Khan Academy: A Student's Guide to Mastering Learning

For students who thrive in a structured classroom environment, the idea of additional learning outside of school might seem like an overwhelming prospect. However, supplementing your education with resources like Khan Academy can significantly enhance your understanding and academic performance. This guide will help you navigate Khan Academy and maximize its potential to boost your learning journey.

What is Khan Academy?

Khan Academy is a non-profit, online educational platform founded in 2005 by Salman Khan with the core belief that "you can learn anything." It provides free educational materials to students and learners worldwide. The platform offers a vast library of courses and lessons covering a wide range of subjects, including math, science, computer science, history, economics, and life skills.

Why Choose Khan Academy?

Khan Academy's learning approach is designed to cater to individual needs. The platform recognizes that every learner is unique and progresses at their own pace. This is reflected in its dynamic learning experience, which offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard. The goal is to ensure that learners not only gain exposure to the material but also build strong foundations and develop a clear understanding of the concepts.

One of the most significant advantages of Khan Academy is that it's entirely free for all learners. This removes financial barriers to education and makes quality learning resources accessible to everyone, anytime, and anywhere.

Getting Started with Khan Academy

Creating an Account

If you're new to Khan Academy, the first step is to create an account. Simply click on the "Sign Up" button on the website or app.
Follow the prompts to enter your information and create your account.

Exploring Courses

Once logged in, you'll be greeted by a wide array of subjects.
Click on the "Courses" tab at the top left corner of the site to explore the available subject categories.
Browse through the subjects that interest you.
Click on a subject to access the available units or topics within it.

Navigating Within a Subject

Within a subject, you'll find a list of units or lessons.
Inside the selected unit, you'll find various resources, including videos, articles, practice exercises, and quizzes.

Maximizing Your Khan Academy Experience

1. Setting Achievable Goals

In education, setting goals can significantly contribute to your success. Begin your Khan Academy journey by defining achievable goals and establishing a consistent practice schedule. It's important to remember that it's perfectly acceptable to adjust and alter your goals as you progress. If you're new to goal-setting, start with something that aligns with your schedule and interests. For example, aim to complete one lesson per day or dedicate a specific amount of time each week to studying a particular subject.

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2. Effective Note-Taking

Unlike traditional classroom settings where teachers may move at a pace that's either too fast or too slow for effective note-taking, Khan Academy's videos offer the flexibility to pause, rewind, and fast-forward as needed. This allows you to jot down key information at your own pace and ensures that you don't miss any crucial details.

To take effective notes:

Pause frequently: Don't hesitate to pause the video whenever you encounter a key concept or explanation.
Summarize in your own words: Rephrasing the information in your own words can help solidify your understanding.
Use abbreviations and symbols: Develop a system of abbreviations and symbols to speed up your note-taking process.
Review your notes regularly: Make it a habit to review your notes after each lesson to reinforce your learning.

3. Utilizing Community Resources

Khan Academy has a vibrant community filled with valuable assistance and insights from fellow learners. Take advantage of this resource by participating in discussions, asking questions, and sharing your own knowledge. You can find the comment section beneath videos and exercises, where you can engage in discussions with other learners.

4. Patience and Persistence

Learning is not always easy. It takes dedication and hard work to master new skills and subjects. Be patient with yourself and understand that progress takes time. By embarking on your Khan Academy journey, you're already making a positive impact on your education.

5. Personalizing Your Learning Experience

The best way to use Khan Academy is to tailor it to your individual needs and preferences. From kindergarten to the 14th grade, you can choose the level of content you wish to begin learning. You can customize your learning journey to match your preferred style, pace, and preferences.

Khan Academy believes in personalized learning and recognizes that every learner is unique and progresses at their own pace. Beyond the typical math, English, and science, Khan Academy's web of subjects and topics continues to grow and build off one another. You can continuously take your learning further, deeper, and wider.

6. Monitoring Your Progress

Khan Academy's dashboard allows you to monitor your progress and achievements. As you complete units, exercises, and quizzes, take a moment to celebrate your accomplishments and progress. This can help you stay motivated and engaged in your learning journey.

7. Adjusting the Pace

Adjust the pace of your learning by speeding up or slowing down videos to match your comprehension speed.

Khan Academy for Parents

Parents play a vital role in supporting their children's learning on Khan Academy. The platform offers tools and resources specifically designed for parents to monitor their child's progress and provide assistance when needed.

Getting Started as a Parent

Create or log into your Khan Academy parent account: If you don't already have one, create an account for yourself.
View your Parent Dashboard: Once you're logged in, you'll see Parent Dashboard.
Connect your children to your parent account: This allows you to monitor their progress and activity.
Have your child log in: Your child can then log in using the username and password you created for them, or through their existing login methods on their account.
Your child starts working on Khan Academy! Khan Academy offers a variety of material about a wide variety of subjects in 50+ languages! We have articles, videos, exercises, quizzes, unit tests, and more that your child can learn with. Your child can work independently, or via assignments you create for them on the Assignments tab of your Parent Dashboard.

Following Your Child's Progress

You can view your child’s progress on Khan Academy in 3 places:

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The Activity Overview Report on the Activity tab: Click on your child’s name to view their activity in the courses across Khan Academy. This includes work your child did at home and at school, broken down by Khan Academy course.
The Individual Student Report from the Activity tab: Click the person icon next to you child's name to be taken directly to their Learner Home. Here you'll see additional progress info, and if applicable, their Khanmigo Chat History and Khanmigo settings page.
Khanmigo: Khanmigo is our AI-powered tutor for learners, and also has a variety of tools built just for parents!

Khan Academy Kids

Khan Academy also offers a special app called Khan Academy Kids, designed for children ages 2-8. This app includes thousands of activities and books aligned with early learning standards.

Key Features of Khan Academy Kids

Adaptive Learning Path: Creates a sequence of activities by adjusting to your child's level.
Extensive Library: Offers a wide range of activities, books, and videos.
Leveling Feature: Allows you to select learning levels from Preschool through 2nd Grade.
Teacher Tools: Provides tools for teachers to use the app in the classroom.

How Children Use the App

From the home screen, students can choose to tap the big green button to start a personalized learning journey with Kodi the bear, or they can choose their own activities from the Library or character rooms. The Learning Path automatically cycles through topics like math, language arts, logic, and social-emotional development. The Learning Path surfaces content at a level that is appropriate for each student based on how they are doing in the app. If students get interrupted while playing on the Learning Path, they will automatically start at the next lesson upon returning to the app and pressing the play button.

Preparing for School with Khan Academy Kids

Khan Academy Kids can help students get ready for school by providing fun activities for learning letters, numbers, shapes, colors, social skills, and daily routines.

Availability

Khan Academy Kids is available as a mobile app on smartphones and tablets across multiple platforms, including Apple’s iOS App Store, Google Play, and Amazon. In addition, some Chromebooks with touchscreens and access to the Google Play store also work with the app.

Khan Academy for Teachers

With thousands of exercises, articles, and instructional videos covering topics from K-12 math to biology, grammar, computer science, history, and more-Khan Academy can be helpful for classrooms at all levels.

Getting Started as a Teacher

Make sure to select a Course when you create your class.
You can check out the courses our resources cover by clicking on the Explore menu in the top left corner of our site.
And you can always change or add an additional course to your class as well.

Finding Resources

Let’s say I’m an AP Physics 1 instructor teaching students about Newton’s laws. First, I would go to the AP®︎/College Physics 1 home page and scroll down until I see the unit that covers Newton’s laws. Next, I would browse the titles of the Learn and Practice resources for Newton’s laws.

Or perhaps my students have learned about Newton's laws and they are ready to do more practice problems to deepen their understanding.

Sometimes, you may want to assign a video or exercise from a different course or grade level than your official class course. Let’s say you’re a 7th-grade math teacher, for example, but your class is struggling with long division. In this case, you may want to rely on the search bar at the top left of the site to guide you to the appropriate resource.

Aligning with Standards

Perhaps you are looking for a resource aligned to a specific Common Core standard for mathematics. Next, click into the appropriate grade level. Use the left-hand panel to quickly jump to the appropriate standard strand. Scroll down until you find the exact standard you're looking for. You’ll see a preview of all the Khan Academy exercises aligned to that standard.

Khan Academy Districts

This guide is a technical resource for districts who are already Khan Academy Districts partners and are preparing to share their data with Khan Academy.

Setting Up Clever

First, ensure your district is set up on Clever.
Classes on Khan Academy are rostered as sections in Clever. Ensure that the sections in the SIS reflect the classes your district wants to roster for the current term.
Classes (called sections in Clever) can contain one primary teacher and up to nine co-teachers. This needs to be set up in your SIS to sync with Clever. Please note: co-teachers will not show up on all the Khan Academy Administrator reports. Co-teachers are not shown on the Progress Reports, or downloadable csv reports.
Student date of birth: Khan Academy has two levels of permissions for student accounts under FERPA and NY Section 2-d regulations. Students under 13 have limited permissions on discussion posts and computer science projects. Students over 13 do not have these limitations. Ensure all students have a date of birth in the SIS that is shared with Clever.
Ensure that students are enrolled in at least one section. Students must be enrolled in at least one section to activate their Khan Academy Districts account.
You will then receive an invitation from Khan Academy to begin sharing data. Below is a screenshot of a recommended sharing rule. Please only share data for sections (classes) that will be included in Khan Academy’s implementation for your district. When setting sharing rules in Clever, please ensure that elective classes like P.E., Art, Chorus, and Band are not included.

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