Khan Academy Kids

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Hello Everyone! For Week 4’s Technology Resource, I have decided to focus on Khan Academy Kids. Khan Academy was actually the tool I used to study for the math portion of my GRE.

What Is Khan Academy Kids?

Khan Academy Kids is an award-winning educational app for young learners ages two to seven. The app engages kids in core subjects like early literacy, reading, writing, language, and math, while encouraging creativity and building social-emotional skills. Khan Academy Kids is a subsect of Khan Academy and is partnered with Super Simple, Bellwether, National Head Start Association (NHSA), and National Geography Young Explorer.

Key Features of Khan Academy Kids:

A key feature of Khan Academy Kids as described in their own introduction video is the “ability to set Course and Unit Mastery Goals. These learning targets aim to provide a clear path for your student's learning journey as they reach mastery of their content.” Khan Academy Kids aims to empower not only the teacher/educators but also students. Allowing educators to assign videos, articles, exercises, quizzes, unit tests, or course mastery in a manner that highlights the flexibility and individual tailoring (to an extent)

Pros:

FREE!: Khan Academy Kids is an entirely free resource and is easily accessible with internet access. Variety: Khan Academy Kids offers a wide variety of subjects and topics, from math and art to humanities and finance. New content is regularly being added.
Pacing: Due to the online and virtual nature, Khan Academy Kids allows for students and teachers to choose the pace of the course. Students can fast forward, rewind, repeat videos and work on tasks at their own pace.

Cons:

Virtual: While the virtual nature of Khan Academy Kids allows for certain levels of independence and freedom not available in traditional classrooms, the virtual nature also removes the immediate and important interactions that exist in reality. Questions that come up during assignments or tasks cannot be immediately answered as help as impacts the ability to gauge whether a student actually does understand assignments through informal assessment.
One-size fits all: However, Khan Academy chooses to teach the subject is how the student is taught, which may not be what is best for the student. Unless the educator is independently uploading videos. With this as well the creative processes and innovation that naturally occur in problem solving are not being inspired as the courses are only designed to instruct.

Final Thoughts:

Like all virtual resources, there are faults that exist. Some parents and educators find the platform to be confusing and difficult to navigate and lack vastly when compared to the traditional classroom. However, as a supplementary tool Khan Academy has been showcased to be extremely beneficial.

References

Khan Academy Kids. (n.d.). Khan Academy Kids. https://learn.khanacademy.org/khan-academy-kids/

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