Khan Academy
Recommend on Google+
This has been around a while now but I have only really started to use it recently. The potential for The Khan Academy to offer education to all, as a public good, rather than an exclusive right of the rich or ‘right postcode’ is vast:
The combination of broadband, cheaper laptops and iPad-style tablet computers is putting online teaching services into the mainstream.
The Khan Academy has thousands of step-by-step videos explaining topics in subjects such as maths and science. It’s also interactive, allowing individual students to test themselves again and again and then chart their own progress. On tablet devices, students can write directly on to touch screens.
It’s a deceptively simple concept - YouTube meets trigonometry meets an interactive whiteboard - with 85 million videos downloaded so far.
It’s free to users, but has some very wealthy friends. Bill Gates has hailed the Khan Academy as the “start of a revolution”. He says that he uses the bite-sized tutorials himself and with his children - he has donated $5.5m so far. Google has put in $2m and Sean O’Sullivan - the entrepreneur credited with coining the phrase “cloud computing” - has donated $5m through his foundation.
Read more: “How the Khan Academy is changing the rules of education”.
The videos allow pupils from anywhere in the world to access tutorials; and whilst they won’t replicate the creative/dynamic teacher-pupils interaction, they do allow pupils to consolidate their learning at their own pace.
Watch one of the videos below on Housing Prices; or on why gravity gets so dense near big objects.
blog comments powered by Disqus
ECONOMICS TEACHER RESOURCE NEWSLETTER
Join over 6,000 other Economics Teachers in the UK and around the world who receive the tutor2u regular Economics Resource Email Newsletter. Get special offers, first news of latest resources, teaching ideas, conferences and workshops + loads of great ideas for teaching economics from our blog authors.
