Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Khan Academy

Khan Academy
The Khan Academy was founded as a nonprofit organization by Salman Khan in 2006. He began the organization after creating math videos to tutor his cousins in New Orleans while he was in Boston. It is a website where anyone can access lessons on subjects such as Math, Science, Economics and Finance, History, and Art History for free. These lessons are in video form created mostly by Khan. After the lessons there are problems to assess the knowledge learned. These problems provide immediate feedback for correctness, and the site also rewards badges for doing well. Here is a video of Salman Khan on TED in 2011.



Pros
There are many positive aspects to the Khan Academy. It is a great supplement to subjects, especially math, that students are having trouble in. The more times a student is presented a lesson by different approaches, the more likely they are to understand the lesson. This student in the Caribbean was at the bottom of her math class and was recommended the Khan Academy by her mother. She used it to help her pass her Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exam (CAPE) in Pure Mathematics. The Khan Academy is also an opportunity for students to explore a subject further than their grade level. Todd Borden, a parent and high school teacher, wrote as a guest in the student newspaper of Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, CA, "I don’t believe it will be possible for teachers, or administrators, or school boards, or state boards, or colleges to tell students what they need to know and when they will learn it anymore."
Teachers can use the Khan Academy in their classroom and track students' progress in the lessons. This would be beneficial to know where each student is in their learning and at which lessons they had the most difficulty.
Khan Academy is great for preschoolers, too. Watch this video of a four-year old using Khan Academy.



Cons
While the Khan Academy has many benefits, it definitely has some weaknesses, too. Tony Bates, a consultant in e-learning and distance education, presents a criticism in his critique of the Khan Academy.
"As someone who struggles with math, the Khan Academy would seem perfect for me. My problem though is I don’t know where to begin. Just jumping at random into a video suddenly makes me aware that I need lots of prior knowledge before I can understand this video, but there’s no help on that. Also, where’s the feedback? If I still don’t understand after watching the video several times and doing the exercises, what do I do?"
In Sal Khan's intro video on the Khan Academy homepage, he states that teachers have told him that they are assigning the videos for homework and have the students work the problems in class that they normally would have assigned for homework. This sounds like a great idea, but it cannot become widespread use until there is equal access to technology for all students. Even if a public school system puts a tablet or laptop in the hands of every student, all students still do not have Internet access at home.
Another downside of using the Khan Academy is that there are glitches in technology that cause it not to work at times. When I first tried to access some of the video lessons, the website was down and it stayed down for almost two hours. As with all technology use in the classroom, it's great when it works but there always needs to be a backup plan.

In conclusion, I believe that the Khan Academy is a useful tool for education. I do not believe it should replace the classroom teacher. There is much to be said about face-to-face learning and discussion for a student with their teacher and their peers. I think it is a good supplement to classroom teaching and would provide excellent remedial help. From it's website, many of the success stories were from adult learners who needed to brush up on their math skills before returning to college. The Khan Academy is another resource for the motivated learner to expand their opportunities in learning with technology.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Search Engine Review

search engines
Search engines are a very useful tool, but not all are created equal. I will review the following search engines for this post: WolframAlpha, Bing, Duckduckgo, Dogpile, Yahoo!, and Yandex.
1. WolframAlpha
WolframAlpha is a search engine for educational use. I took the tour on it's website and found that is is a "computational knowledge engine" that "computes exact answers." Being a future math teacher, I find it useful that it can compute answers to mathematical problems. Also, WolframAlpha does not have ads, which makes it even more beneficial for educational use.
2. Bing
One of the differentiating factors of Bing is that you can earn rewards for your searches. Rewards are earned in a range of amounts for different searches, the rewards build up over time, and then they can be redeemed for prizes such as coupons, sweepstakes entries, and gift cards. My favorite is the $5 Amazon gift card for 475 reward credits. Of course, Bing must have ads in order to provide these rewards.
3. Duckduckgo
Duckduckgo has the slogan "Search anonymously. Find instantly.". This search engine does not track your searches from topic to topic. This is beneficial because you will not be bombarded with ads of links in the margins based on previous searches.
4. Dogpile
Dogpile is a search engine that produces results by searching within other search engines. Dogpile uses Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex to find it's results. By using this search engine, you can search within three different search engines at the same time.
5. Yahoo!
Yahoo! is a search engine like Google. It provides users with email ability, streaming news, and it even has links on its homepage to the top ten trending searches. Yahoo! is also powered by ads so deciphering the search results can be difficult sometimes.
6. Yandex
Yandex is a search engine run by a Russian company. It is one of the top five search engines in the world and number one in Russia. It's homepage reminded me of Google because it has its own email and images, but the best feature I found was the translate link. The translate link can translate to and from in 36 languages. This would definitely be helpful in education.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Plagiarism

prevent plagiarism
Plagiarism is not a new issue, but with the increased use of technology in education, the ability to plagiarize has grown significantly. Therefore, educating students on what constitutes plagiarism and how to prevent it, is key. I think students should be taught early that when they use someone else's work, they need to give credit to the author. They should be taught that this is done to respect other people's work and that they should expect the same for their work. If students are taught about plagiarism and the correct way to give credit where it is due from the first time they do research for an essay or project in elementary school, then they will have a good foundation on how to prevent plagiarism. This will help them in their higher education where they will be doing much more research.