Man gets shock of his life when he buys two toy poodles for $150 only to be told by a vet that they are actually GIANT RODENTS pumped up with steroids to look like dogs

Ok, I will admit that this is my first time blogging. So as I tend to do when I want to learn more about something I turned to my friend Google. One site suggested that it is good to start with an attention-catching headline. This Daily Mail headline from April 7, 2013 certainly caught my attention so I thought why not! But seriously, I started to think about the task in front of me, and I started to think what a great resource Khan Academy is for students of all ages to turn to when they are looking for assistance in math.  

In the chapter entitled The Los Altos Experiment, Sal Khan embraced the opportunity to work with an affluent California school district. Up until this point Khan Academy had been primarily reaching students outside of the more formal school setting. But Khan decided this was the right situation to “learn from real teachers and real students how our technology could be made better” (page 163). The pilot program in two 5th grade and two 7th grade classes proved successful.

One of the measures of success that was observed came from standardized testing. Initially Khan was concerned about the “congruence, or lack thereof, between what our kids were learning and what the tests were testing” (page 166). He was also worried that some of the very advanced students were working on skills well above grade level that would go unrecognized in the testing process. His apprehension about students doing well on the standardized grade level test proved to be unfounded. Students who had mastered the skills taught through Khan Academy were able to do well on the test without specifically being taught for the test.

Khan built upon this success by expanding the number of classrooms that were served. As the amount of districts using the program grew, Kahn was excited about what he saw, especially with minorities and remedial classes. Though it is hard to argue with the positives, I feel we need to realize the limitations of the program and the videos. I have always felt that it is up to me as the math teacher to guide students in discovering a conceptual understanding of the math that they are learning. I want students to derive the rules and equations they use whenever possible, and discover why they work. As a teacher I have been fortunate to work in a district that has provided learning opportunities with experts and excellent resources that stress the conceptual.   

I tend to find the Khan Academy’s videos to be more procedural than conceptual. For example, in his initial division with fractions video Kahn shows two number line examples with fractions that have like denominators. He uses this as an example of how he ended up multiplying by the denominator and then dividing by the numerator- otherwise know as find the reciprocal and multiply, or keep-change-flip. What his video and lessons provide here is instructional, but few students would be able to say why this is the algorithm. I favor having my students derive this algorithm through real life scenarios and modeling. Recently I had a discussion with a 4th grade student who is proud of her completion of multiple grade levels in Khan Academy. I have seen her improve in some areas, and I believe that her self confidence has grown through her experiences with Khan Academy. But recently she asked me to help her with a 6th grade geometry exercise on Kahn that built upon a 4th or 5th grade skill. She had managed to pass an earlier triangle lesson on Khan Academy by memorizing the area equation for a triangle. In this current set of problems she needed to be able to find the base of two connected triangles that had been rotated. This student was not conceptually able to see that any side of a triangle could be used as the base for that triangle. In other words, she had a gap in her conceptual understanding of triangles.

Do I think of Khan Academy as a stand-alone math course? No. But I see the worth of having something like this available. The videos are an excellent resource for students, and are beneficial as a supplement and for exploring topics of interest. The practice exercises on the site are also useful in helping students grasp the concepts.To have a free resource that anyone can turn to is the beauty of Khan. It transcends race and wealth. And there is a Khan lesson for nearly every learning objective in the math continuum. I believe it has a place in our classrooms.

Oh- and about the poodles….