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TEACHING RESOURCES INFORMATION

TITLE OF TEACHING RESOURCE

Khan Academy

DATE OF PRODUCTION

2012

WEBSITE OF THE PRODUCT

http://www.khanacademy.org/about

TYPE OF PRODUCT

Online course, Web Site/Portal

LEVEL OF CHEMISTRY KNOWLEDGE

Basic, Medium

PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH

Cooperative learning

SUBJECT AREA

Fundamental Chemistry, Life Chemistry, Materials Science, Industrial Chemistry

LANGUAGE/S OF TEACHING RESOURCES

English

DESCRIPTION

• The prerequisites
The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. It is a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.
All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.
• The contents
This library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer.
• The aims
As the objectives I see support for students and chemistry teachers; and assistance in teaching practice. The website provides useful materials that would take large amounts of time to be shown during classes otherwise. I think the authors want the pupils to provide results themselves. Pupils will not only get information, but they will have to work with the information and data they receive from the experiments. Pupils must work carefully and follow the rules written on the website. They can see the procedure of basic experiments. These experiments are able to be performed at home.
• Task Description
Every time you work on a problem or watch a video, the Khan Academy remembers what you've learned and where you're spending your time. They keep all of this data private but expose powerful statistics to each user and their coaches. You get at-a-glance information about everything you've been learning and whether or not you've been hitting your goals.So this is the best way how to motivate people to do, what they don’t know yet.
• How to use it in class
Teachers and coaches can access all of their students' data. You can get a summary of class performance as a whole or dive into a particular student's profile to figure out exactly which topics are problematic. The class profile lets coaches glance at their dashboard and quickly figure out how to best spend their time teaching.
They have put a lot of energy into making sure that the Khan Academy empowers teachers by giving them access to the data they should've had for years. You'll know instantly if a student is struggling in multiplying fractions...or if she hit a streak and is now far ahead of the class

COMMENTS

• Points of strength
These web sites are great due to their graphic design and website visibility. It can be seen that the site is intended for elementary school students. Also videos are clear, instructive, in good quality, in funny way. It can be used also by parents for their small kids.
• Points of weakness
There is nothing as point of weakness. These pages are great done by professionals.
• Scientific reliability
I think, all is perfect explained and students are led by questions to make the best results. Every work must be followed by session, where all pupils discuss the results and the teacher must correct mistakes. It is made by oil company, so there is one section focused on oil.
• Pedagogic value
Every teacher can use this web site and teachers can consult results together. Very useful materials. Students have an access on these web sites at home, so it is very useful. The knowledge map shows all of our challenges, skills, and concepts. You can zoom in and out and pan around all the different skills and challenges, just like on a normal map. You can start working anywhere on the map, and the Khan Academy will suggest the best skills for you to work on. We'll even remind you when you need a review.

Comments about this Publication

Your comments are welcome

Date: 2013.05.11

Posted by Carla Morais (Portugal)

Message: 1. Is the teaching resource described useful for you? Why?
According the information available Khan Academy was formed in 2006 by an MIT engineer, Salman Khan. It is a repository of free contents in the field of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, economics, among others.
Today there are about 4,000 videos, 370 exercises and 225 million given lessons for the various levels of education, following the American curriculum.
No doubt that this repository of free content, with scientific quality, pedagogy and aesthetics may be very useful for teachers and students. As teachers do not always have the opportunity to develop videos and animations that support the curriculum, they can use this repository in order to integrate those resources in their teaching practice.

2. Do you think it can increase the students’ interest toward chemistry? Why?
In this digital age research has proven that digital educational resources have great potential to enthuse students increasingly using image and movement. The motivation, which is intended to foster in young people, as well as being associated with the appreciation of learning and recognition of the interest of the contents. The Khan Academy is simple to use and intuitive, and is also compatible with iPad, the application and its resources are totally free. All of this can be converted into extrinsic motivation for students enabling them, thus a better managing geographic and temporal access to the knowledge.

3. Do you think it can help the students to understand better and faster? Why?
We believe that this kind of resources can help the students to understand better and faster because the visualization of the lessons is complemented with the possibility of exercising, also presented in a more graphical and interactive model. And there is also the possibility of monitoring with the statistics of the performed work, the level of responses and the presentation of a \"knowledge map\". To all of this is added the respect for the learning pace of each student, that if he wants, might view the resources the number of times that he might consider useful, and build personalized learning paths.

4. Do you think it propose an innovative didactic approach? Why?
The teaching methods are a topic constantly discussed but for further changes that may be implemented, the enthusiasm of those who study is one of the most important factors to take into consideration. However, it is clearly that teachers and educators can find in this repository of free contents, materials to help their students to better understand the study subjects, and based on these materials, teachers can provide their students new learning experiences either in the classroom, either implementing e-learning and/or b-learning dynamics that complement and extend the classroom.

Date: 2013.02.04

Posted by Krchová (Czech Republic)

Message: This source deals with important terms for teaching chemistry at a high school. By a playful way it provides theoretical attitudes with the help of updated data and it also integrates various aspects of teaching chemistry. Students can make use of our extensive video library, interactive challenges, and assessments from any computer with access to the web. Using of this source provides you with a wide range of opportunities. It is clear from the concept of the web page that it was created with an intention to attract an interest of students about chemistry.
It provides simple and exact answers for many current questions and tries to provide a support for high school students and to help teachers when searching for a source to simplify their work. It is mainly kinds of didactic application and demo versions which help also when creating a new curriculum and are motivation for young teachers. This web page uses new technologies to motivate students and simplify an access of teachers to many topics in chemistry and helps them to integrate students into school educational programs.
These new technologies increase an interest of a young generation for chemistry and science but it is important to know how to deal with experimental part of teaching with a traditional one. Teaching should not be only about using new technologies but they should be in harmony with traditional ones.

This a multivariate resource, consisting of a set of options that integrate aspects related to chemistry teaching. The exploitation of this resource provides a wide range of possibilities. Through an easy to use menu, it is great organized into needed themes that address diversified contents with relevant scientific information that can be used either in the context of the classroom (exploration of the periodic table, information about chemical elements, safety rules, laboratory activities, among others), either as a research tool for individual work.

This resource can be used by teachers because it presents some issues with didactic and pedagogical interest and it can also be very interesting for students because it allows access to applications, demos and exploration of contents with curricular relevancy.

National Reports on successful experiences to promote lifelong learning for chemistry The national reports on chemistry successful experiences to promote lifelong learning for chemistry are now available on the related section of the project portal. The reports presents examples of successful experiences in the partner countries and the results of testing of ICT resources with science teachers.