In this week's selection of readings, I was drawn first and foremost to Michael Noer's article, "One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy is Reinventing Education." I first learned of the Khan Academy three years ago from a middle school teacher, and I was eager to learn about the Academy's founder, development, and future as well as the implications the online school has for students today. After completing the article, I believe the Khan Academy must continually grow more dynamic in its implementation to become a mainstay in the world of education. My post will speak most specifically to the education of students at the upper elementary to high school levels.

Noer painted the picture of the Prussian-style educational landscape Sal Khan entered into with the invention of the Khan Academy. "Those schools were dedicated to teaching citizens the three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic), with the secondary, more cynical, objective of creating a docile working class accustomed to submitting to authority.1." Though I'm not sure the Khan Academy alone encourages students to be less submissive or more inspired, I do believe it provides scholars today with a unique opportunity to "flip the classroom" and empower their own learning by watching the videos as needed. As well, I think that coupling this online educational tool with other opportunities and resources will push students far beyond the mastery of a specific learning objective.

Providing students with access to the Khan Academy is huge, but to create a more substantial impact I believe teachers and everyone else who plays a regular role in a child's education are the real game-changers. These are the people who will push the Khan Academy beyond other instructional videos or programming of the past.

Noer touches on critics of the Academy and how it compares to these past programs. "In the 1920s, as radio boomed, more than 200 educational stations were formed with the hope "that through the connectivity of radio, a single dazzling teacher could inspire thousands of bored students," as William Bianchi writes in his history of the movement. By 1937 only 38 had survived. The dawn of television spawned similar utopian dreams. Sunrise Semester , a production of CBS and New York University, ran for nearly 25 years starting in 1957 and offered watch-at-home courses for credit. In the 1980s personal computers became common in schools; in the last decade broadband Internet did. None of it helped very much.2." The difference is that when students' classroom teachers use the Khan Academy in regular classroom instruction, it can work as supplementary material to push student comprehension and application of learning objectives forward. Meshing the Khan Academy with students' everyday classroom experience will provide them with more opportunity to achieve the best education possible.

During my time with Teach For America, Khan Academy served as a tool that was used by my fellow teachers to further explain mathematical concepts to their students. Each teacher who employed it directly in class, spoke about nothing more than the benefits it had on their classrooms. The Academy served as an additional resource to support their student's apprehension of a concept, and it had huge impacts overall on the students' benchmark and end-of-year assessments.

The first thing you read when you enter the Khan Academy's website is: "You can learn anything. For free. For everyone. Forever.3." Sal Khan is accomplishing everything he set out to do in making his educational videos accessible, easy to comprehend, and fun. My biggest takeaway from Noer's article was that the potential for Khan's tool are much more far-reaching than I realized. The Khan Academy is serving an incredibly important part in the fight to improve educational outcomes for students worldwide. As its use grows, particularly in classroom environments, the tool will continue providing more students an opportunity to receive the highest quality education possible.

1. Noer, Michael. "One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing 

     Education." Forbes, 2 Nov. 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/ 

     one-man-one-computer-10-million-students-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/4/#3f4518da7a26. 

     Accessed 12 Sept. 2017.

2. Noer, Michael. "One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing 
     Education." Forbes, 2 Nov. 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/ 
     one-man-one-computer-10-million-students-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/4/#3f4518da7a26. 
     Accessed 12 Sept. 2017.


3. Khan Academy. www.khanacademy.org/. Accessed 12 Sept. 2017.