Khan Academy & Digital Nation

Kahn Academy

The life story of Salman Khan was impressive to say the least. It all started with him helping a family member with her math through YouTube.  It's amazing how quick his instruction spread. Bill Gates had a lot to do with it. Khan couldn't believe that Bill Gates was using his video to learn math.  It turns out Bill was just the start.  Kahn Academy is used by millions of people all over the world. The technique Khan uses is a flipped classroom design. 

The flipped classroom model of teaching flips the design of teaching and learning.  For classwork students attend a virtual lecture, podcast or watch a video at home the evening prior to the class, and then come to classroom the next day to do their homework. By flipping the two, students utilize their class time to work collaboratively with fellow students and instructors.   This model allows for hands on learning and instruction during the school day.   The instructor spends less time talking and more time doing. Students come to class prepared to ask questions and work together to find answers.

At CCV we use Khan Academy to help students prepare for college level math courses.  I can see this program working nicely in a flipped classroom.  Students watch videos and tutorials and answer questions at home.  The questions they get wrong, can then be revisited during class time the following day.  This program actually helps students work through missions. Once they master one mission they move onto the next.  It also has the capacity to report student learning information to instructors, to support classroom instruction or lesson planning.

Our Digital Nation

Technology is a part of day-to-day life in America and some children are introduced into it as early as infancy. We have baby monitors, video cameras, visions being broadcast on the ceiling and sounds being transmitted in many children’s nurseries. By preschool many of these children can play games on their parent’s phone.  Digital Nation suggests that technology and the internet are an addiction for many people all over the globe. 

Multitasking was a leading topic in Digital Nation. This video was produced 2010 I wonder if we as a society have gotten better over the past seven years multitasking with technology. MIT professors in this video suggest that our students are living in a short term world due to their constant technology multitasking. They say their student have trouble completing more than just a sentence or even reading a book. Many instructors no longer assign large novels as class work, because students don't read them.  

Virtual reality scares me. In this video people actually meet other people in virtual worlds and end up getting married. They consider their first dates the day they met in a room in virtual reality room.  Drones in our military are the same.  Military personal are sending bombs across the world virtually.  Killing many people while sitting in a desk chair.  There are reports that many of these drone drivers are suffering from PTSD due to their drone activities.

I am confident that our world as it relates to technology is going to change even more dramatically than it has in the past sentence years. I feel that in order to survive and thrive we will need to keep up with these changes.  As scary as some of these technology advances seem I can only imagine that we will see in the future.