Learning Styles-Kahn Academy humanising education
Salman Khan talk at TED 2011
The future of learning from The Kahn Academy who provides free invaluable education to kids.
I know - 2011 seems a while ago to only now share a review of the Ted Talk however; being a fan of learning, I could NOT not on-share this wonderful academy and mission of Salman Khan.
Salman Khans TED talk shares the wonderful ‘accident’ by a hedge analyst recording math lessons for his cousins and how that has led to an amazing breakthrough in humanising education and accelerating classroom learning through video lessons.
“My cousins actually liked me more in video than in person”. Not because of what you think but because his cousins could replay parts of the video, and retry whenever they needed to without feeling like they were inconveniencing him.
Teaching has become an inconvenience to teachers, parents and students...an interruption to learning in some cases itself.
The Khan academy provides video lessons for students so they can learn at their own pace, outside of school time so that time with the teacher is interactive, focused on the needs of the kids and playful.
Teachers can also leverage the Kahn Academys great lessons accompanied with excellent data categorisation, tagging for a profound and a nice analytics dashboard. I know my sister - a primary school teacher would relish the time to serve kids learning so aptly. Do you know of anyone in Australia using the Kahn Academy? I’d love to hear if you do?
The opportunity for play is multiplied for kids because time also moves from ‘getting through curriculum’ to how can we best use our time in the class together. The kids actually ‘play’ the videos over, and stop and interact with them at their control. That kind of empowerment is a wonderful trigger opening up the mind. I also do love that it’s creates a learning community and invites other students to become mentors to their peers. Champion of champions program starting young!!
On the other hand I am a bit reticent towards the concept of learning outside of school in addition to school time because when do kids ever get time to play? Will this be used to ‘over saturate’ kids with information rather than learning through play and experience?
Probably not given the Kahn Academy puts value on “ student to valuable human time with teacher”. Plus they are developing ways to gamify the experience. No wonder Bill Gates is such a big advocate. Watch the Ted talk and let me know what you think? I’m undecided and going to keep my mind open.
thanks,
Stephanie