Sunday, April 17, 2011

Blog Assignment 12

Watch Salman Khan's video called "Let's use video to reinvent education".  After you have watched this video, answer the following questions in a blog post.
1. Who exactly is Salman Khan?
2. How can Mr. Khan's program be used effectively in your future classroom?
3. What advantages and disadvantages do you see for using this type of program in the classroom?
4. At the rate that education is becoming more involved with technology around the world, do you believe that education will eventually turn into a "global, one world classroom"?


Salman Khan

Salman Khan is the founder of "The Khan Academy."  The Khan Academy is a free education platform which contains over 2200 educational videos for different subjects but mainly focuses on mathematics and the sciences.  I believe that Khan's program can be used in classrooms to allow the students to think ahead of time about the topics that can be discussed in class.  As Khan was saying in the video, one teacher told him that his videos were being assigned the night before, and the teacher was taking the next day in class to work on the homework assignments that they would have given the kids.  I believe that it could be used effectively in my future classroom; by allowing my students to look over the information in the videos beforehand, that they would be prepared for the next day. 
There are advantages and disadvantages that can be seen in using this program.  There is the fact that students would be going at their own pace in this program.  In some ways that is a good thing, and some ways a bad thing.  It allows the students to fully grasp the subject before moving on, but it can also be seen as that the students do not really have to work on it at that current time, and they would proceed to procrastinate for as long as possible.  An advantage that I see to this program is that the teacher can check on each child's progress, and offer help to that student in that area.  In my opinion, I do not think it is even possible to comprehend a "global, one world classroom".  It seems that there would be many problems and questions that would arise from this situation.  Questions such as: Who would teach the students in a "global, one world classroom"?

2 comments:

  1. Wow, something like this would be so helpful. Math and science have not been my forte and watching a video before completing assignments would prompt me to ask the right questions instead of experiencing the shock of information overload. I like that these videos can be revisited too. I hated that in high school there was so little time to go over math problems, ask the right questions, practice, take notes and remember that for a unit test in two weeks. These videos would be so helpful, no doubt the future of education is the global classroom.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like this idea for using his academy! I have seen these video series before, and I was also impressed. I think it would be great to let students build their own videos explaining how to do a problem.

    ReplyDelete