Khan Academy

 Khan Academy Retreived from http://www.khanacademy.org./

I have heard a lot of buzz about the Khan Academy and decided to check it out for myself.  Being a primary teacher, I had a look at the early math skills sections. I pretended to be a child struggling with basic addition and subtraction facts and worked through these two sections.  Khan Academy did not win me over. The 'badges' and incentives are fun (although they don't fit with the intrinsic motivation we believe in at our school). I like that the program changes the questions with the proficiency of the user - as I got tricky questions wrong, the program gave me more simple questions in each 'stack' of practise 'cards'.  I showed that I knew about adding to 10 and some of the doubles (eg. 3+3) but had trouble with the usual tricky ones (eg. 5+8). The basic addition section moved me on to the next concept with a very tenuous hold on addition facts. The instructional videos, while narrated in a friendly and relaxed voice and using standard examples of addition, are not great teaching tools. They provide very basic explanations and little strategy. A student who used a number line for every question could do quite well on the practise, but would only be proficient with that one strategy.  Primary teachers know that we need to teach various strategies and a real understanding of how numbers work. We teach about using doubles, doubles plus one, how to break numbers into manageable pieces, how to estimate to know if your answer makes sense, which numbers make 10, how to use that knowledge to make 9 or 11....  Khan Academy may be useful for middle or high school students who already have some knowledge of basic facts and strategies, but it is lacking in depth for early numeracy.  As a forum to practise skills after a some skilled math instruction, Khan Academy could be useful.  However, there are more accessible and appropriate programs out there for elementary students. One is Destination Math, created by Riverdeep, which is linked to our school district e-resources. Destination Math uses virtual manipulatives and follows a carefully designed progression of early numeracy skills.  Ask your teacher for a password to try the Destination Math site from home or download a trial demo here.

Primary/ Intermediate/Young Adult depending on the topics/exercises chosen