A lot of people, specially us teachers and people who feel identified with Humanities more than with hard Sciences, have struggled at least once with mathematical problems. As we were still in school, educational institutions and teachers were unable to do much for the students who needed longer time to understand a given task and were forced to continue with the next one, leaving a bunch of their students frustrated for not understanding and at disadvantage among their peers who managed to reach the objectives in time.
In 2004, Salman Khan made a huge discovery. He started posting math tutorials in YouTube for his nephews, as he was tutoring them from a long distance. Shortly after, other users of the popular video site started posting him comments and thanking him, because his videos helped their children understand mathematics. At that point he realized that he had found a great teaching tool still not fully exploited.
Now in 2012, there are more than 3,400 videos that can be found in Khanacademy.org along with math exercises generators displayed in a game-like fashion to make them more engaging. Teachers can tell their students to do all the exercising they need at home at at their own pace and use the time at school for experimentation, humanizing the classroom.
This system is already being applied in different schools in USA, and, hopefully, we can expect to find it in a school near us soon. As Bill Gates said, this is the future of education. Wouldn’t you agree?
I've watched many tutorials on Youtube. They're not only useful when teaching Math, but also when teaching any other kind of topic. I've learned how to pronounce words, how to do nail art, how to do new hairstyles or cook something new, History, Science, and a lot of other things. I think that Youtube is very useful for us as teachers, but unfortunately it is still considered as a source of pure entertainment.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've seen, there are lots of people who have also learned a lot of things from this website. If we have been able to learn from Youtube, why can't our students too?
I find this a very helpful tool for learning and we should certainly integrate this tool that is so used currently by almost everyone around the worl, this is not only a young people thing anymore, but we should keep in mind that they are much more "into" this cyber-culture, so it would be very useful to embrace that truth and use in in favour of learning. I do think that this cannot be mistaken with somekind of replacement for the role of teacher-student relationship. I strongly believe that in order to achieve an effective learning process the "skin" is fundamental (don't get me wrong here, I'm sure some of you will agree with me that we need to directly interact with other people)because there's also a very important point in what Salma Khan says in his talk "this does not so all the math teaching" we should use it as an strategy to help students go their own pace and spend time in class the way Gonzalo points out so well in this entry.
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