Khan Academy

Are you a math teacher? Will you be delivering instruction online for the 2020-2021 school year? Were you dissatisfied with your online instructional delivery or student engagement in that delivery during the Spring of 2020? If you answered yes to any of the above Khan Academy needs to be part of your repertoire. 

With a quick search on any math topic, you can find instructional videos. They range from 2 to 10 minutes, depending on whether the content is an introduction or demonstration. You can search by grade level or specific content. For example, I searched “decimals” and immediately received more than 50 videos. The beauty of the Khan Academy website is that you can also be very specific with the search parameters. I searched “adding decimals” and similarly received just as many search results. Khan Academy offers videos, articles, exercises, and programs on many subjects and grade levels.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel if you can find an already made instructional video to offer your students. For the coming school year 2020-2021, the affordance would be in offering educators time to create dynamic flipped lessons or all online lessons. With an instructional video already available, educators can then concentrate on collaborative projects to create for students. One of the learning problems of the Spring of 2020 that I and many of my colleagues experienced was students not watching the videos then engaging with the activities and not being successful. Khan Academy offers fantastic videos, but how can we make sure on an online platform that elementary students are actually engaging with them? This year I am combining my online math instruction with Edpuzzle.

 For example, a lesson on adding and subtracting decimals would begin with a Khan Academy decimal video made interactive with Edpuzzle, a web 2.0 tool.  I can take the Khan Academy adding and subtracting video and create certain stops within it asking students to answer questions. The questions can be open-ended or multiple-choice. Khan Academy/Edpuzzle Adding Decimals VideoAssigning the video in this way would solve the problem of students skipping through or not fully focusing on the mini-lesson video assigned. Then, the students could complete an activity where they order from a menu and add up the total check. This could be collaborative with an assigned google document for 2 to 4 students who could pretend to go to lunch and order. Going Out To Eat Activity Online learning can be a different experience for both educators and students thanks to Khan Academy and Edpuzzle.