I recently passed by a sign that said “I teach. What’s your superpower?”, and was reminded of the teachers that have been superheroes in my life. There were a few precious teachers who encouraged a shy little girl to love learning, changing the course of her life forever.  

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, we take a moment to say a big THANK YOU to superhero teachers, including the 30,000 teachers across the world that are using Khan Academy in their classrooms, and changing the lives of students.

We salute you as you endeavor to provide more personalized, mastery-based and interactive learning experiences for your students.  Thank you for putting in the long hours, for giving it your heart and soul, and for being a role model and an inspiration to students to be lifelong learners and explorers.  

Check out our updated Coach Resources featuring classroom case studies, tips on getting started, and approaches to developing a personalized, mastery-based, and interactive classroom.

Get more out of Khan Academy in your classroom!

New to using Khan Academy in your classroom?

If you’re just getting started, check out the Quick Start guide which provides the basics on using Khan Academy in the classroom.  

Join the conversation

Connect with other teachers who are using Khan Academy in our community discussion online to find out more. Below each video and article in the Coach Resources section, you can engage with other coaches and the Khan Academy community about how to use Khan Academy.   

Over the past 6 months we’ve added a significant amount of content, including over 150 medical and health videos, but we want to do more. We are now collaborating with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Association of American Medical Colleges (those are the folks that put together the MCAT® exam) to find new medical content creators. (See the press announcement here).

Together with RWJF and the AAMC, we will sponsor a competition to encourage medical students and residents to create educational tutorials (i.e. collections of videos, questions, and articles) about concepts that will be tested by the new version of the MCAT exam, which will be administered in 2015. Announced last year, the revised MCAT exam will include concepts from psychology and sociology that provide the foundation for learning about the human and social components of health. It also will include biochemistry concepts for the first time, along with the biology, chemistry, and physics content included as part of the current test.

If you’re interested in making free medical content for the world and being trained as one of Khan Academy’s new medical content creators, apply here:

https://www.khanacademy.org/about/med-competition

The competition will run through June 14, 2013, and we’re going to invite the top video makers to join us for a one-week boot camp (July 14-21) to refine their tutorial-making skills. Winners may then be invited to become Khan Academy Fellows to work with Khan Academy on developing the next generation of pre-health and medical education content! Everyone will benefit: competition winners get to make great tutorials, we get to offer more content, and the Khan Academy community gets to learn about a whole set of new topics related to the new MCAT exam that will debut in 2015. It’s a win-win-win!

Teachers, you are now able to create accounts for students of any age!

For students under 13, you will need to get parent permission for them to use the site. You can download our sample permission slip to send home with your students.

To add your students, visit Coach > Manage Students and click the green “Add new students” button.

This opens the form for inviting students by their email addresses:

If your students do not have email addresses (or you don’t have them handy), choose “create Khan Academy accounts for them.”

Next, you’ll create a username and password for your first student and enter their birthdate. If they are under 13, you need to include their parent’s email address:

You’ll receive a confirmation and then you can create your next student’s account.

As soon as you’ve created the account, your student can start using it — so you can create accounts for your whole class one afternoon or evening and have them log in the next day!

Credit goes to team lead Matt Faus, intern Dylan Vassallo, Kitt Hirasaki, Maureen Suhendra, Matt Wahl, Shantanu Sinha, Ben Kamens, and our fantastic legal advisor Aman Shah!

When we started Smarthistory 7 years ago, we thought of it as a replacement for the textbook - mostly for our own students. But along the way, we learned a lot about how we might use the web to think about teaching art history. We opened our classrooms, and opened Smarthistory to art historians, hoping in the process that together we could create a free, open resource for the teaching and learning of our discipline.

We learned we could teach…

1)  more experientially (why not make videos from audios recorded INSIDE the Arena Chapel or the Contarelli Chapel?)

2) more personally than the impersonal voice of the textbook 

3) using lots more images than were ever available to us in the slide library (Flickr!)  and tourist videos too (why not show students what’s it like to climb to the top of the Brunelleschi’s dome?)

Today, Smarthistory.khanacademy.org has 250 essays and 500 videos (and all our videos and a few text pages are also on khanacademy.org).

And this afternoon we were honored to read a blog post by our Contributing Editor for American Art, Dr. Bryan Zygmont, on how rewarding it has been to contribute to Smarthistory at Khan Academy (Bryan has contributed fabulous posts on Frederic Edwin Church, Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, and Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolf. Bryan’s post is titled “In Praise of Smarthistory.”

So we want to take this opportunity to thank Bryan, and our other generous contributing editors, Dr. Nancy Ross, Dr. Rebecca Easby, Dr. Amy Calvert, Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis. Email us if you’re an art historian interested in contributing.

From Bryan’s post:

SmartHistory.khanacademy.org is a peer-reviewed online art historial textbook.  That is free. 

Free.  For you, me, and for our students.  Free, indeed, for the world.  It’s like an art history Wikipedia, with one notable difference: those who write for it have something we like to call ethos.  It’s written by art historians.  But not just art historians.  It’s written by art historians who have a sincere desire in teaching and pedagogy.  It’s a wonderfully useful site.  It currently contains almost 500 high-quality videos and nearly 250 essays.  And by the time you read this, it’s likely to have grown (I’m just too lazy to update these number weekly!).

What does this mean for the teacher of, say, Survey of Western Art II (Renaissance to Modern Art)?  It means, quite simply, that you can have your students read the 500 words that may appear in Gardner’s Art Through the Ages on Giotto’s Arena Chapel.  Or, you can send them to SmartHistory and have them watch a video (or four!) on the same work of art.

Want some proof:  Check out Part I of the video here.  There is absolutely no way that the images or text of any book can match the detail and enthusiasm present in this video.  And it’s one video of four that are available for the Arena Chapel.  Quite simply, as this resource grows I believe it will fundamentally change the ways in which I teach art history.  And change it for the better.

It may seem hyperbolic to read such lines, but the are true: I am honored beyond measure just to be involved with this project in the small ways in which I am.  It sincerely signifies the best part of my job of being a professor of art history.

 

(Thanks Bryan!)