Getting Started with Khan Academy and Khan Academy Kids for Remote Learning

All right, hello everybody, and thank you all for taking time out of what's got to be an incredibly busy day to join us for this webinar. My name is Karen White, and I'm on the product team here at Khan Academy. I'm also the mother of two girls, ages 12 and 17, both of whom have been out of school since last Friday; one with the distance learning plan and one with no plan at all. So we are definitely winging it here in San Jose, California, while we shelter in place. I'm sure many of you are as well.

With me today we have Dan Chu from our marketing team; you can see him if you go to the next slide—uh, see him pictured there with his nieces and nephews. And we have Sophie Turnbull in that picture with the helicopter; she's going to be talking to those of you with little ones about how to get started on our Khan Kids app, which is designed as a mobile app for kids two through seven.

I want to thank our friends at Bank of America for generously supporting our ability to bring school closures resources to you at this time. And finally, before we dive in, I just want to mention that this session will be recorded and it'll be sent out by email soon after we finish the session. It'll also be uploaded to YouTube for easy access. So if you need to step away, if you miss parts, don't worry about it; it will be available to you to review and to share with your friends and family.

So with that, today we're going to help you and your child get started on Khan Academy. If you are a teacher, we are not going to be going to the teacher experience in this webinar, but we're going to send these slides out, and that link on the right over there that says "Watch this webinar" will take you to a teacher webinar we recorded earlier this week. It's fantastic, and it'll give you everything you need to get started there.

We're also not going to be doing a step-by-step walkthrough of the setup, but in a couple slides, you're going to see our quick start guides that actually will do that for you quite well. So a little bit more about Khan Academy. First of all, this came up in a number of questions from the pre-webinar survey: Khan Academy is free. We are a non-profit organization, and all of our instruction and practice is always free to learners and parents and their teachers.

Khan Academy is a trusted source. You can trust us because we've been doing this for a long time—more than 10 years—with millions of users around the world. All of our math courses are Common Core aligned, and our other non-AP math courses include both Common Core material and additional content. Our AP math courses are aligned to the AP standards, and as I mentioned, we served, even before the school closure started, we were serving well over 10 million learners around the globe every month.

Finally, Khan Academy is flexible. The Khan Academy main app, which is what I'm going to be talking to you about, is available on desktop, web, iOS, or Android anytime, anywhere, translated into over 40 languages. Sophie's going to talk to you later on about the Khan Kids app, which is a mobile app only, but Khan Academy—the main Khan Academy—we're going to be talking about for the next 10 minutes or so is available on desktop as well.

So now let's get into what it really means to learn on Khan Academy. In our pre-webinar survey, the most common question we got—and thanks to everyone who took the time to fill it out—the most common question we got was, "How do I figure out what my child should be learning?" It's a great question because if you're like me, you might not know exactly what your kids were up to right before the school closure started, and you're certainly not used to teaching it, right? I've been a mother to my younger daughter for 12 years, and I've been her teacher for about 12 hours.

So I, you know, would say the first thing to do is pat yourself on the back for trying to pull this off during a time that has a lot of other stressors in play as well. So with that preamble, here are a few tips to getting started. First things first, look at your child's homework and their textbooks. If you have access to a parent or student portal through your school, you might be able to log in and see what assignments your child's teachers have lined up before school let out. That will give you some clues as to where to start their learning path.

If you don't have that, that's okay. You can select a course on Khan Academy based on your child's age and grade, and you can navigate your way through that a number of ways. You can start with their very first lesson—we're going to talk in a few minutes about how to start with a course challenge to identify learning gaps quickly—or you can let your child choose where to start. And even if your child chooses something that kind of feels easy to you, that's okay. Those early math skills are foundational to more advanced math, and you know, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have your child review that material and gain confidence and really just keep the brain training going while we're in this really unusual time.

Finally, for high school students who are enrolled in AP or are studying for the SATs, we have the most popular AP courses on Khan Academy, and we also have our official SAT prep. I can vouch for that as a parent of a senior. It is incredibly valuable. My daughter used it as her sole way to prepare for the SAT and was really, really happy with her results.

So overall, if I had to give you one mantra to remember, it's this: some learning is better than no learning. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. There are all sorts of things that are being demanded of you right now. Just get started; it's very easy to course-correct, to change your learning path, and make adjustments as you go with Khan Academy.

So next up, I want to share those quick start guides I was mentioning. These links, again, will be provided to you after the webinar. There are three different guides here—two for Khan Academy and one for Khan Academy Kids. Just for a little bit of context on why we have different guides for younger and older children on Khan Academy, it basically comes down to the fact that there are some regulatory requirements around setting up accounts for younger kids that require your approval.

What we wanted to do is give you the absolute fastest, most efficient way to get started based on your child's situation, and these guides are customized for the fastest path through to get your child learning and then to get you set up as a parent. So lots of support in those guides.

What I'm going to do now is jump into what happens once you're signed up, and this is what you're going to see first. You're going to be offered the opportunity to personalize your child's learning; selecting the grade level and seeing what courses we recommend. Now, regardless of our suggestion, your child can choose any course on Khan Academy. So if you have a child who's really into math and is generally performing above grade level and loves a challenge, you can choose any course that's right for that child.

Same the other way; if you have someone struggling, don't feel bound to the grade level suggestions. After you've done that, so you've selected a course—you can select more than one; you can always go back and add—this is what your child's experience is going to look like. The courses will show up on the home page whenever they log in, and you'll see that Khan Academy is designed to give your child a lot of agency in terms of where they're going to go to do their next task.

That can be great if you've got a child who's engaged and motivated—let them roam around, let them take these things in the order that sparks their interest and energy. It can also be a little challenging and overwhelming if you've got a younger child to have so many choices. So one of the things we like to do when we're in the classroom with young children is say, "Follow the blue button." You can see there that the red arrow is pointing at a blue start button. That's pretty much always going to be a good call. It will essentially take the child linearly through the course, starting with the most basic skills and advancing from there.

So always an option if you want to give your child a little bit more of a sense of where to go next. So once you've done that, if you were to click into any one of those units, those then turn into lessons that include instruction, practice, and assessments. If you look at where those arrows are, you can see the practice exercises on the right and the instructional resources on the left.

So if your child is practicing and is finding that the material is a little bit challenging but not so challenging that they want to move to a different level, they're likely to find an article or a video, or a series of them, right next to that practice content that can support them as they're practicing and reinforce those skills.

And then the other thing I want to mention is this course challenge. Most of our math courses are going to have this challenge, and it's a great way to accelerate the process of getting your child to that learning edge—the place where they're struggling a little bit in a productive way but not so much that they get discouraged.

The way to do this is you scroll to the bottom of the course page, and you'll see this button that says "Start course challenge." You know, these do take a little bit of time, so you want to leave 30 or 45 minutes for the child to get through that. But what you're going to come out of it with is a sense of the skills that they're really comfortable with and the skills where they might need some more practice, especially given where we are in the school year. This is a pretty good option for you because there's going to be a lot of content that feels familiar in most cases, so starting at the beginning may not be what you need to do.

The one caveat I'll say is, at least if you've got a child who is generally in the mode of performing high—being a high performer—the course challenge can feel a little bit like a test that they didn't get to study for. I know from my daughter, when I put this in front of her, she was still in that mindset of, "I have to get an A." But really, what the course challenge is for is identifying where she needs to practice. So I needed to really kind of encourage her and coax her along to make her comfortable with the idea that this wasn't a test; she didn't need to get an A, and this was really about finding the best ways for her to spend time on Khan Academy.

When they're practicing, we've really designed Khan Academy to be a delightful learning experience. We celebrate when they've leveled up; they'll see confetti, there are bells. When you're on a roll, you'll get a nice surprise every time you answer a question right, and there are videos and hints to get in-the-moment support as you go. We really try with Khan Academy to celebrate grit and perseverance, not just leveling up, because that's what having a growth mindset is all about.

So now I'm going to very briefly talk about the parent tools that you can access as part of your parent account. The main thing you're going to do when you're logged in as a parent is look at your child's progress. This report is essentially like being in the room with your child, looking over their shoulder, seeing what they're working on—except without the looking over their shoulder part.

So it's almost like an audit trail that shows you every exercise, how much time they spent on it, and how they did. And there are really three values I think that are going to be helpful to you as you're coaching your child or thinking about how to motivate their work. There are two numbers you'll see in there; both say three in this particular case. One is the time spent on exercises, which is the real practice of applying the skills, and the other is the total learning time on Khan Academy, which includes things like watching videos or reading articles. You're looking for, in general, a mix of those things—not just the instruction but also the practice.

Then the third thing you're going to see are those little arrows. You can see a little green one there on the screen; that's going to tell you when a skill is leveling up or down. What we essentially mean by that is if the skill is going up, it means they're making progress towards mastery of that skill. And if mastery sounds like a fancy term, what it really means is this child is getting so good at the skill that they could probably explain it to somebody else; they could almost teach it.

There also are going to be red arrows if the child is struggling and maybe going down the level on a skill, and those are your opportunities to say, "Hey, let's lean in a little bit here; maybe review some videos and support them with instruction." So this is all a good segue into the last few minutes I'm going to spend on Khan Academy before turning it over to Sophie, and it's really about how do we motivate and structure the student's day?

Let's face it: it's hard. There's a lot competing for your child's attention right now, let alone your own. Just be kind to yourselves. But I always like to remind myself that at the end of the day, yes, I want my kids to be learning, but the most important thing is we're all going to be stuck in this house a lot together, so we had better get along.

In terms of setting goals, it's great to include your children in the process. They're going to be more invested if you do it that way. Take it one day at a time. If the goals you set for your first day don't turn out to be particularly realistic given your situation, stay flexible. Let yourself give yourself some slack; we're all in uncharted territory right now. And then recognize milestones. We always like to celebrate both the progress and the effort, so when you look at those numbers around time, that's one of the ways you can congratulate your child for making the effort and then look for those level-ups as an indication that your child is making progress.

All right, one last thing I think some of you probably have seen: we have posted online a number of templates for daily schedules that can help you just get a little bit more of that structure that helps your child be calm, creates a sense of predictability, and gives you some room to maneuver because you have a sense of how your day is going to go. So feel free to click through on those when you get the materials, and hope that they are helpful to you as they have been to me in terms of giving your children some structure and order in what is kind of a chaotic time.

And with that, I will turn it over to you, Sophie.

Hi everyone, I'm Sophie from Khan Academy Kids, and tonight I'm really excited to walk you through the basics on getting set up, how to learn at home with your kids on Khan Academy Kids. Khan Academy Kids is made by Khan Academy; it's a mobile app that is separate from the Khan Academy app or the Khan Academy desktop experience, and it's designed especially for children ages 2 through 7. It's available on your mobile, be it Apple iOS or Android, as well as touchscreen Chromebooks, and you can find it in the app store that you use.

So what we're going to do right now is quickly watch a demo of how to get set up on Khan Academy Kids in about three minutes. The first thing you want to do is go to your app store and download Khan Academy Kids. Once you've done that, you can open our app, and you'll be greeted by our fun character Khan. You'll be taken to a sign-up screen; click sign up and enter your email. We use this email to create your account, and we're going to ask you to verify it.

So once you've entered it and clicked next, you'll receive an email in your inbox, and you want to click the verify email button in that email, and then you're set to go back into the app and start creating accounts for your kids. Click next here, and here you are. First, we're going to add the name of our first child, Kim. Kim is six, and we'll select an avatar for Kim—a dolphin, ready to start learning.

Now, we'll quickly show you how to create a profile for another child. If you swipe up into the parent's section, you'll see Kim's account there. Tap the new button, swipe up, and enter the name of the next child, Oscar. Oscar is actually older; he's seven, and he is going to be a tiger. Now we have two children's profiles, Kim and Oscar. We're going to start learning with Kim, so we tap Kim, and if we press the play button here, we'll be in our personalized learning path. It'll serve up age-appropriate activities for your child like this one: they have five toy dinosaurs.

If you wanted to do self-serve, you could click in the top left corner on the library icon. Then you can scroll through all of our activities: books, videos, reading, logic, social-emotional learning, and you can pick out what your child works on. We've partnered with National Geographic and Bellwether Media to offer a range of characters and stories and formats to keep your child busy, and there's always the offline functionality—the suitcase under the word "library."

We can't wait for you to discover everything there is to do on Khan Academy Kids, so now you should be ready to get started learning. I want to run through a few of the questions that we've been getting from parents learning at home with their kids. I mentioned the home screen: if you press that big green play button on the home page, you'll go into the personalized learning path. If you press the top left library icon, you'll go into the library.

Well, what's the difference between those two? The personalized learning path is an automatic playlist of all of our activities—math and reading, social-emotional learning, books, and videos—and they get served up to your child to meet them where they're at, so they're age-appropriate and they're automatically served up. The learning path might be a good idea if you just can't be there to pick and choose every activity that your child is doing for a certain part of the day.

The library is where you can self-serve out of our catalog of activities; it's the blue book icon in the top left-hand corner of the home screen. All of the activities are the same; it's just about how they're served up to you. Do you want to pick and choose what your child is doing from one activity to the next, or are you happy to let them work their way through the personalized learning path? It's totally up to you.

Now, I want to cover some quick tips for learning at home with Khan Academy Kids. All of Karen's points about having a daily schedule but being flexible and motivating kids at home—being terribly difficult—apply to 2 to 7-year-olds. On the technical side though, I want to point out a couple of things. If you have to go offline, I mentioned the suitcase icon in the library. Tap that; all your child's progress will be saved and uploaded when you go online next. If you want to view progress, go into your child's library view, and you'll see green, yellow, and red checkmarks indicating whether they've mastered something, are still working on it, or are yet to work on it.

On the content side, there are a few things that parents have pointed out to us. Parents are loving using the thousands of books that we have to read to their children. We have books on everything from animals to feelings, so have at it in the book section. Parents have also been saying that they're enjoying healthy habits throughout the app. There are activities on things like saying hello and making friends, even getting dressed in the morning—some of these habits that are so important when we're cooped up inside.

I encourage you to check those out in the logic tab, and then finally in the create tab, your child can do something creative like drawing or making a card for a friend. You can screenshot it and send it on. Khan Academy Kids is really focused on not just math and reading—the core academic subjects for 2 to 7-year-olds—but also making sure kids are creative, that they're interacting with you, that they're moving around, getting up and jumping and making zoo animal noises, and really developing their whole selves.

The last thing I want to mention is that there are some places you can go for more information. Teachers should look out for the teacher guide that is linked in the quick start handout that we are posting on this webinar. It has a whole lot about how you might teach remotely with Khan Academy Kids. If you have any questions about getting started, please email Khan— that's k-h-a-n kids at khanacademy.org—and you should follow us on social media if you're into that for daily activities, things like circle time and what to do with your kids on Khan Academy Kids. Thanks so much!

All right, thank you Sophie and Karen. Hi everyone, it's Dan here. I'd like for you all to do two steps before we open it up to live questions. First, if you can all go out to the handout section and grab the cheat sheet. It contains guidance through this entire process—from finding the right content for your kids to tracking their progress and creating structure and motivation. It also contains step-by-step instructions on how to set up an account and links to other parent resources, so feel free to download it and share with other parents, friends, and families.

Secondly, if you have any questions, please add them to the question box. I'll be facilitating while Karen and Sophie provide their expert answers. So let's go ahead and start with some good questions that are coming in, and thank you everyone for submitting.

So we have a question, Karen, for you: Should my child have a separate account for me as a parent?

Yeah, that's a great question. We would absolutely recommend that you and your child have separate accounts. First of all, you have a set of controls and settings that are particular to the parent account. But there's a second reason that I want to emphasize, which is that you actually may want to do some learning on Khan Academy yourself. I have personally found that seventh-grade math feels like it was a really, really long time ago, so while your child is learning in their own accounts, you can actually go in as a learner—and this is in the quick start guide—and practice yourself.

So you'll have your own learning path if you have a separate account from the one you set up for your child. Awesome, thank you Karen.

This next one I think is most appropriate for you, Sophie: Is Khan Academy Kids integrated with the desktop Khan Academy, and can I see their progress from the kids app on the desktop?

So the short answer is no. Khan Academy Kids is a mobile app, and the progress that your child makes on the Khan Academy Kids mobile app will not be present on the Khan Academy desktop experience. We've designed it so that it's touchscreen and it's especially for 2 to 7-year-olds. I think in the future we look forward to linking those two experiences, but for now, no.

Okay, great, thank you. Here's a question that either of you can answer. Perhaps Karen, you tackle it first, and Sophie can go next on this one. So we have a question from Matthias Tavares (apologies if I pronounce the name incorrectly): How much should we supervise our kids while they learn?

Yeah, great question. I guess my first response would be, "How much can you?" I know at least for me, I am working during the day, even though I'm here at home, so my ability to supervise is fairly limited, and I imagine many of you are in the same position. We have designed Khan Academy so that most children can progress independently.

I like to make myself available to be nearby, but if you're supervising because you want to hold your child accountable, that's where that progress report becomes really valuable. Your child cannot practice on Khan Academy without your seeing it, and vice versa. So that report will be your way of staying connected with what your child is learning, even when you don't have the ability to sit side by side. Having said that, if you do have the ability, and if your child welcomes it, it's a great chance to really be part of their learning journey.

Yeah, I would just quickly echo that. It's great for parents to be interacting with Khan Academy Kids while their child is using it, particularly in the library mode. But if you needed to step away for a time and have your child learn independently, the personalized learning path is really taking care of things while you have to do that, and you'll be able to see a comprehensive view of their progress when you go back into the library. Keep in mind Khan Academy is used in schools all over the place, and that's a situation where one teacher has a group of 30 kids. So it's definitely designed for kids to be able to make independent progress through a combination of instruction and practice paired together without direct supervision.

All right, so I think we have time for one more question. Karen, this one's from Heather: Will there be an answer key to help grade if I'm a parent and not in a teacher account?

Yeah, great question. So you will not get an answer key, but you actually won't need to grade your child's practice because they are getting real-time feedback with every question. As the questions are answered, they will immediately know whether they got the question right or wrong, and they'll have access to a hint, and they'll have access, in many cases, to a rationale, even if they do get it right. So there's really no need for an answer key.

All right, so thank you, Karen and Sophie, for sharing your expertise with our audience. And thank you to our audience for taking the time out of your busy evening to be with us. We know there's so much going on, and we really appreciate you investing your time into this session. We know that we hit our limit in terms of the number of people who wanted to join the webinar, so we apologize for that.

For those of you who may know folks who were not able to get in, this will be recorded, and we'll be posting it live online and available to everyone. Rest assured that this information will be available to you. Secondly, we also have quite a few other resources available on our website at khanacademy.org. There's currently a blue ribbon at the very top; we're adding new resources every day and making changes quite frequently, so feel free to go there and click through for more information.

Before we sign off, please do us one more favor and take the poll that pops up at the very end of this webinar, and let us know two things: First, how could we make future iterations of this session even better for you all? And secondly, what kind of sessions would you like to see next? This was obviously a relatively high-level session to get you all started, but if you want us to dive deeper into things like motivation or specific courses like math or science, please let us know.

We're here to support you! This is the first of future webinars that we want to create to be able to support you through this time. So with that, from all of us at Khan Academy, thank you again for joining us, and good night.