine all those three things together, and that's going to lead to sustained learning, not just this summer, but in years ahead.

Alright, so how it works. I'm going to go a little bit more into detail now. I already mentioned this Monday; you all should have received an email just announcing Camp Con, and we sent that email to all our parents in the U.S., all learners over the age of 13, and all our U.S. math teachers too. From now until August 28th, over that period of the next nine weeks, we're going to give weekly guidance where learners can progress on those get ready courses that we're going to go into and receive some weekly recommendations via email too.

Included in that weekly guidance is just some tips and opportunities to really recognize and reflect on progress, giving some ideas for how you might celebrate the effort your children are putting in and the learnings that they might have throughout the year, and again, making sure we have some time for fun too. That's a real quick overview. If you have any additional questions, I'm going to refer you back to that one-pager that's in your handouts and this website on the bottom here: khan.co/campcon2020, and we're also on social under the hashtag #CampCon2020.

Alright, I mentioned the weekly recommendations and suggestions that we're sending out. Here's a rough outline of what it looks like. Each of our weekly emails will have five suggestions along kind of three different topics. Before I get into that, I want to mention that all our messages are available in Spanish. And then the three topics are: one, learning goals for your get ready for grade level courses; second topic is learning tips, and they can be learning tips about how to use Khan Academy, how might you share progress with a teacher or with an adult, or some reflection prompts about how do you best learn, what are some things that you really like doing in a classroom.

Then the third topic is these fun and motivational activities, and these are going to be taken from our own content library. So for instance, you know one of the things that we're going to suggest is our Pixar in a Box content, which is going to be a set of courses and activities that students can really do to kind of hone in on their imagination.

We're also going to take some fun and motivational activities from some of our partner organizations too, who have great ideas for how do you spend the summer and how do you spend the summer not just in front of a screen, but also outside, with friends and with family. For each of these topics, we're going to have clickable videos on various weeks where you can just right directly in the email view a video or go to a partner resource.

Now to get these emails, there's no sign-up you'll need to do, anything other than have a Khan Academy account if you're a parent, and we'll also be sending a similar but slightly differently worded email to learners who have spent any time on our get ready for math courses.

Alright, I feel like I've been talking up these get ready for grade level courses quite a bit, and I want to spend the next few minutes just highlighting what those are. So our Get Ready for Math courses are newly created math courses. They were created or curated in part because we heard from parents; we heard from teachers who said, "Hey, what can we do or what can our students or children do between now and whenever school reopens that's going to make sure that they're ready to learn, that they're ready to hit the ground running when school year 2021 begins?”

What we did was go back to all of our previous or existing math courses and pulled the content and the skills that we think are most important for a student to be successful in their math class next year. So if you have a child going into fourth grade, for instance, you would take the Get Ready for Fourth Grade level course, and in that Get Ready for Fourth Grade level course, you're going to see skills that maybe from third grade, from second grade, the real kind of foundational skills that we find to be important so that they can enter fourth grade really confident and knowledgeable to be successful in their fourth grade math class.

I'm going to show you just a few screenshots of how you get to the Get Ready for Grade Level courses. First thing you want to do is get onto our website, khanacademy.org. Here you can either log in or if you don't have a Khan Academy account yet, you can sign up, and it's pretty easy. You can do so with your Google account, for instance, or you can create a new username and password.

Once you're in the Khan Academy site, and we're looking at this from kind of a student perspective, so this is what your child might see: they can, on the top left corner, go to courses and from there click that drop down. You can see on the bottom right of my slide here there's going to be a list of the entire Khan Academy library, and this Math Get Ready courses will have a green "New" button to let you know it will show up and then just pick the grade level that your child will be entering in the fall.

You can do it another way; you can get to the Get Ready for Grade Level courses is just by typing in or clicking on this link directly and we'll be making these slides available after the webinar. Once you click into a Get Ready course, you're going to see a pop-up that says “Show What You Know,” and there's going to be an option to start a course challenge.

Now, we recommend that students or children start with the course challenge because it's going to take them through a set of skills where they can demonstrate what they know and what they might just want to brush up on a little bit. That course challenge can also guide students on what they should be doing or what they might want to focus their time on, again what they might want to brush up on. After taking the course challenge and as your children work through the Get Ready course, you and they can track how they're doing by the number of mastery points that they earn on the top left-hand corner.

We suggest usage of increasing progress towards mastery by five to ten percentage points each week. As you see right here on the screenshot, this student has made about 20% of progress through the entire Get Ready for Fifth Grade course. We imagine five to ten percentage points each week; Camp Con is ten weeks. By the end of ten weeks, if your child has followed the weekly suggestion, they hopefully will be at 100% completion or getting pretty close to it.

Alright, we'll deliver a lot of information pretty quickly here, and we'll just run down some FAQs, some questions that we've also heard from parents.

So one, we hear a question: Is Camp Con right for my child? As we mentioned before, Camp Con is a free resource for students entering grades 3 through 12, and it's a way to brush up our math, and it's also a way to look for fun and motivational activities throughout the summer. We're hoping it's a low lift, and we're also hoping it's flexible, so if parents want to join us for the whole ten weeks, great; if they want to join us for five weeks or three weeks, that's totally fine too.

What age is Camp Con for? We are targeting Camp Con for learners in grades 3 through 12 because that's where our Get Ready for Grade Level courses are in math. Now younger students can also join us for Camp Con Kids beginning July 6th; these are for students who are ages 2 through 7. Again younger kids who might want to have that exposure to learning activities and fun activities this summer.

The third question we've heard is, what do I have to do to sign up and participate? Really signing up for a Khan Academy account is most of what you need to do as a parent. Now your child will get these weekly notifications with suggestions and recommendations once they do any work on our Get Ready courses. Speaking of Get Ready courses, the last question is, which Get Ready course should my child sign up for?

We would suggest that children start with a grade level that they're entering now. If your child is exceptional at math or is really doing some advanced math, they might go to a higher grade, or similarly, if they are struggling a little bit with math, we might recommend going into a lower grade. But broadly, generally speaking, we would say the grade level course that they should start with on the Get Ready is the one that they will be entering in the fall.

Alright, so we've done a few FAQs, and so now we're going to turn it over to questions, and this is where I'm going to talk with Patty a little bit, and she's going to share some of the questions. Hopefully, we'll be able to answer them here.

Awesome! Thank you so much, Roy, for sharing that wonderful information with us. And just again, my name is Patty; here I get the pleasure to be on the district partnerships team with Roy. As part of the information that Roy just shared with us, we also want to make sure we're grabbing any of the questions you might have, and so throughout the question area, I also saw people were asking where can I get the slides, where can I look at the handout, and potentially, you know, is this a webinar that's going to be recorded and shared with us?

The answer to all those is yes; you will receive both the deck—the slide deck or handout—and you'll also receive a recording of the webinar via email after our session. If you are in your GoToWebinar screen, there should be a little tab that says handouts, and that tab will have a PDF called Camp Con Article Webinar. So if you click on that, you'll then be able to see all the information that Roy shared as well.

This would be a great time if you want to add some pressing questions that came up for you. I can see a lot of folks are adding questions as well, and we're going to start out with one that I also noticed was pretty common, Roy, and it's specifically coming to us from Carrie. Carrie has actually already started using Camp Con this week, and so she's using it with her two kiddos—one of them is in fifth grade, the other in seventh grade—and they're enjoying it. They're wondering a little bit about what the pace should be for a student to kind of move through the content.

So she's saying, you know, she wasn't really sure what time to aim for. Is there a recommendation or a time that students should spend weekly on Camp Con?

Yeah, great question, Carrie! Thanks for getting started on the Get Ready courses, and I hope your girls are enjoying the courses. We recommend probably about two or three hours per week to get ready for grade-level courses. Now you can split those out; you know, an hour a day for two days, or you can say, you know, I'm gonna do 30 minutes or 45 minutes a day for four or five days—that's totally up to you. Again, we want this to be as flexible as possible, given your schedules.

In addition to the hours spent per week, we also recommend that students make about a five to ten percentage point increase in their mastery progress.

Awesome! Thank you, I think that will be really helpful for parents as they're nudging and encouraging students to work through their Get Ready for Grade Level courses. So a little bit more on the logistics, Roy, just to make sure parents are really clear.

Suture wants to know, is Camp Con limited to math?

Yeah, great question! So Camp Con, the work that students will be going through is limited to the Get Ready for Grade Level courses, which are in math. At the same time, we're hoping that Camp Con is more than just math; we're hoping it's an opportunity for students to build confidence. It's an opportunity for students to have a little bit of fun because it is summer.

So we're going to be infusing those suggestions for progressing in math on those Get Ready for Grade Level courses along with say, some reflection prompts to ask students to really think about, you know, how do I learn best? What do I do when I find myself struggling with learning something? How do I feel when I, you know, finally do learn something that's really challenging?

Some of those learning reflections and prompts are going to build their confidence and awareness as a learner, and then also some fun activities, like getting outside and going on nature walks or doing virtual tours through museums that are offering these great opportunities or looking through some of our content like Pixar in a Box or Imagineering in a Box, that's really about creativity.

Thank you for sharing that! Yeah, I think it's great to make sure there's a holistic kind of set of opportunities for students.

Awesome. So the next question comes to us from Jeffrey, and Jeffrey wants to get super clear: do parents or students pick the course level, and can they switch if needed?

Great question, Jeffrey! Students will initially pick the course level, so we would ask that parents are just sitting alongside their child as they pick the course level. We do recommend that students at least start with a grade level that they're going to be entering in the fall, and to your second question, they can always switch if they want; they can always click into other classes, and they'll get Ready for Grade Level courses depending on whether they find the material too challenging or too easy.

Great! I think that flexibility is key for students and for parents as well. So let's switch the view a little bit and think more about the student themselves who's going to be working on this content.

When we think about the design of the courses, are they, you know, getting students to catch up on their current grade level? This question is specifically from Yin Ju, so just want to be clear that we’re answering your question. Are the Get Ready classes designed to help students catch up to their grade level, or can they also be used for advanced learners, and how could they be used for advanced learners?

Yep! Yeah, another great question! The creation of the Get Ready courses was more to get students caught up, so more to your first question. We want to make sure again that if you do the Get Ready for, let's say, fifth grade course, you're going to enter fifth grade ready to learn the fifth-grade math.

For advanced learners, I think the Get Ready courses could potentially be good courses for advanced learners too, and I'm thinking particularly for middle school students, middle school mathematicians who are really kind of chomping at the bit to know a little bit about high school math or to think, you know, "I wonder how well I would do in Algebra." They could take those high school level courses just to get a sense of what they would need to be successful in those courses.

So the short answer is for advanced learners, I would recommend even going on to grade levels above where the student is going to be entering in the fall.

That's great! That's a great suggestion!

And as we're thinking about students potentially looking or reviewing content and potentially getting stuck, right, we know that that happens, and that's okay when you're learning math. So how could kids seek help? And this is a question from Napor, who wants to know or references that you mentioned, Roy, that there's going to be an option to seek guidance. So how could students get help?

Yep, great question, Napor! In each of our exercises in Khan Academy, there are videos students can watch that gives them kind of a teaching of what the concept is. In addition, there are hints that will give students kind of step by step how to solve this problem. We always recommend that students watch the video first because that's broadly just about the concept, and we've also seen some students just watch the videos before they even start on their problems.

In addition to the videos, if a student is really stuck, they can always just click the hint under each question, and the hint will be a step-by-step solving of that particular question that the student is seeing. We think this is a great way for students to, again, take a little bit of ownership or more ownership in their learning. We also hope this is a way where a student isn't constantly going to be asking you, the parent, for help every time they might be stuck.

That's really helpful and a similar question from Deanna related to that, Roy. Like, do parents need to be hands-on helping, or is it fairly simple for kids to navigate on their own? So maybe just sharing a little bit more about how kids can navigate on their own?

Yeah, great question! The question of whether and how much parents should be hands-on, we leave it totally up to the parent. Again, we want Camp Con and our courses to be pretty flexible and really to promote kind of self-student-driven learning for the student.

So for a student, when they get on the Khan Academy, we do recommend starting with that course challenge, and then the exercises we always recommend that students kind of follow a blue button—there's kind of a blue start button or a blue continue button. Once you click on those, then students will get underway under exercises, and then once in their exercises, they can start looking at those videos and viewing those hints.

If they're stuck, we can recommend that they ask maybe an older sibling or they ask another adult in their household, and then eventually, we might ask that they reach out to the parent.

I think that's great scaffolding! I think very similar to the way teachers have the "three before me" rule sometimes in the classroom, so maybe parents and caregivers out there can do the "three before me," and the first one can definitely be Khan and the resources that you mentioned, Roy.

Similar to that, I think as part of being a parent, Talasi asks how do we, as parents, see the progress of our students and what they're learning?

Yep, another great question! A couple of ways you can do this: one is to just have the student—have the child show you what they're working on and how much progress they're making. Another way—and we're going to send this in an upcoming email—is to join your student account and watch, not watch, I guess, but see their progress on the Get Ready for Grade Level course.

So this is going to require the parent to add the child's account and then for the child to approve the parent, so there's going to be a little bit of back and forth so that this parent can see what the child is working on and how they're doing on it. We're going to send those instructions out in an upcoming email.

Great! That'll be really, really helpful! We have another question from Kimberly asking, can my child use their district Khan Academy account, or do they have to create a new student account?

Yeah, students can use existing accounts and just, you know, go and start working on their Get Ready course. They don't need to create a new account for Camp Con.

That's great! That's very helpful. We have now a question from April, and we probably have room for a couple more, so for sure, please keep asking your questions. This is from April, who says, do you have any example of the fun activities that go in conjunction with the Get Ready courses? Who makes the clickable videos?

Yeah, great question! So like I mentioned, the fun activities will be coming from some from our content library. So I mentioned our, you know, Pixar in a Box or Imagineering in a Box, and those are kind of videos and activities that are meant to spark children's imagination.

We also have content from our growth mindset library, for instance, which is really meant to explain the brain science behind getting smarter. So we see those as more kind of motivational content. So that's one side of the fun and motivational activities; they're going to come from us.

Another part of the answer is from our partner organizations, so we will be partnering with schools like Wide Open Schools that have great suggestions and activities on things families can do outdoors during the summer—for instance, taking a nature walk. We'll work with other organizations about virtual tours that students can take during the summer, so those are just some examples of what we'll be including in the fun activity section of our weekly emails.

That's really helpful. Great! We have another question from Louise. Louise says, I'm a grandma helping my grandson; we're at different locations. Any suggestions?

Thanks, Louise, and thanks for thinking about your grandson even though he may not be right there with you. Now our suggestion is to pass along the article that's in this webinar—that handout—and there'll be some directions there for getting started, or to have them get on Khan Academy, and there are links to sites specifically the Camp Con details that a student, any student, once they get on the website, they'll have directions there, and then they can get started just by following the directions on their site.

Wonderful! And then I think this will be our last question, Roy, which came up a little bit with some other participants. So this is specifically from Lim and a couple others. I would like to know how the Get Ready courses are different from the other grade-level courses you already have out there?

Yep, thanks for that question, Lim! I apologize for not being clear about this during the webinar. The Get Ready courses, let's say the Get Ready for Fifth Grade course, is actually pulling from our math courses, our regular grade level courses in fourth grade, in third grade, and in second grade.

So the Get Ready for Fifth Grade course is actually containing skills and content from grade levels below fifth grade that are met or that have been identified as the most crucial, most important things to know before you start fifth grade.

So in other words, the difference between the Get Ready for Fifth Grade course content and the fifth-grade course content is the fifth-grade course content is going to be what your child learns in the fall. The Get Ready for Fifth Grade course content is going to be the content that's going to prepare your child to be successful to learn fifth-grade math in the fall. So I hope that distinction was helpful.

Yeah, I think that will be really helpful to a lot of folks! And I think, Roy, that'll be it for our questions. So if you want to wrap us up?

Great! Thanks very much again for all of your time. We will send out these slides, and in addition, please visit our website, and you will get an email with the resources here and a survey link, so please fill out the survey link; that will help us to improve our webinars and also continue to hear from you all. Thanks very much!