with Khan Academy.

Thanks so much for joining us this afternoon.

You're in for a very special treat today

because we have kind of Academy ambassador

and all star male teacher, Shalom with us today

who has been using Khan Academy for almost a decade.

Basically since Sal Khan himself started making the videos,

Shalom has been with us using it in his classroom.

So if you're ever curious about how do you get started

with Khan Academy for remote learning,

how do you specialize and target your content

for your middle school students?

Shalom is the person to speak to

and he's happy to share his expertise today.

So that being said,

before we get you Shalom's background here,

I wanna remind you the first part of the session

we focused on the most common questions we received

and Shalom will talk through how to get started

and how to focus your energies with Khan Academy.

And then we'll open it up for the final half

for questions from the audience.

So if you ever wanna ask a question,

just go to the question section

of the go to webinar control panel

and we'll take those in the order they're received.

So Shalom, welcome and thank you so much

for joining us today.

- It's very nice to be here with everybody.

- And just to sort of give folks a sense of

where you're coming from, tell us a little bit about

where you teach, who you teach and what your experience

with Khan has been.

- Okay, I'm a seventh grade math teacher

in Ocean Township, New Jersey.

Teaching is a second career for me,

I actually worked on Wall Street for six years,

and decided to make the switch

and I've been teaching middle school ever since.

So here I am in Monmouth County, New Jersey. (laughs)

- Very cool.

And so tell us, like, even before this crisis started,

why have you been a Khan user in your classroom?

- At about the 2010/2011 school year,

a friend of mine had told me about it.

And I had heard about this Khan Academy videos thing,

but she told me, "Oh, no, no, it has exercises."

So I was really drawn to the exercises.

Back then they had to get either seven in a row

or 10 in a row right to level up.

And I was like, this is how we learn everything.

So primarily I didn't have computers back then.

I used it initially for extra credit.

But I continue to use it to this day.

It's my primary source of practice problems for students.

I use others, but it's my primary source.

And I love the fact that students can go at their own pace.

They're not, it really allows them to learn

what they want at their level.

And it provides such good data for me as a teacher

to decide when to intervene, what to intervene,

what trends there are, things like that.

- Very cool.

And so obviously you could probably give

an entire three hour lecture on how to set up Khan Academy

during normal times.

- I really could. (laughs)

- (laughs) The times we live in are very abnormal

all of a sudden.

If you are an educator out there, a middle school teacher

who is struggling to get with remote learning

basically yesterday and the district is saying, "Hey, you've

"got to roll something out for your students."

Obviously number one, our hearts go out to you.

But number two, what kind of like really concrete tips

would you give to that educator

who wants to get started immediately?

- Okay, first of all, I'm very fortunate,

my students are conditioned on how to use Khan Academy.

And I know it's scary to, "Oh my God,

"how am I gonna start with something new?"

So my recommendation is to go through some exercises

as a student (mumbles)

answer them yourself,

but make sure they are review exercises.

Start with something that the kids would know.

Start small, assign a few skills for them

and then just at that point, dive in,

meaning you assign it to them.

You tell them, "Here, go do this by Friday,"

and let them work and then take a look at the data

that comes in, take a look at what students

are working on.

Are they getting them correct or are they not?

So you wanna start small

because you don't wanna overwhelm the kids

with a bunch of stuff, which is why I think

for right now it would be good to start with review.

But then once you get started,

make sure to look at all the reports,

try to understand it's, I know it's so hard

to see the forest through the trees.

But that would be my big piece of advice.

And here's where I'm gonna give you a shout out, Jeremy.

A few weeks ago you did a workshop

and you talked about adding.

It was, once you add yourself as a coach

to your own account.

And I think that was actually something

I had never thought to do

considering the amount of time I've spent using Khan.

And by doing that I started seeing the same notifications

that the students would see.

You know, here's something your teacher assigned you.

I started getting email notifications.

So you kind of by adding yourself as a coach

to your own learner side of the account,

'cause every account can be a learner and a coach account,

it really kind of helped me understand,

I already kind of knew what they saw

but it really let me, it kind of put it in my face

to see what the students are seeing

when I assign them things.

- Very cool.

So just to recap those three main steps,

it sounds like number one,

just start searching around Khan Academy,

playing the role of a student.

What does it feel like to look at a video?

What does it feel like to do an exercise?

Get some hints.

Once you see one that you're really excited about,

maybe just start by assigning a single assignment at a time

just to sort of dip your toes in the water

and get your students feeling comfortable

and then to really understand what it looks like

from the student lens, come down to your student section,

get your class code, and then under your learner home,

you can find the section called teachers at the very bottom

and add yourself to your own classroom.

You'll now see those notifications that Shalom talked about.

So you understand exactly what it feels like

to be in your students' shoes.

- Yeah, and the other thing too is in this time

that we're in the videos tend to take a little longer.

I would just start at first with the exercises.

Yeah, this is just practical advice

so that you can quickly see, "Oh, is this something

"I'd want my students doing?"

And if it is right at the top of the screen,

if you pick an exercise right now,

can you just pick one and show everybody

how they can assign it to their students

right from the top of the screen?

- Yeah, tell me like a common skill you might be teaching

in your classroom right now, Shalom

if we were back in school.

- Well this time of year, I'm doing some geometry

with my advanced class.

So if you go to seventh grade geometry.

So let's just go to Area of a Circle, second one there.

- So click the practice button.

- So you're in the student view.

The student have to answer seven questions

and you say, "Wait a minute,

"I really like this question up here."

So at the top there's assigned to, all right,

you can assign it to multiple classes,

you can assign it to individual students

as long as it's for one class only.

If you have multiple classes, you're just gonna assign it

to every student in the class.

I prefer to do different questions

or you can also assign the same questions to everybody

different questions the way I go.

And then you can set a due date.

Now this will come up on their learner dashboard.

But this right here will not come up on Google classroom.

That's something teachers, I know you can link your class

to Google classrooms to get your roster into Khan Academy,

but assignments don't automatically go out

to Google classroom.

And I'm hoping that they are working on changing that

in the future.

- Yeah, I'll just mention on that point,

if you ever have feedback for us about something

you'd love to see in the product,

just go right up to your name

in the upper right hand corner,

click the help button and then come to the section called

report a problem and say, "Hey, I've got

"a really great feature idea

"that would make things much, much better."

I'll actually paste this in to the chat section

so you can let us know if you have problems

or ideas you want us to consider.

Okay, so that is sort of getting started

with checking it out.

What are some of the challenges that you anticipate

the teachers will face in the next few weeks, Shalom?

I know we have a lot of things on our shoulders right now,

but if you think about Khan Academy in particular,

where do you see new teachers you run into issues

and how can they sort of preempt those best they can?

- Okay.

My biggest challenge with Khan Academy

has always been getting students

to buy into the growth mindset aspect of it.

You know, it's not just, "Here's five problems,

"do them, great, you got four wrong,

"let's move on to the next topic."

It's really designed to have the kids work

until they show levels of proficiency.

So two things that I make all my students and parents do

at the beginning of the year

is I make them watch the, "You Can Learn Anything Video".

And also there's about a five, six minute or so Ted talk

by Angela Lee Duckworth on grit.

So it's kind of to get them set.

And by the way, she talks about how

she was a seventh grade teacher and how perseverance

and all these things to get students in the mindset

of you're not gonna get everything right.

You're gonna make mistakes along the way

and that it's okay as long as you keep going.

Those are the two things I think that

are the biggest challenges that I've had.

And I've had some tough times,

especially in my earlier years

with parents complaining about

how frustrated their child is.

But since I've started doing that,

I've gotten much better appreciation from the parents

and from the students that struggling is okay.

I always say, "Why is it okay to be terrible

"when you first play an instrument?"

I mean, you don't see somebody pick up the flute

and they're playing it and they sound great.

They sound awful, right?

And why is it not acceptable in math to be bad

at something at first?

So that's my first thing.