Treasure House: Khan Academy

Treasure House of Knowledge: Khan Academy

Khan Academy is another not-for-profit organisation attempting to change the way learning is delivered in the classroom. In particular, having students work at their own pace and only having a teacher intervene when they can see that a student is stuck. The resources are free and available for anyone to use including student’s, teacher’s, principal’s and home schooler’s.

The site mainly consists of videos and practise exercises for biology, chemisty, physics, history and finance.

Some of its features include:

• A statistics pie chart which keeps track of what you’re learning;
• A knowledge map which shows all the exercises and concepts available;
• The ability to earn badges and points with everything you’re learning and
• A class profile feature which helps you identify where your student’s need help.

The site managers are currently trialling Khan Academy with a class to help teacher’s and parent’s monitor their student’s progress in class and at home.

From my little tour of the site, Khan is quite the data gatherer. It produces a lot of data which you can use to monitor a student and inform your teaching even down to the day and hour that the student worked on a problem. The program is able to show the student’s how to do problems and tests them on speed and accuracy which I also liked.

To get started with Khan both teacher’s and student’s need to create accounts with the site. This can be done through Google, Google Apps for Education and/or Facebook.