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One thing I've seen in the Khan Academy videos is that they focus on one small slice of information at a time. This is often hard to do in the classroom. While

by saundby 15y ago

One thing I've seen in the Khan Academy videos is that they focus on one small slice of information at a time. This is often hard to do in the classroom. While I tend to lean toward the "cover less in class, but get better understanding of what is covered" side of the spectrum in my teaching, I'm still often giving the equivalent of 2-3 Khan video descriptions in each class. Personally, I refer my students to the Khan Academy videos in class as well as other online resources. They don't much for many students, but for others they make the subject matter click. IMO they're a boon, as are the other online resources as well as abebooks and Powells where great textbooks from the past are available for less than lunch money as alternate resources.

garyrichardson 15y ago
Yes! Teachers need to start trusting modern tools to help them teach. I'm married to a teacher and have 8-10 teachers that I socialize with on a regular basis. Whenever I start talking about charter schools, Khan, statistical analysis of grades, etc, they always roll their eyes "oh, that's just too much work for me to do" or "it's a bad idea to slot someone as a 'visual' learning" or "not everyone can handle being self guided" etc, but they always miss the point. The majority of teachers are stuck in their ways. For 100 years (longer?), the education system hasn't really changed at all. The addition of computers has been more like 'faster horses' than 'cars'. Highschool/gradeschool teachers aren't really that effective at learning new things. Sure, there's professional development, but that's the equivalent of HR presentations on sexual harassment. In the last 5 years, we've had a revolution of the available teaching tools and an institution that is resistent to change/improvement. A friend of mine is working on a pilot project at one school where everyone gets an iPad. I feel this is a huge waste of resources, since they are just modeling their current process but with an iPad. It's basically being used in place of handing out photocopies. It's a huge waste. Technology should be leveraged and used to evolve so we can do things we couldn't before, not be an expensive drop in replacement. If you have kids, ask them if their teachers forbid the use of wikipedia, or embrace it as an imperfect information source. Has a class ever worked on updating a wikipedia article? Ask them if they've ever had a skype video conference with an expert from a particular field. Ask them if their teachers include kahn videos as supplement resources. Or do they watch VHS tapes of PBS recordings during class time like I did 15 years ago? These are the things I expect every classroom should be doing today.

by saundby 15y ago

garyrichardson 15y ago

Yes! Teachers need to start trusting modern tools to help them teach. I'm married to a teacher and have 8-10 teachers that I socialize with on a regular basis. Whenever I start talking about charter schools, Khan, statistical analysis of grades, etc, they always roll their eyes "oh, that's just too much work for me to do" or "it's a bad idea to slot someone as a 'visual' learning" or "not everyone can handle being self guided" etc, but they always miss the point. The majority of teachers are stuck in their ways. For 100 years (longer?), the education system hasn't really changed at all. The addition of computers has been more like 'faster horses' than 'cars'. Highschool/gradeschool teachers aren't really that effective at learning new things. Sure, there's professional development, but that's the equivalent of HR presentations on sexual harassment. In the last 5 years, we've had a revolution of the available teaching tools and an institution that is resistent to change/improvement. A friend of mine is working on a pilot project at one school where everyone gets an iPad. I feel this is a huge waste of resources, since they are just modeling their current process but with an iPad. It's basically being used in place of handing out photocopies. It's a huge waste. Technology should be leveraged and used to evolve so we can do things we couldn't before, not be an expensive drop in replacement. If you have kids, ask them if their teachers forbid the use of wikipedia, or embrace it as an imperfect information source. Has a class ever worked on updating a wikipedia article? Ask them if they've ever had a skype video conference with an expert from a particular field. Ask them if their teachers include kahn videos as supplement resources. Or do they watch VHS tapes of PBS recordings during class time like I did 15 years ago? These are the things I expect every classroom should be doing today.