I use Khan Academy for a variety of reasons, and I thought I would share a few of them in this post.
1) Because it's online, students can complete exercises during class or outside of class. For my purposes currently, I'm assigning students review parts of speech exercises. Most of the students will breeze through quickly, while other students may occasionally need a hint or watch a video. The students, though, can pace themselves.
2) Students in college are taking more and more online courses, and I think Khan Academy is a basic activity that is similar to an online course. Students have to manage their time and efforts to make sure that exercises, quizzes, and tests get completed by a certain due date. This process challenges students to keep some type of planner - either using their student planners, some digital planner like Google Keep, or something else of their choosing. If they forget to complete what's been assigned by the deadline, there are penalties. And that is something they need to figure out now.
3) The program is always improving, and it's becoming more and more user friendly for teachers to post assignments and record performances. I can now view scores and post scores in my online grading management system fairly easy.
4) Through reports that I can generate, I can determine trends of difficulty. It's not hard at all for me to see if a particular skill seems to be a struggle area for students. That's nice because I can keep breezing through stuff they know, and slow down and instruct and support skills that are unfamiliar.
5) Did I mention hits and videos? (Yes, I know I did.) Through the hints and videos, students get real time assistance as it's needed. They don't have to send me an email or wait until our next class period. They get help as they are working.
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