Educate to Innovate

Nix the Norm is a YouTube channel that is operated by Shannon Germaine. She is an independent film maker whose films have won awards from C-Span, Planet 911, One Earth Film Festival Young Filmmakers and the Redford Centre Stories Challenge. Ms Germaine is a product of home-schooling and therefore provides information and advice in her videos about her home-schooling experience and other home-schooling issues. She also creates videos offering advice on different educational technologies that she has experienced. Below is a video of Ms. Germaine giving her opinion about her experience with Khan Academy.  

 LearnStorm is a mastery challenge program that Khan Academy uses as a data tracker. It uses class level challenges to track students' performance.  Teachers can use it as a fun way to help students improve their skills and knowledge.   LearnStorm  tracks the entire class’s performance and presents it in a fun visual that shows how each individual student is contributing to the overall class performance in a particular area. Students are not identified in the visual; and their progress is only recorded on the LearnStorm tracker once they have passed the mastery proficiency level. Class progress is presented in rings, and for each ring to be completed, it requires that the number of assignments completed is three times the number of students in class. This motivates learners to master content and encourages them to work together to achieve class goals. Students can also use LearnStorm to track their own individual performance. LearnStorm LearnStorm Growth Mindset: The...

Khan Academy uses an interactive artificial intelligence named Khanmigo to assist both teachers and students. Khanmigo is a GPT -4 powered learning guide. It can help teachers plan lessons, gain insight into students' performance and provide advice on what to do with the information from progress reports. It is not free, and the fee is typically about $9 US/ month.  Khanmigo can be used as a virtual assistant or coach to help students learn content or complete assignments. This can be seen as a form of one-on-one tutoring and students can use it to not only accelerate their learning but to improve their communication and collaboration skills. Khanmigo does not provide learners with direct answers, instead, Khan Academy has designed it to only provide prompts and suggestions to help guide them to find solutions and consequently, enhance students' learning experience. KHANMIGO How Teachers can use Khanmigo

 Khan Academy is easy to navigate, however, if you encounter any difficulty using the website, you can find several videos on YouTube that were produced by Khan Academy, to teach you how to use the site.  The following video shows you basic site navigation for using Khan Academy How can Students Navigate Courses in Khan Academy?

  Selecting the best types of educational technology is extremely important to enhancing the teaching and learning process. Consequently, teachers must ensure that they develop the skills and knowledge to use them effectively and efficiently. Many educational technologies can be effectively used to stimulate learning and support students' learning challenges. However, it is imperative that the best educational technology is used. Many educational tools in circulation may have several issues that the user may be unaware of, such as poor content design, inadequate documentation, not user friendly or may be too expensive in comparison to another substitute. Some of these concerns could affect student learning outcomes and teachers' effectiveness. It is for this reason that this blog seeks to evaluate all possible educational technologies so that teachers, parents and coaches can provide learners with the best learning experience. What is Education Technology (EdTech)?