at Khan Academy.

Wanna wish you a happy Friday

after week number five, can you believe it?

Since this all started.

I know, like, the way of doing things in the past

feels like the distant past all of a sudden.

But we really appreciated everything

that educators are doing across the country

to further students in this time of need.

And we especially appreciate your fellow-educator, Jessica,

who's calling in from Brownsville, Texas,

where she's an English and ESL teacher

and is using Khan Academy for the last two years

to serve her students in a really effective way.

So, Jessica, thank you so much for being here today.

- [Jessica] Thank you for inviting me, I appreciate it.

- [Jeremy] And just to give folks a sense of how

they can interact with you,

we're gonna go after some of the basic things about

Jessica's background as an educator,

how she recommends that you start using Khan Academy,

if you're just getting started this week.

But then if you have specific questions,

you can ask those via the GoToWebinar questions feature.

Just type them in and we'll take those

as we go into the session.

And Jessica can really walk you through

whatever's on your mind.

So, that being said, Jessica why don't you

tell folks a little bit about your own

educational adventure and how you got

to where you are as a teacher today?

- [Jessica] Well I'm an English, ESLL,

English One teacher in Brownsville, Texas.

Our demographics are pretty unique.

We have very high, low socioeconomic students

and I also have a large percentage of ESL students.

We have 2,500 students in my school.

We have six high schools.

And out of our 2,500 students, about 350 of them are EL's.

And we have about 100 students who are newcomers,

which means that they're at the beginning level,

as far as we can tell from English.

As far as English language learning.

So they are beginners.

I am certified as an ESLL English One teacher

four through eight and eight through 12 in Texas.

I also hold technology applications certifications

for eight to 12, grades eight through 12.

We are SIOP-trained.

We also embed a lot of technology into our classroom,

we're very lucky to have access, as ESLL teachers,

to iPads and Google Chromebooks,

and all the different technology that we can use.

So, we started using Khan Academy about

two years ago in the classroom.

And it was pretty interesting because

we found that a lot of our ESL students

lacked the basic grammar and functional

English language skills that we

didn't really have time to sit and teach

for long periods of times.

So we needed to find a way to kind of embed

those skill sets and those TEKs,

along with our ELPS, that we are required

to use in Texas, by using Khan Academy.

And it was really amazing because,

for our newcomers, we started off,

you know, two days a week for them.

And they really started picking up on the grammar basics.

You know, we went over nouns...

You know, verbs.

We went over punctuation and we used Khan Academy

as a way to bridge the gap.

And because it was visual...

And it allowed them multiple opportunities to kind of

do the questions without fear of failure.

So it was really, really great for them

because they were able to see it in

a non-threatening environment.

And we also used Khan Academy because I do

computer science after school with our ESLs.

So Khan Academy also has really great program

if you're looking for some interesting things in there,

like they have Pixar in a Box and they also

have computer science, so we use it across the board

in our school district.

- [Jeremy] Very cool and so...

Obviously, Khan Academy has all these tools

and there's all these other technology platforms out there

but if you were in the shoes of a teacher

who's just starting with technology

or just starting with Khan Academy today,

and trying to serve their English language learners,

but now over a remote distance,

are there any tips you would give them

for just getting started serving that audience?

- [Jessica] I would.

One is if you do have access to Google Classroom

and your ISD has logins for your students,

you can automatically log them in

to Khan Academy using Google.

And when you log them in, all they do

is they input their login credentials from the school,

which makes it so much easier to connect

to the actual classroom and then you're able

to give them the class code.

So that way they can sync with it.

That really helped us.

And we did it in small chunks when we first started.

When we started, 45 minutes a week.

And then we expanded to longer periods of time.

But we really focused on the skills

that they were missing.

Because we have our yearly STAAR end of course test

in Texas, our data is always pretty current.

So we look at what our students were struggling in

and then finding ways to kind of remedy

those areas, in order to strengthen them for the test.

So what we found was our kids really struggled

with editing and revising.

Because they didn't have the basic foundational skills,

so we started small, we started with nouns

and simple sentences.

And when we did the simple sentences,

we would embed the Khan Academy for the structure

and then we would bridge it to a piece of writing

and have them identify noun, verbs.

So they still get the reading and the writing,

and then we were able to those skills

and move the ones who were a little more advanced

could move on.

And the ones who struggled, we were able

to identify them more.

And be able to work on them one-on-one.

So it's about small chunks at first.

Until you get really comfortable with the program.

And I really liked that I could see,

and I would go and check, "Hey, did you do

"so-and-so assignment?"

and I could see whether or not they viewed the video,

I could see what they got on the assignment,

and I would tell them, "If you're struggling with

"the assignment and you didn't watch the video,

"you should probably go back and see where the video,

"what the video has to say before

"you even start the assignment."

- [Jeremy] Very cool, I think that's such an

important piece of advice right now,

when everything feels so overwhelming,

just start small.

One lesson, - [Jessica] Start small.

- [Jeremy] One assignment, if your student can

sort of get that experience under their belt,

before you move onto the bigger and bolder things.

- [Jessica] And what's really great is you can start,

if you do nouns, for ESL especially,

you have to work on the cognates,

depending on what their language is,

where they struggle.

Luckily, we're in an area where most of our students

are Spanish-speaking and most of the

people here are bilingual.

But that might not be so in other areas.

We also have a population of...

A population that speaks Tagalog.

So with that, it's really helpful to use,

like we use our Duolingo, we use our Khan Academy,

we use our Flipgrid in order to kind of bridge the language.

So what we do is we start with nouns

and then we give an assignment on nouns.

So everything connects...

together.

And then we'll give a STAAR question

that has, like, identify or edit

whatever topic we're working on.

So everything's just kind of streamlined, I suppose.

- [Jeremy] Very cool.

So now that we've sort of covered

some of the basics about like how you

would get students registered,

what would you give them as a first assignment,

how would you look at some of those results,

let's take them to some of the

next step questions from the audience.

So Lisa asks a really important question,

which is so much of this is in text

and obviously many ELLs, especially the newcomers,

really struggle just getting started,

what do you do to sort of serve them,

given this sort of text-based focus of many of

these Khan Academy questions?

- [Jessica] So the way we did that also

was we used a variety of models,

so that's why it's important to start small.

You don't want to give them too much too fast

because it gets very difficult.

We do a lot with dictionaries and we start this,

I know it's hard right now,

but we make use of all the online dictionaries.

So if you have a Spanish-speaking student,

the best online dictionary that we have found

has been spanishdict.com, I believe that's the...

Website address.

It's one of the better, yes that one.

It's one of the better Spanish-English translators

and it's one that our students use all the time

to translate some of those text-based questions.

We start...

If you're not in too much of a rush,

you can start small like a noun is a sustantivo.

So we do a lot of bridging with the...

The primary language.

Because academic language does take five to seven

years to kind of learn, so we bridge a lot

with our...

Home language, which is part of our ELPS in Texas.

Where we're allowed to use the home language of the student

in order to bridge those gaps.

So we try to at least...

Kind of...

Translate the main ideas like noun or not a noun.

One problem my kids struggled with

in identifying nouns was when the names

were from other countries.

Like I think there's a couple names from Japan,

a couple names from other countries in there,

so they really struggle with that because

they weren't used to other names.

So we had to go over that.

So what I would do is I did mini lessons,

as I was discussing earlier.

I did mini lessons and I upload them to my YouTube.

So if the students are asking me questions,

that I know they're gonna struggle with, or concept,

instead of doing a live Zoom,

I do a mini lesson and then I upload it and share it.

That has been by far the easiest for me.

It's really...

You can look up cognates, things like that,

just to help kind of bridge that gap in the language.

I'm not sure what language that your students speak,

just from experience from my Spanish-speaking students.

- [Jeremy] Very cool - [Jessica] I hope that helps.

- [Jeremy] Yeah, that actually speaks

to a great question from Paula.

Which is what's the most user-friendly

sort of video engagement tool

when you're working with an ESL classroom?