Today’s post comes from MATHletes Challenge mother Geraldine Exton, whose two sones Daragh and Odhran were Limerick County Champions for 2nd year and 6th class, respectively. Both boys were also runners up for the Munster Championship and National Finalists. Geraldine talks a bit about the family’s experience with Khan Academy
We discovered Khan Academy back in 2011. We’d been away for a year and the children had had some experience of other online Maths programmes designed to fill gaps in their knowledge; we heard that this new site was freely available and we decided to investigate. We signed up, firstly our two boys, and eventually our younger daughter as well.
Multilingual Education & Khan Academy
Studies into multilingual education suggest that teaching students a subject in their more comfortable language first, then reinforcing that learning later, in a subsequent language, is a powerful way to ensure that both the concepts and the language are learnt. In the process of overseeing our children’s transition from English- to Irish-language instruction, Khan Academy was a natural choice for us to support their learning.
In the process of overseeing our children’s transition from English- to Irish-language instruction, Khan Academy was a natural choice for us to support their learning.
Once we took it on, though, we saw it was much more than this. With their father as their coach and guide, the children quickly progressed through the World of Maths and their class-level exercises, before rapidly gaining ground, amassing badges and moving through the grades with success.
MATHletes Challenge: Recognition & Celebration
And then came the Mathletes Challenge. An added game layer, introducing competition and rewarding achievements by publishing the best performing students’ names on leaderboards, injected a frisson of excitement into the daily Maths routines. Suddenly there was a public outlet to recognise all the hard work that the children were putting in, a wonderful acknowledgement that being good at Maths is important, worth celebrating, and aspirational.
The children love their badges. They love the new avatars, and the way the site keeps record of all the skills they’ve mastered, and shows them how far they’ve come. They love being good at Maths.
Participating in our children’s learning
We no longer have any fear that there will be gaps in their Maths knowledge, because we can watch, we can step in, we can be active as parents as we shepherd them through their learning. We are participants in their learning, which, as educators as well as parents, is hugely exciting to us. Their confidence has soared. They know, when they meet something new at school, no matter what the subject, that they will learn the skills required, and they will master them, because by using Khan, they have learnt how to work.
We no longer have any fear that there will be gaps in their Maths knowledge, because we can watch, we can step in, we can be active as parents as we shepherd them through their learning. We are participants in their learning, which, as educators as well as parents, is hugely exciting to us.
Geraldine originally qualified as a secondary teacher of English and English as a Second Language, which she has taught to adults and teenagers in Australia, Sweden, Belgium and Ireland. In 2011 she gained a Masters in Linguistics in Brussels, and after two years teaching English and French back in Ireland, she completed a H Dip in Software Development at the University of Limerick. She is now in the midst of a PhD, examining ways to motivate and build community among volunteers in a distributed online environment. As a way into motivation, she has looked extensively at gamification, and is really interested in Khan Academy as a parent, an educator, and a researcher.
You can follow Geraldine on twitter:@GeraldineExton