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An introduction to Khan Academy | Sal Khan, Founder and Ginny Lee ,Chief Operating Officer

An introduction to Khan Academy.

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Video transcript

namaste teachers I'm Sal Khan founder of the not-for-profit Khan Academy as you probably know we have a big mission to provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere and we know that the most important people in that mission are you the teacher and so that's why from the beginning Khan Academy has always worked closely with teachers to be able to create tools for teachers so that they can use it with their students and allow the students learning to happen as well as possible and so that's why we're excited that you are a part of this training because I've always said if I had to pick between an amazing teacher and amazing technology I would pick the amazing teacher every time the good thing is we don't have to make that trade-off and so here at Khan Academy we are trying to build tools for you tools that will make your life easier that will save you time and will help you serve your students better so Khan Academy is an online educational set of resources it is a combination of world class content that spans from kindergarten all the way to 12th grade and in some cases the first and second year of college and then we span across many subjects there's two pieces that I think makes it very unique one is not just world class content but it's taught in a way that is very easy to understand we also build a lot of what we call social emotional learning elements into the platform because learning is hard it can be intimidating you could feel under confident you could feel not very smart learning something that's very new to you so our product of content and software the combination of both we try to make it so it's easy to understand that it's fun that it's engaging that it motivates you that it helps build your self-confidence so that you can start to be a self-motivated independent learner to be a lifelong learner and what makes us unique is those elements of not just the content but the social-emotional learning part of the software as well as we have a lot of built-in intelligence to know exactly where you are and all the steps that you need to learn so we have this thing called a knowledge map inside our product that lets you say gosh if I want to learn calculus someday I need to know these foundational elements first and then I can build on top sort of like a house we have the foundational elements and then you know how to build the first story and then you put the second story and we connect all those dots for you our reach in our scale today we are in over 190 countries across the world we are translated in over 30 languages across the world by amazing advocates volunteers that help us do this because they believe so much in our mission and it does really take a village to make that happen it is unfortunate there's a misconception of us wanting to replace the teacher absolutely not there is no way that we can replace a teacher and in fact for us if I had to choose between technology or a teacher as to what is the biggest lever for a student and their growth it's the teacher they are such an important part of the students life for us it's about providing tools and functionality for the teacher to empower them to give them agency to be better than they can ever be to be more efficient to be more effective so tools and insights that we can do to help the teacher so that they can be the best that they can be for these students the people at Khan Academy are amazing I am so blessed to run this company because the people I have 200 plus people whose sole goal is to enable this mission to happen they just want to really transform the educational industry to really help those underserved children and that's what they eat breathe and sleep every day so we're excited that you're part of this training hopefully you will find everything that we are able to provide for you to of use and we are looking forward to getting your feedback about how together we can better serve you and your students thank you