How to get a FREE education - The Kahn Academy

[True Earthling]

What started out as a few algebra videos for Salman Kahn's cousins has grown to over 2,100 videos and 100 self-paced exercises and assessments covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history.

The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to 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.

Kahn Academy website... http://www.khanacademy.org/

Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math
Can an ex-hedge fund guy and his nonprofit Khan Academy make American schoolkids competitive again?

In August 2004, Salman Khan agreed to help his niece, Nadia, with her math homework. Nadia was headed into seventh grade in New Orleans, where Khan had grown up, but she hadn't been placed in her private school's advanced math track, which to a motivated parent these days is a little bit like hearing your child has just been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. In particular, Nadia was having trouble with unit conversion, turning gallons into liters and ounces into grams.

Being a bit of a geek, Khan put Yahoo!'s (YHOO) Messenger to work to help Nadia, using the Doodle function to let him illustrate concepts for his niece as they spoke on the phone. Then he wrote some code that generated problems she could do on a website. With Khan's help, Nadia made it into the fast track, and her younger brothers Arman and Ali signed on for Khan's tutoring as well. Then they brought in some of their friends. Khan built his site out a little more, grouping the concepts into "modules" and creating a database that would keep track of how many problems the kids had tried and how they had fared, so he'd know how each of his charges was progressing.

Less than five years later, Khan's sideline has turned into more than just his profession. He's now a quasi-religious figure in a country desperate for a math Moses. His free website, dubbed the Khan Academy, may well be the most popular educational site in the world. Last month about 2 million students visited. MIT's OpenCourseWare site, by comparison, has been around since 2001 and averages 1 million visits each month. He has posted more than 2,300 videos, beginning with simple addition and going all the way to subjects such as Green's theorem, normally found in a college calculus syllabus. He's adding videos on accounting, the credit crisis, the French Revolution, and the SAT and GMAT, among other things. He masters the subjects himself and then teaches them. As of the end of April, he claims to have served up more than 54 million individual lessons.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_22/b4230072816925.htm

Los Altos district pilots technology-based math program, Khan Academy

The Los Altos School District is piloting the program in fifth-grade classrooms at Covington and Santa Rita elementary schools and in two seventh grade classrooms at Egan. On Friday, students in Cadwell's class eagerly typed in answers on white MacBooks, as a graph projected overhead tracked the number of energy points the class was earning per minute.
"I love Khan Academy," said seventh-grader Devon Nemelka, 12. "Things that I'm having trouble with, it helps me set a goal to be proficient at it and get energy points and stuff."

Instead of lecturing, Cadwell moved around the classroom and helped students who were stuck on a problem. From her own computer, Cadwell can track each student's progress down to a problem-by-problem level, and help an individual student with a particular topic while allowing the rest of the class to move ahead. "It's helped me target my instruction," Cadwell said. "I just feel like I'm making a better use of my time and my kids' time."

Cadwell said she hadn't felt any pushback from parents on the new teaching approach since she began using it in December, though the program is a "paradigm shift" for some teachers accustomed to a more traditional classroom. The district is discussing how to expand the program next year, she said.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_17705589?nclick_check=1

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

Salman Kahn's presentation on TED Talks… http://goo.gl/owewh