Welcome to our daily homeroom live stream.

If it's your first time and are wondering what is this?

This is a live stream that we started doing

every day since school closure started happening

'cause we realize as a not for profit with a mission

of free world class education for anyone anywhere,

we have a role to step up.

It's our duty to step up to support teachers, parents,

and students as we all navigate through this crisis.

And so we've been trying to put as many supports out

as possible teacher webinars, parent webinars,

(mumbles) class schedules, frameworks for learning plans

for students, and also this homeroom.

And this is a way to stay connected

in times of social distancing

and to just talk about interesting things.

Many of which might be related to the crisis

or whatever else is on folks' mind.

I do like to remind folks as I just did,

that we are not for profit

and we can only exist through philanthropic donations.

So if you're in a position to do so

please think about donating,

we were running at a deficit even before the crisis

and now we're seeing about two and a half

to three times the traffic we normally see,

and you could imagine that plus all of the other programs

and content we're trying to accelerate

are only making our costs go up higher.

I do wanna give a special thanks

to several corporate partners that stepped up

over the last couple of weeks when they realized

how big the need was to support everyone

on the education front for COVID.

Special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org,

Fastly, AT&T and Novartis.

They've made a huge difference,

but we still are running at a deficit.

So any more help from either corporations

or individuals is very, very much appreciated.

So with that we'll get into the heart of this live stream

and sometimes we have guests and sometimes we don't

or I guess you could say today I am the guest.

And so we could treat this livestream as really

just a ask Sal anything so you can get on the Facebook

and YouTube message boards and literally ask me anything

and I have team members that are helping me

surface interesting questions.

But we also said that given that this is the end

of Teacher Appreciation Week

that we wanna make sure teachers feel supported

especially as they're all trying to navigate

this world of distance learning or making videos.

And so I'm also happy to answer questions for teachers

who are wondering what are tips we might have

for making content, for making videos

and what are the tools we have?

So feel free to put those questions in.

I already have a question from Facebook

Jay is asking,

"I must admit that I would be happy

if I just knew the name of the tablet

that Sal uses to present.

That is the biggest challenge when teaching remotely.

I cannot tell you how many times teachers have said,

if only we had tablets like Sal uses."

All right I will tell you the name of the tablet

I actually have it right over here,

and I'm not normally about product endorsement.

So I'm not sure if this is the best tablet out there

or what but it's definitely met my needs.

So let's see this is the Intuos Pro Medium Pen Tablet.

I think it costs 100 or $200, it looks like this,

and it will come with a pen that...

Whoops I'm pressing buttons on it,

I hope (mumbles)...

It comes with a pen that looks like this.

This camera is kind of a reverse mode.

So there you go.

So that is the tablet and I think the cost really increases

as you go from the small, to the medium, to the large.

For many years at Khan Academy I had the small version,

which was I think was $70,

and you can go pretty far with that.

So yeah hopefully that is useful

and obviously this is useful.

Tablets like this are useful

for making Khan Academy style videos.

And I actually use a tablet like that with a pen

and I use Camtasia to record my screen

and this is the microphone that I have.

This is a Samson...

And once again,

I'm sure there's other good microphones

let's see Samson CO3U,

I just realized it wouldn't make do much good

if I'm reading the model number

when my mouth is on the other side of the microphone.

But just with that and Camtasia

you can make exactly the types of videos I make.

And obviously, this is useful for all of y'all

who are also doing live, Zoom or Google Hangout

type sessions as well 'cause you can share your screen

and then use your art program.

Oh, and I use SketchBook Pro for the art program,

but you could use others.

I like to just use something that's quite responsive.

Some of the art programs that get super fancy

there's a little bit of a lag and that bothers me.

So that's what I try to do,

and I've been working with some teachers

running some live sessions as well.

And so I use the exact same tools for that

where I can share my screen and share the art program.

I will say a low tech hack for the live sessions,

and actually in theory you could do this

for your videos as well,

is those those small whiteboards that we have students

do their problem on,

you can literally just have one of those

and write with a with a marker.

I've actually found that to be reasonably good

especially for the kind of the live sessions

when you're trying to work with students.

So from YouTube Matthew Masters asks,

"Sal, do you think there will always be a place

for classroom learning

or will online learning eventually become the standard?"

Simple answer is yes I think

there will always be a place for classroom learning,

or I hope there will always be a place

for classroom learning.

Especially for students who haven't reached adulthood.

So I would say for K through 12 for sure,

because in theory yes students could learn

a lot of the academic skills

potentially on their own time and pace,

on things like Khan Academy,

and or you can have Zoom sessions

and you can have this kind of distance type of learning,

but that's only part of what

really makes the school experience powerful.

There is a whole other level

of having incredible teacher mentors,

being able to form bonds with them,

being able to do extracurricular activities,

all of the socialization that goes on in school,

knowing how to work in groups,

knowing when to communicate,

when not to communicate, know how to get your point across.

These are all super important skills

that you'll never see on any standardized test,

but we all know that they're very, very important

for overall life and success.

So, I've always said If I had to pick

between an amazing teacher and amazing technology

I would pick the amazing teacher every time

and I would prefer to have that amazing teacher in person,

so we should definitely strive for that.

And I think I would want it for my own children

and frankly all children.

And so I think the interesting question

over the COVID crisis is,

how do we get as close to that as possible

given the constraints that we have of social distancing?

And then longer term,

hopefully when we get out of this crisis sooner than later.

How do we leverage the best of both worlds?

So I think hopefully we're gonna go back to school,

kids are gonna be to get that socialization,

they're gonna be back in those classrooms

with their amazing teachers,

but then everyone has built a stronger muscle

for sometimes maybe the distance learning does work

maybe over summers, maybe over breaks, maybe after school.

It doesn't have to just be

between the teachers and the students,

it could be older students and younger students

or it could be the peers working together,

so I think that would be a good takeaway

from this whole process.

I think higher education, there are some real questions.

I loved my college experience,

I loved sitting in the dorm and pontificating

about philosophical questions

and I met my wife and many of my best friends in college.

So I definitely think that was a very valuable experience,

but there's a lot of students

who, there's huge trade offs.

They need to help support their families,

they might want you to start make money

while they're in college,

and so I think in cases like that

when just you have more of adult learners,

I think there will always be a place

for the in person college experience.

But I can imagine some adult learners

decide that that's not for them

and that they could still get their college degree

and learn all the material,

but do it at their own time and pace

and be a little bit more flexible

because maybe they hold a job

or they have to support their family and things like that.

So, my personal view is I hope we only double down

on the physical experience but leverage some of the tools

we're all exploring with a little bit more as well.

So from Facebook, Jaya Gupta asks,

"How can I become a good teacher?

Because I'm teaching my students,

but some students are not taking it seriously.

Please tell me dear sir, what to do."

Jaya, I won't pretend like I have all of the answers.

And I in the Khan Academy journey

I've done a certain flavor of teaching,

but there's a whole other dimension of teaching

which you and many other amazing teachers

are doing on a day to day basis

that I think I can learn a ton from y'all

versus the other way around.

My best advice, though, is try to make it

as interactive as possible,

and when you do that think about it.

And this actually goes to the earlier question

about in person versus digital.

I think there'll always be a place for in person,

but we should always be conscientious of what maybe digital,

or online, or software, or videos could do.

So, if you're just giving a lecture for 10 minutes straight

in theory, that could happen over a video.

And so if that could happen over video

then maybe it should happen over video,

but then that liberates you to do something else.

And it's not like all of a sudden there's nothing to do,

you could have a Socratic dialogue,

you could have a simulation,

you could have a project,

you could put a problem up on the board

that's a little bit more challenging

and have the students struggle with it a little bit.

Have them break into groups

and try to come up with their own answers,

and then present it and you're walking around nudging them,

giving them a little hint for the ones that get stuck.

So I think there's a huge opportunity

for that classroom to just interact