Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles - [Sal] Is there a lag? - [Producer] Okay, standby, here we go. - Hello, I think we are up now. So thanks for joining our morning livestream here at Khan Academy, we're calling it something of a homeroom, a national homeroom, or an international homeroom I guess. And every day we are trying different types of technology, so we're trying a new technology today, hopefully it works out, but definitely bear with us. I think we've definitely improved from earlier this week when I was operating from my not-so-great wifi. But things have improved. So thanks for joining, for those of y'all that this is the first day you're joining this homeroom, it's really a way for all of us to connect. As I'm sure many of you know, and are experiencing, we now have over 40 million students in America who are now not in physical school, they are trying to learn from home. And we have approaching a billion kids around the world who are in that situation. And over the last few, well really over the last decade, Khan Academy has inadvertently building things that can hopefully help folks navigate this school closure situation. This is a very suboptimal situation, but we have over the years created things like Khan Academy Kids for early learners, that's for ages three through six. Covers the head start standards, all the way through first grade, and reading, writing, math, social, emotional learning. And I guess you could say the main Khan Academy, whether you're on the website, or you're on our app, it goes for sure all the way in math through elementary, middle, and high school, and even some of the core of college. A lot of people associate us with videos, it's not just videos. In fact, most of what we put resources to are interactive exercises that have solutions to every problem. Students should never be able to run out of practice, they get feedback, there's game mechanics to make sure they really mastered the concept, there's data and reporting for teachers or parents if they wanna help the students progress. We've recently launched a Beta, which is kind of a first draft version of our English and language arts. It's not quite as rich as what we have on the math side, but the exercise items, I think, are quite good. That goes from second through eighth grade. And then as you get into high school, not only do we have the math, but we also have the sciences, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, computer science. For those of you in middle school, I actually highly recommend high school biology, I think you have the math background to handle it, and it's very relevant to the world that we're in today. And we also have SAT practice in reading, writing, and math, and that's an official partnership with the college board. And we have all of those resources, and we realized last week that we've got to be able to put these things together in a way that it feels more structured, in a world where so many students are going to be working from home. And so that's why over the past weekend we launched the schedules on Khan Academy. There could be links, depending on what social media channel you're looking at, you could also just do a web search. If you just go to KhanAcademy.org, we have banners that lead you to the schedules and other resources that we're having. But that helps structure student's days. For young students, middle school students, high school students, elementary school students, and we've been getting a lot of good feedback from that, and we're constantly tweaking it so it becomes better and better. So please give us feedback on that. But the purpose of this homeroom, that was a long parenthetical, the purpose of this homeroom is to, as folks work at their own time and pace, on those types of schedules, to feel a connectedness. When you're in a real school, there's a homeroom, and there's announcements, and we get to see each other. We get to kind of prepare our minds for the day. And so this is really for everybody, it's for students, it's for parents, it's for teachers, just as a way to start their day. And in this time of social distancing, hopefully feel a little bit connected. A couple of announcements, as many of y'all know, I've been mentioning this in the last few livestreams, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit, with a mission of a free world class education for anyone, everywhere. Not-for-Profit means no one owns Khan Academy, it's a public charity. I don't own Khan Academy, you own as much of Khan Academy as I do. And we are dependent on philanthropic donations. And we are proud, and we wanna step up in every way possible to serve everyone during this situation, but what happens with a not-for-profit like ours is our servers, our usage has more than doubled as of the latest data that I saw from yesterday. And that increases our costs, and our funds come from philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So we definitely need help. And so, let's see, I just, looks like the screen just clicked out on me. Oh, it's back. All right, sorry. So we need help, but I do wanna thank several, there's many of y'all who've been donating at all different levels. I definitely wanna thank some corporations who have stepped up in record time over the weekend. Bank of America was the first to step up when they found out our situation, and how much the resources we have to put out there and what we hope to do to get everyone through this school closure situation. And they encouraged us to think big, so Bank of America gave a very generous donation over the weekend. You can read up about that announcement, and just this morning, I really wanna thank AT&T and Google.org for following close behind Bank of America and also stepping up with significant support so that we can handle all the extra programs we wanna do, the server costs that have roughly doubled now, and we were frankly already running at a deficit before this. 'Cause you can imagine serving up content, we have a team of over 200 folks, and serving up content to tens and what is likely hundreds of millions of folks now does take a lot of resources. So thank you for everyone there. So with that said, with my asking for support from the world, and we need more, I'll turn to your questions. So the first question, and this is one we get pretty consistently is, as a parent, how should I figure out what my child should be learning? So those schedules that we put out, they have, and you should definitely feel free to modify those schedules so they work for you, and depending on what works for your child. But in each of those areas, for say math, we give some grade levels that might be appropriate for students of a certain age, and I would say if your student has historically felt confident in math and has done quite well in math, you can just start them right at grade level. They can take something called the course challenge that's right from the course page, and on that course challenge, it'll take about 30 to 40 minutes, they'll have to answer about 30, 40 questions, and then it will tell them what they got right or wrong, and then the things that they got wrong, I would recommend going to those units in the course. And on those units, if the student feels like they know a good bit of that unit, they can go to the unit test, and take that, and then that'll give them credit for what they know, then they can focus on the skills that they don't know. And then the game mechanics for the entire site has unit test, course challenges, other things, mastery challenges, so that it encourages kids to show that they have mastery, that they can fill in all those gaps in their knowledge, that they can do the skills in a mixed topic type of environment. So that's one method. If your child, or if you're a student, and maybe you've felt a little bit weak in math, one thing that we've seen, Tim Vandenberg, this teacher that I've been really, really impressed by over, I've heard about him a couple weeks ago, he actually starts all of his sixth graders at kindergarten, and that's not to talk down to 'em, it's actually 'cause he has very high expectations for them. What happens there is, the students, by starting at kindergarten, they're able to build some momentum, obviously a lot of sixth graders, most sixth graders will get through the kindergarten content, they can do it through the course challenges in literally 30 to 40 minutes, then they go to first grade. You can do all of early learning on Khan Academy, you can do arithmetic, and he also makes all of his students do the third grade, because he sees that that has a lot of foundational things in it, like your basic arithmetic fluency, and your basic multiplication fluency, things like that. And then he has them simultaneously working at grade level. So I think this situation, might be, especially if you have a child, or you are a student who's historically struggled in math, I recommend spending more time so you can work at grade level, and make sure that you don't have any Swiss cheese gaps going forward. And then the same thing is true in English and language arts. You should always be working at a level that you're getting a few questions wrong, it's a little bit difficult, but you can definitely engage on it, would be my best advice. And I think over the next few days and weeks, because Khan Academy has all of the grade levels, it's a good time to try to triangulate, where is that learning edge? And you should be able to get to it in about a week, and then learn from there, and really have strong foundations. So let's see, Kylie Kameoka says, "Hi Sal, "as a tutor, how do you figure out where "the students' gaps are?" So a very similar question. If you really wanna go for gap finding, you should start students at the very basic material, that's why we created mechanisms on Khan Academy to accelerate through it. But that's really the only way to go skill by skill and ensure that students have no gaps. And what we see over and over again is even students who are A students in middle school, they still have a few gaps, or they're still not completely fluent at certain things from arithmetic, or the things that came before. We see many high school students who are not fluent at middle school skills, or at elementary school skills, and so it's really valuable. It might seem like you're taking a step back, but it's kind of a go slow to go fast. If you take that week to start from the beginning and build up all your skills, then when you get to the middle school math, or the algebra, you'll find that you're in the right place. If you're looking at other topics on Khan Academy, like biology, or physics, I'd advocate the same thing. Economics, take the course challenge, understand what you know and you don't know, and then go back and fill in those gaps in the appropriate units. So Underground School says, "Other than career preparation, "what is the role of learning in life?" So you know, Underground School, it's an interesting name, it's a deep question of what is the purpose of life period? And you know, I think one of the things that makes us as human beings fairly unique, we know what some of them are, we have opposable thumbs, although all of our primate and ape cousins have opposable thumbs. We have large brains, and we walk on two legs upright, and we have language, which is maybe a byproduct of our large brains. And maybe all those things come together, the opposable thumbs, the brain, and the language, and I think that learning is one of the most fundamental human things that makes us feel human. And so I've gotten letters over the years from Khan Academy, from people who are past their career, or well into their career, and they realized later in life how much joy there is just for the sake of learning, just trying to understand this mystery that we find ourselves in called life, understanding the universe a little better. And what I've said in multiple livestreams is, some students have asked, "How do I get motivated?" And I remind them that this content that you can learn on Khan Academy, that you can learn in your textbooks, a lot of what you see in a lesson or unit is someone's life work, or it's probably many of hundreds of people's life work. And they would've done anything to see that knowledge that you now see. How does photosynthesis work? What does mitochondria do? Calculus, people like Newton and Leibniz spent decades trying to derive these things, and you can now understand it in a more distilled format. I think that's incredibly exciting. And it just changes your perspective on everything, and it also just makes you a better citizen. In a world where we want democracy, we want people to be able to participate, there's an obligation of the person themselves to be as informed as possible, to be able to look at the data that exists in the world, to be able to think critically about the world, and that's what education is gonna provide. You'll also be more fun at dinner parties, better dinner party conversation. All right, Kirsten Martin says, "How does a teacher use Khan Academy "to teach a class at multiple levels? "What should the teacher component focus on?" So Kirsten, if we weren't in the school closure situation, the teachers that I've seen use Khan Academy to great effect, and I've visited hundreds of classrooms over the years, and Tim Vandenberg's the most recent that I've talked to, I haven't visited his classroom yet. The teachers will spend some time with the students that are learning at their own time and pace on Khan Academy, I don't think it's a bad idea to start all of your students at kindergarten and let them progress as quickly as possible. Or early learning in arithmetic, and let them progress as quickly as possible, maybe simultaneously as they do the grade level. What Tim has done is he has all the students start at early math, but then he also assigns, let's say they're sixth graders or seventh graders, he will use our assignments functionality to assign unit one in sixth grade, and then unit two. And what he does is has a double expectation for his students. He says, remediate, fill in those gaps as quickly as you can, if you don't have gaps, it'll happen quite quickly, and simultaneously work on the grade level stuff, and I expect you to be done 1/4 through the grade 1/4 through the year, halfway through the grade halfway through the year. He makes his grading based on that, but it's a mastery learning framework. So if a student's not quite there at the quarter year mark, but then gets there later on, he actually modifies their grade to reflect that they have now gotten to that point. And that seems to work really well for him. And the way it flows in the classroom, when class is in session, is he's able to look at the data of what students are working on, who's engaged, who's not engaged. Obviously he can see some of that just by looking at the classroom, and what are students having trouble with? And then he can use that to take a handful of students to do a more focused intervention, or maybe pair two students together who are trying to work on the same skill, or maybe pair a student who's already mastered a concept with a student who's trying to master the concept. And what you find is it's a very rich classroom. A lot of people imagine that online learning can be kind of this Vulcan or Borg reality where kids are just on computers and learning, and in their isolated places, but done well, it can be highly, highly interactive. And the teacher's able to form good connections with the students, students are able to talk, and interact, and teach each other. And obviously, you learn things the best when you actually have to teach it. Now that we're in this virtual world, I've heard of teachers and parents emulating aspects of that where the kids are working on Khan Academy, and then simultaneously you might have a Google Hangout or a Zoom conference call, or a Skype session at the same time where students know that they can go onto that and access their peers, or their teacher, or parent who might be able to help them. And you could imagine, in this more virtual world that we're finding ourselves in, a parent, or a teacher, or even an older student could look at the dashboard still and say, "Hey, looks like five of y'all are really having "trouble with negative numbers," and yes, the Khan Academy has resources, and that person could say, "Hey, make sure you "watch the videos, make sure you look "at the explanations on the hints," But they could say, "Hey, at 10 a.m., "I'm gonna run a 20 minute session, "a break out session on negative numbers "for you five to really help you through it." Or you might see, "Hey, Khan Academy "does certain types of items and problems," but there might be a really rich, multi step application problem that you can say, "All right, half the students keep working "on Khan Academy, but half of y'all are ready "for this deeper type of question, "let's work on that together," and you could do it on a Hangout or a Zoom. So those are the types of frameworks, but we would love to hear from all of you teachers how you're using it. So Nadia Ali says, "Hi Sal, my son asks, "what is the importance of the points you collect? "I answered the more points you score, "the smarter you are, but he wants to hear it from you." Well I'll give a slightly different answer, what I would say is, the more you learn, the richer your life will be, so that's the number one thing to remember. The points really are just points. (Sal laughs) They do help unlock things like avatars, and things like that, but you know, the way our brains are wired, or many of our brains are wired, things like points, and I think even in adulthood, many people are still looking to score points in different ways, whether you call a bank account points, or beyond a certain measure, it probably is. But you know, those are just what's known as extrinsic motivators, things that will hopefully motivate you to get more engaged. But the best motivators are intrinsic motivators, when you realize that the best thing to do is just build that learning, and maybe you could view the points, we have energy points, we have mastery points, you can see your skills that you've leveled up, that's a way to reflect on what you've learned. And that's actually the most enriching thing of all, more than points or anything else. But that's what the points are, they're indicative of what you've learned. And I wouldn't even say necessarily smart or not smart. There was a question earlier about the growth mindset, actually that's the next question from Mahalia Lickich, I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your name, Mahalia, but the whole principle of growth mindset is there's people with either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. Fixed mindset and the domain thinks, I'm either smart or I'm not. And a growth mindset says, "Well, I don't really know "my potential unless I'm always willing "to step out of my comfort zone, "try things that are difficult for me, "recognize that when I fail at something, "that's when I'm growing the most, "that's my opportunities for growth." And when people have a fixed mindset, if they think they're smart at something, many times they don't want to try hard things because it might undermine their self-perception, and if they think they're not smart at something, they don't wanna try it, 'cause they're like, "Well I'm never gonna be good at it." But people with a growth mindset will always say, "Hey, that's a challenge, I might not succeed, "but I'm gonna try it, and I'll work on it." So really the points are there to reward and show how much effort you've put in, and how much you've been willing to push yourself, and that I think is the muscle that we all wanna build. And if you look in the world, the people who are disproportionately successful are the people with growth mindsets. The people who are always looking to improve themselves, push themselves, and aren't trying to say, "I'm smart or not smart, just I'm gonna keep seeing "what I can do." (Sal laughs) So Hafsa Savilkia says, "Anything that we can do "as a volunteer? "We'd love to be part of the team, "thank you for all you do." So there's multiple ways you might volunteer. We have people for languages, people for subtitling, I think in this time that we find ourselves in of the school closures, if you're in a position, find some kinds that you might know in your community that might need help, contact some teachers, especially kids who might not have a lot of resources. One try to figure out how to get them resources, I think computers and internet are a lifeline right now, not just for accessing things like Khan Academy, but just to be able to connect with people now that we all have to be socially distanced. So if you could help someway in that, that could be really powerful for the world. I think if you could run video conferencing tutoring sessions, classes for people who wanna learn in your area. We're looking at ways that we could kind of scale that type of thing up. We've recommended on our schedules that people do that, I've already mentioned it, teachers, parents, older students are able to organize, create video conferencing places where people can go get help. I think that could be a great way to volunteer right now. I think there's ways unrelated to Khan Academy that could be great to volunteer now. Find people who might not have a lot of connection to other people, get on Hangouts with them, talk to them, I think people need that. I think if there's elderly people in your area, offer to go buy their groceries for them, drop it off on their porches. I think that could be of great service. So there's a lot of opportunity for service right now. But in the academic realm, and Khan Academy realm, I'd say right now, run tutoring sessions for folks. And when you do those tutoring sessions on Hangouts, or on a zoom session, some of it might be explaining the concept, but a lot of it might just be motivating. "Hey, remember, you could go to Khan Academy, "that's the video. "Hey, are you using it right?" And they can sign you up as their coach, so you can monitor and see how they're able to interact. You could say, "Hey, so-and-so, it looks like "you haven't been working on it, "what's going on?" "How can I help you?" I think that by itself is a huge, huge, huge service. And we are running, I forgot to mention, parent webinars and teacher webinars to help parents and teachers understand how to use our tools and our reports a little bit more. So stay tuned for some of that. So I have Somol Sahu says, "What is your typical day like?" Well, I think that changes depending on whether you talk about the last week, or before the last week. This week has been a very interesting week, for everyone. And I feel lucky that Khan Academy's in a position to help the situation. Because as I said in other livestreams, there's three things that people are worried about, their health, mental and physical health first and foremost. The second is the economics of the situation, and there's a lot of people struggling, especially as restaurants, and hotels, and airlines are having to lay off folks, it's a really tough, tough situation we're in. But the third thing is, there's a lot of kids out of school, and there's a lot of adults that are home, and are all in the same room together. And how do we navigate that? And how do we make sure that people keep learning? So anyway, my day, yesterday I woke up super early, we got a bunch of press inquiries we're leveraging to help communicate that these resources exist. Then we had the livestream, simultaneously we're trying to still put some content out. I have a few that are in my queue. There's another Corona virus video that I'd actually like to make to help explain, and people appreciate that social distancing is something to take quite seriously. And the more seriously we do it, and the sooner we do it, the more likely we are able to navigate this thing in a very good way, and it wouldn't hurt the economy too much. And yeah, but right now it's just constant, our whole team is now virtual, so even while I'm talking, I've gotten four text messages that I haven't looked at yet, so it is just like a bit of a war room where we're trying to figure out what goes on, and that day's going pretty long right now. In the old days, like two weeks ago, (Sal laughs) my day would be, I try to split my day about a third, a third, a third, a third is I still create content, I still try to make videos or create other things. About a third of my time is working with the team to help think about where does the product go? What features can we add? And then another third of my time is roughly doing things like this, external communications, fundraising, talking to press, et cetera. So yeah, that's my average day. Okay, Galaxy Wolf Plays says, "Will there be any "new updates for the website and app?" In the long run for sure, 100, we have a whole team working on this. Even as this crisis was unfolding, we've actually had to rearchitect our entire backend, our infrastructure of our site just so it can continue to scale. And obviously that's even more of an imperative now that our usage has more than doubled over the last few days. But we do have plans on a whole host of features, we usually launch them around back to school time period. But yeah, we have whole, and there's aspirations for sure over the next year, two years, three years, of the types we wanna do. We wanna add more content, we wanna make it easier to navigate, we eventually wanna make easier ways, a lot of people ask where to start? And I've given you some ways to do it, but we wanna make that even simpler. So there's a ton of things that we definitely wanna add to the site. Heather Sylvester says, "My son tried to log in "the other day and start where he left off "in algebra one, but it's making him start "all the way back to the beginning. "Is there another way around it?" Well I'm sorry to hear that. I'm guessing, if your son was, maybe what you're saying is maybe he left off in algebra one in his algebra one class. So my advice to your son, and to you, is he should take the course challenge in algebra one, and then that will give him a good sense of what he knows and doesn't know in algebra one. And we do that because every course, there's some courses people do around the world in roughly the same order at the same pace, but it's usually a little bit different. And so, if he takes that course challenge, he'll know where he is, and then he can then focus on the units where he has gaps. The stuff that he knows, it literally could take him a few hours to show that he has mastery in that, and that's good, because then he will know that material that much better, he will have reviewed it a few months after. 'Cause that's another issue that a lot of kids have, they'll go through the material that's covered in class, but then by the end of the year, for sure after the end of summer, they've forgotten it. So this is a good chance to review and refresh, and algebra is one of those foundational things, not just for the rest of math, but also for science, and economics, and pretty much anything else you're gonna do in life. So yeah, I would say the course challenge, use unit tests, that'll help him accelerate, there's also things called mastery challenges. Those will all help him accelerate if he already knows some of that material. It'll take him a few hours to get to a mastery in a lot of that, and then he'll see the areas where he needs to work more on it, and he should be able to get, if he does know 60 or 70% of the material already, he should get to 60 or 70% mastery quite quickly. Then now he can progress from there. And I would say, once he's done with algebra one, he should continue on into geometry or algebra two, or whatever else interests him. So next we have David Hadimanos, and first of all I wanna thank David, he's one of our teacher ambassadors, these are incredible teachers around the country and world who are Khan Academy super users, and not only are super users with their own students, but help other teachers use Khan Academy. So I just wanted to thank David for being one of the ambassadors. So he says, "Thank you to you and your team "for all you all do." Thank you for thanking us. "A couple of questions, are there plans "to provide downloadable packets "for teachers who need to provide paperwork, "and two, are there plans to extend "upper math content further going beyond calculus?" So on the first one, we don't have current plans, but that's an interesting idea. You're an ambassador, so let our team know, I'm assuming that would be for the younger age groups that might need more paper-type worksheets. That's an interesting idea, and I think we wouldn't maybe have thought about it two weeks ago, 'cause we've always viewed ourselves as going side-by-side with what the traditional paper-based curriculum is, but in this type of reality, it is something we should explore. "Are there plans to extend upper math content further "going beyond calculus?" So we do have video content going beyond calculus, multi variable differential equations, linear algebra, we have statistics too, which you could argue, it's not necessarily beyond calculus. The statistics has exercises. So long term yes, I would love to do it long term. In the short term, we probably aren't. There might be something in multi variable, but I can't promise that just yet. Let's see, Bunny Hernandez says, "We'd love to help Khan Academy raise funds, "how can we get in touch?" So depending, if you'd like to donate, KhanAcademy.org/donate, there's also some links I think if you're streaming in, or if you're getting the stream on Facebook, we're gonna put it there, on YouTube you might see some donate links. If you're looking at fundraising in a bigger way, helping fundraise from other people, pop us an email at skhan@khanacademy.org, and I'll forward it to the right person. So it looks like we are all, oh I just saw the screen kinda clicked out. So it looks like we're pretty close to time now. So a couple of announcements. So next week, we're going to change the livestream time. The livestream is going to be at 12 noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, as of Monday. We're gonna be doing this livestream every week for the foreseeable future, just to help us feel connected during this time. So it's going to be at 12 noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, starting Monday, this was based on everyone's feedback on what would work across time zones and things like that. And I really look forward to seeing you all, y'all take care of yourselves, stay socially distanced but not socially distant. Interact with your friends, I've been interacting with friends and family, many of the people I haven't talked to for a while, but doing it on Hangouts and chats, and things like that, and it's actually helped everyone get through this. And as I said at the end of every livestream, this is something, I remind myself whenever it's like, oh I'm in this house for an awfully long time, or whatever else, is that the whole world is going through this. It's a crummy situation, but there's very few times in history where the whole world has gone through something like this, and as bad as it is, it's also an opportunity where I think we're seeing the good in everyone, and everyone is trying to help everyone. So I think we can all appreciate that aspect of the crisis we are in. And once again, thank you all for joining. This helps me feel connected to all of you, and thank you to everyone who's helped out, donated, given your donations, we need help, our server costs are growing very fast, and another thanks to the corporations that have begun to step up. Bank of America stepped up over the weekend, and then today we just announced AT&T and Google.org, and any corporate leaders out there, we need more help. There's many, many students on Khan Academy right now who need our help to learn, and parents and teachers who need our support. Thank you very much.
B1 khan academy khan academy grade math algebra Office Hours With Sal: Friday, March 20. Livestream From Homeroom 29 0 林宜悉 posted on 2020/03/27 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary