In-class practice

(light music) My name is Amy Forsythe, and I teach Geometry and Honors Geometry at Mason High School. This is my 27th year. Our school is the largest high school in Ohio. That presents a lot of opportunities for students and it presents a lot of challenges, trying to not let anybody slip through the cracks. My main goals as a teacher is to make sure that everybody sees that they can do the work. It takes practice and it takes more practice for some than others, but we can get there. (light music) When I'm planning lessons, what I tend to do first is look at all available resources, Khan Academy and otherwise. So when I find sections on Khan Academy that match up with what I have planned for the week, then I look at how best to incorporate those. In a typical class, students would have a section or maybe multiple sections assigned to them and they would work on those sections. (light music) Some students were able to jump right into the problem set because we went through some things in class as a whole group, prior to that. Other students might need a little more information, in which case they can watch the video and get some additional help before they jump into the problems themselves. (background voices) And then I always tell them, 'cause there's a lot more of them than me, "If you miss a question, the next thing you do is "click on 'I need a hint.'" They can get help plus they know right away if they're right or wrong. - When you get a problem wrong, it says, "Not quite, wanna use a hint?" And then when you get it right, it has the little confetti and you're just happy. And you're like, "Yay, I did it right." - They're not doing 30 problems and then realizing, "Oh, I don't know what I'm doing "and I just made some really bad habits for myself." If I don't understand something, if Ms. Forsythe is working with someone else, I can just figure it out on my own on this site, instead of having to wait for her and wasting time. (light music) During this time, I'm helping them, I'm monitoring on my own computer to see who's doing what and whether they're being successful and intervening as I need to. What if you just took that little corner off and opened it up? That's what you'd see. - Okay. - Technology really can't replace the teacher in a classroom. Khan Academy supplements what I do. It's not a substitute for what I do. You can see that all they're doing is leading us through treating this cylinder as two circles, my circles are missing, and a rectangle. By using Khan Academy for the more basic things, it frees me up to do that more with students and allows me to really look in detail and realize what mistakes they're making. Or, if they're not making mistakes, what could help them to go further, or what direction they should take from there. (light music) My name is Wendy Englert and I teach Algebra I to ninth graders and I teach Algebra II to 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. I've been teaching for 11 years and I know problems that students often have, but sometimes it's surprising as to what one particular class struggles with or what their misconceptions are. One of the things that I like to make use of is the report that shows me the percent of students who got a particular question right. It'll show me, for a particular problem, only 33% got this one right. Or, 100% got this one right. So one thing I can do with that is I can take the most missed problem or problems and I can project it on my screen with my whole class and we can have a discussion about how to solve that problem. What I have done is I have pulled up the problem that was most missed by this class for that first exercise. So if you guys could, on that second page, at the bottom where it says most missed, I would like you to write down this problem, log base 10 of 10,000. I may have you start with having a discussion just at your table. So talk this through at the table. I know some of you guys had this exact question. It's the one where you have to, like, two to what power equals ... (students talking) Four zeros for the answer to be 40. Exactly. So we got four. So you just gotta count the zeros. Good. By looking at the most-missed problems, it gives me the opportunity to see where those misconceptions are and to address them right then and there before they turn into bigger misconceptions and before they turn into bigger problems in the content. (light music)