I love, love, LOVE the site featured on today's Fresh Look Fridays post. Thing is, I tend to forget about it from time to time (can I blame preggo brain for that?) Luckily, in my travels I get to work with some amazing educators who give me little reminders about the myriad of awesome resources that are out there. So a big 'thank you' to Joan Kollewyn (@jkolle) for re-introducing me to today's featured website: Khan Academy.

Khan Academy is essentially YouTube on steriods  -- a ginormous compilation of education-related videos, all decided to become, and I quote, "the free classroom for the world."

One quick glance at this site shows a bazillion lesson-based videos ranging on topics from basic addition, to the French Revolution, to organic chemistry modules.  Mind. Blowing. At the click of a button your students have instant access to all sorts of lessons, activities and easy-to-understand videos.  Fan-freakin-tastic if you ask me!

I also LOVE the story behind how the founder, Salman Khan, got started with this website.  Since I will probably butcher the actual story if I try to retell it in my own words, here it is from the horse's mouth, so to speak:

My uncle's family visited me in Boston after my wedding in the summer of 2004. At some point during the trip, my Aunt told me that her daughter (my cousin) was having trouble with "unit conversion" which was not allowing her to be placed in the more advanced math track for 7th grade. Nadia was clearly a very bright girl, so I made a deal with her. I'd remotely tutor her for an hour after work as long as she was willing to do any extra work I gave her.

I began remotely tutoring Nadia in August of 2004. She was in New Orleans--where I also grew up-- so we used a telephone to talk and Yahoo Doodle as a shared notepad. Nadia ended up catching up and getting ahead of her class so I started tutoring her brothers, Arman and Ali, as well. Eventually, word got around and I was remotely tutoring and handful of cousins and family friends. Scheduling around my work, their soccer practice, and the different time zones became a little ridiculous, so I started to make YouTube videos for them to watch in their own time, at their own pace.

It didn't take long to see that other students (including adult learners) were hungry for videos like these so I kept going!

Even before I made the videos, I started writing simple Javascript problem generators so that my cousins would never run out of practice problems. I wanted to know when and how they were doing the problems, so I added a database to track usage. 70 modules and 10,000 lines of code later (much of which has made the software adaptive), it has morphed into the adaptive assessment exercises on our site.

Source: http://www.khanacademy.org/about

So, if you haven't yet already, PLEASE make sure you make some time this weekend to go check out Khan Academy.  I promise you, you won't be disappointed!

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

Vanessa