Website Review: Khan Academy

By: Katelyn Baron, EC-SEAT Scholar

Khan Academy is an excellent, free tool for teachers and parents to use as instruction and practice for student’s math skills. The website's lessons and activities address all math standards and can be tailored to the needs of the individual. Lessons and activities are sorted by grade and by subject content. Within each section, a student can access videos of clear instructions, learn the material, practice the material, and show their mastery of the material by completing a quiz. This website could be used in a school setting and at home. Teachers could use the site to further a math lesson and to focus on the needs of their students in a particular content area. 
  

For the students, Khan Academy is a great tool for learning and mastering math skills. The website starts at early learning and ends with high school. Each student has a dashboard that shows the objects they are working on and includes a study plan which shows the areas that they need growth in. The tasks are self-paced and there are several accessibility options.

For the classroom teacher, Khan Academy is a means to focus math lessons for each individual. The classroom teacher can effortlessly create his/her virtual classroom and assign tasks that align with the student’s skills. They can track their students’ progress and see who is struggling in specific areas. The website allows the teacher to guide students to particular lessons but also permits them to have the freedom to explore other objectives within the content that they are working on.

After exploring a lot of the early learning math content, on the Khan Academy website, it was easy to tell that the site was not a developmentally appropriate practice. To fully understand the task and the website, students would have to know how to navigate the website and be able to read. The website is also not very engaging for young learners. Also, the badge system for a young learner would not be a good motivator. If the site included a game or some sort of fun activity at the end of a task, the student might find that more appealing.

When exploring the Khan Academy website, I came across many Big Ideas that were covered in each of the early math section. For example, in the counting section, there was a chart where the student had to fill in the missing number. In the Big Ideas of Early Mathematics book, they talk about how using a number chart can help students see number patterns and therefore make it easier for the chart to be filled in. While navigating through the different math sections in the early math, and other higher levels of math, I thought that many of the activities were just brushing the surface of the topic. Although the topic was covered, I didn’t think that many questions had the students really having to think about the problem. The questions seemed more straight forward, then abstract which would make the children contemplate the question and answer.

I also noticed that each section on the website was divided into smaller sections that built on one another. As a student progressed through the section, they were using their previous knowledge to make sense of how to steer through the higher levels of learning. In the Big Ideas of Early Mathematics book, I feel that they really focus on the foundational lessons and build upon those, only moving on when the students have excelled in the foundational skills. The way the site was designed, also showed the student how each area was really helping them complete different sections as well. A student may be working in the kindergarten section but is also accomplishing areas in different grades as well. I think that this would be motivating for students to see that they are completing higher-level problems while working on content that is applicable to their grade level.