Humanities with Khan Academy

(upbeat music) My name is Andrea Glenn. I currently teach AP World History at Millikan High School. As a history teacher, I'm always trying to find that balance between teaching content and teaching the historical thinking skills. I want them to not just know the content but also know what to do with that content once they have it. Khan Academy fits so well with the content aspect of it. Pick one or two of those themes. And then use that to do your comparison. It reinforces the information that they're learning from the textbook. It shows them visually, things that I was talking about in class. It provides them additional information or key vocabulary to the video clip that we watched in class. So it integrates well with all of the other styles of teaching that I'm already implementing in the classroom. Yeah? Perfect, okay, somebody else? The students that are more visual learners will be drawn to the videos that they can watch on Khan. The students that, you know, are really strong readers will focus on more of the articles. So it allows them to kinda choose which way they're internalizing and interpreting this information. My process for figuring out how I can implement Khan Academy into my existing lesson plans was really just to look at okay, overall, what are all of the things that I'm trying to cover in this unit? And with unit one in AP World History, I went on to Khan Academy and I looked to see okay, do they have these five major civilizations that I know I want to cover in my content. And so I found the five that I wanted and then they used Khan Academy resources, the articles, and the videos, to figure out all of the SPICE themes that we use in here. The social, political, interactions with the environment, cultural, and economics of each of the civilizations. (upbeat music) So on a typical day, I might want them to understand the process of writing a long essay question. They've already taken the notes on what's expected in this very, very specific type of writing. They know what is supposed to go into it but they need to practice how they write those sentences, how they put that together, how they infuse the content into the prompt. When they click on AP World History, it's divided into the units of time. So they can click on those units of time to help them find this research that they can use to answer the prompts that they were given. Then they can practice the skill of long essay question writing. (upbeat music) Rather than just spending a day lecturing, they were researching these things on their own and then showing me back what they learned. It was really an, a really great opportunity for me to walk around and see exactly where each student was struggling, where their weaknesses were, where they were excelling, and kind of support students in a more one on one basis. (upbeat music) In the last couple of years, I've seen Khan Academy used as an SAT or PSAT prep program. I've seen a lot of students use it in math, and building their math skills. But this is the first year that I'm using it as an AP World History teacher. And what I noticed is, in the first exam where I was using Khan Academy, more, I saw a 20% increase in the average grade from this year's class versus last year's. (upbeat music)