Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that has a website that supplies a free online collection of thousands of video micro lectures in mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics and computer science. The organization highly relies on donations for funding; however they are backed by several giant companies.
Main Features
The main feature of this website is the video library which is a collection of academic videos made available to visitors of the site. The website also allows users to track their recent activity and progress on the website using a bar graph and measured “energy points.” Users can also earn achievement badges for completing proficiency quizzes in different content areas.
Level of Difficulty
The website is definitely user-friendly assuming you know how to navigate a simple website and required video plugins are updated. Users can become members of the website; however it does not prevent users from viewing the content. The website also allows users to comment on videos that are posted. To use this feature, users are required to create an account either with Google or Facebook.
Classroom Application
This is definitely a great tool to use for finding educational content and subject specific videos for teachers and students. The videos could be incorporated into the lecture or even used as a supplemental tool for homework. Because the website tracks student’s progress in a particular subject, it is a useful tool to inform them of their content deficiencies.
Conclusion
This tool is worth learning because it will take about 15 minutes to figure out the website. A majority of the time spend on the website is going to come from watching the videos and taking the assessments. I think that this could be a very instructional tool, especially in Biology, due to the nature of some topics that are tough to comprehend for students. Videos are helpful for explaining and visualizing topics, such as cellular replication, because it is on a scale that is too miniscule for the human eye.
This sounds like something I can definitely use as a math teacher. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThanks Rahila,
ReplyDeleteI'm always looking for sites to incorporate more videos and multimedia into social studies.
Are these videos created by the Khan academy or are they a collection of videos created by others?