Saturday, May 7, 2011

Let's teach maths the easy way!

A professor in biology forwarded me a cool video on teaching microrganism. I watched with excitement on how the subject was presented in an interesting way. It did not only helped me to understand the subject matter further but also gave me some ideas to use in my profession :)

Well, it turned out that they have even more of such tutorials covering other subjects as well.

The tutorials are simple and easy to follow. The facts are explained in detail and there are lots of examples to ensure clarity. The tutorials aree not only popular among students (viewing it to help them doing their homework!) but also among parents who need some information to assist their children with school work.

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization created in 2006, by Salman Khan.With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of over 2,310 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics.

Drawings are made with SmoothDraw. Khan eschewed a format that would involve a person standing by a whiteboard, desiring instead to present the content in a way akin to sitting next to someone and working out a problem on a sheet of paper: "If you're watching a guy do a problem [while] thinking out loud, I think people find that more valuable and not as daunting."

Offline versions of the videos have been distributed by not-for-profit groups to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While the Khan Academy's current content is mainly concerned with pre-college mathematics and physics, Khan states that his long-term goal is to provide "tens of thousands of videos in pretty much every subject" and to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything." I wish I can do this too :)

The Khan Academy also provides a web-based exercise system that generates problems for students based on skill level and performance. Khan believes his academy points to an opportunity to overhaul the traditional classroom by using software to create tests, grade assignments, highlight the challenges of certain students, and encourage those doing well to help struggling classmates.

Here's a sample of a tutorial on fraction. The first video is "How to add and subtract fractions". The second video is "about converting mixed numbers to improper fractions and improper fractions to mixed numbers".

Hope this can give you some useful ideas and thus be helpful in our classroom.






For more videos go to http://www.khanacademy.org/

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