Salman Khan has taken the classroom made it interesting and engaging as well as completely virtual. It isn't that he has completely invented a new idea, although. What Khan has done is simply take all the talk that has been going around the education field and done something tangible with it. As an analyst at a hedge fund in Boston, Khan began to videotape lessons and put them on YouTube for his cousins that lived in New Orleans; they said they began to "prefer him more on YouTube than in person." Why is this? Well the idea is OBVIOUS. Now, his cousins could pause, rewind, review, any and all of the lessons on their own time and at their own pace of learning. All thanks to self-paced math lessons. Even better it is all free and not for profit. Anyone can benefit from the Khan academy.
I love this opportunity because new concepts and lessons aren't easy to pick up and learn right away, especially with so much other environmental factors that can occur within a classroom setting, including a possible domineering teacher breathing down the necks of the students waiting for them to learn the lesson. Without realizing really what he was doing, Khan began to gain notoriety and his lessons took off because of his apparent like-able attitude and demeanor as well as the receptiveness he had to ideas from those watching the videos. What this now does is takes the lecture time out of the classroom. Teachers now assign the videos for homework than have the students bring in their work for class. This vastly increases the value of student-teacher face-to-face time, because instead of feeling distanced from the students, the teachers are able to help them in more meaningful ways.
One of the great points Khan makes is in a typical classroom, after a test the class moves on to the next topic. This begins to snowball and happen very rapidly which than exploits any gaps that a student may have had in learning the previous lesson because the TRADITIONAL model, what we should be moving away from, penalizes experimentation and failure but does not expect mastery. I love Khan's message: Encourage experimentation AND expect mastery. He gets the go ahead from someone we all know: Bill Gates, who shares the stage with him in this video near the end and we can just hear the teaching verbiage oozing out: Motivation, feedback, collaboration, continuity as well as teacher/student driven learning. It is something we can't afford to ignore nor can we argue isn't useful, but rather we must start accepting the changes now because they have already begun to happen. Get on board for the revolution of education via technology. (This video is a podcast from TedTalk.)
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