Tonight your homework assignment will be to watch an mathematics lecture online. Tomorrow we will work problems related to the lecture.
This is what mathematics teacher Tim Beaulieau of Concord High School in Concord NH told his students one day this spring. He had read about the work of Sal Kahn and had decided to use Kahn's web lectures in his class. Kahn rose to national prominence when Bill Gates introduced him at the 2011 TED talks and supported him with a 2 million dollar development grant. Kahn is a self described hedge fund manager who began making web tutorials for his young cousins so they could learn the math that they were having trouble with. At this point he has created over 2000 YouTube videos in the areas of math and science and there have been more than 50 million page views of Kahn's content.
Kahn uses a simple approach. Simply put he uses an online blackboard and his voice to give the lecture on a particular subject. It is nothing special but he advocates a topsy turvey approach to education that involves his videos. The thought is that student's homework would to be to watch the lectures--the current norm of during the day math teaching. Then when they returned to class during the day the teacher would have the time to work on basic problems related to the lecture and then on problems where students would transfer their learning and apply what they had learned. The idea being that the math teacher no longer provided the lecture--they would provide the context and the application of the learning.
Tim began by asking a group of Algebra students to view a Kahn Academy video for homework. During the school day class he had explained to students where to go to access the site and how they could complete the assignment if they did not have home internet.
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