In “Digital Teaching Platforms in the Spectrum of Educational Technologies” by John Richards and Joseph Walters (in Digital Teaching Platforms: Customizing Classroom Learning for Each Student edited by Chris Dede and John Richards) there is an excellent discussion of different types of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Digital Teaching Platforms (DTP).  I have one quibble with it though.  

They list LMS systems as not providing the following "Pedagogical Support Tools":

Please send this to anyone you know who might be interested.

For the last few months we have been working with the Khan Academy open source code base and helping schools integrate it with Moodle.  Sal Khan does an excellent job describing his vision of how he hopes Khan Academy will impact teaching and learning in schools.  We believe that integrating the Khan Academy platform into a learning management system supports those goals.  Even so, doing the kind of “rich, deep open-ended learning projects” that Sal Khan describes (at the end of the following video) is not easy for teachers.

I’m looking for a partner to help me make some of these “rich, deep open-ended learning projects” available and easy for teachers to use in their classrooms.

The goal of this project is to address the some of the obstacles that teachers face, including the following:

• Need to spend classroom time on specific topics in the Math Common Core.
• Lack of time to find and prep for the project.
• Management of student work flow and access.
• Need for assessment of learning that is aligned to the Common Core.

One of the organizations I work with, ASSISTments, has an entry in the The Boston Innovation Incubator Competition.

The proposal is being spearheaded by Boston Public School's math teacher, Eric Simoneau and his Stats4Stem team.  Eric has done an amazing job creating content for the Statistics AP courses.  

His next dream is to create a high school class  called: “Data Science & Computational Statistics”. Mr. Simoneau has his students use the open source R program extensively and creates content using ASSISTments. 

Please consider giving this project your vote! 

Solution Grove is pleased to announce The Rashi School's launch of a custom cloned instance of Khan Academy (KA) that is integrated with The Rashi School's Moodle site.  The Rashi School is a private K-8 school in Needham, MA.

The Rashi KA site is not associated with Sal Khan or Khan Academy, but is made possible by the KA open source licensing model. The goal is to make Khan Academy's learning resources easier to use in The Rashi School. While the Rashi KA site can only be used by the students and teachers of The Rashi School with an account on the Rashi Moodle site, anyone can use Khan Academy for free at any time.

Yesterday I attended Michael Mino's teacher training on Moodle and I was very impressed by their excitement and enthusiasm from the Kindergarten teacher to the 8th grade math teacher. I learned a great deal watching them and from their questions. I can't wait to see what they do with it!

1. Start by watching the introductory videos on how to create new exercise modules.
2. Read the Writing Exercises wiki pages to familiarize yourself with more advanced topics.
3. When testing using the standalone framework, adding "?debug" to the exercise url can save you a great deal of time trying to look for improper variable initialization.
4. Remember that you are not limited to the stock answer types.  You can extend the Khan.answerTypes objects appropriately.  A sample use case is that I needed a case-insensitive text match in one of my exercises and instead of modifying the text answer type to support it, which could potentially break or introduce incompatibility to future upgrades, I just wrote my own implementation of an answer type like the one below and used that instead.
   

   $.extend(Khan.answerTypes, {
   
       texti: function(solutionarea, solution, fallback) {
           var verifier = function(correct, guess) {
               correct = $.trim(correct);
               guess = $.trim(guess);
               return correct.toLowerCase() === guess.toLowerCase();
           };
           return Khan.answerTypes.text(solutionarea, solution, fallback, verifier);
       },
   
   });
   

5. When writing your own javascript utility to complement the already several present in the base code, a common gotcha is supplying an incorrect key name to the fn array when declaring your main function.  You should use a key of the form <filename_without_dotjs>Load.  So if your file is named my-word-problems.js then you append to $.fn using the following command:
   

   $.fn["my-word-problemsLoad"] = function () { ... }
   

6. You might also wonder why new javascript utility files that you've added and tested to be working using the standalone exercise framework  suddenly fails when it's running inside the Khan Academy codebase.  If this is the case you might have forgotten to add it to the "javascript" object inside js_css_packages/packages.py.  Just open up that file and search for khan-exercise.js.  You'll notice it's defined inside an array called "files" inside the "exercise_content" property of the "javascript" object. Just add your utility file to that array and then your javascript utility should now be properly loaded.

I hope this short list helps you in some way when you start writing your own Khan Academy exercises.

I have been rereading “Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning” by E. A. City, R. F.  Elmore, S. E. Fiarman and L. Teitel.  I took Professor Elmore’s class: “Supporting Teachers for Instructional Improvement” as part of my degree at Harvard Grad School for Education and I am working on trying to bring more of these concepts into my own practice.

Currently one of my focuses in on deploying the integration of Moodle and a clone of Khan Academy that we recently developed.   I want to use the Instructional Core model presented in Instructional Rounds to look at how this system might be put into practice in a way that results in real improvement to student learning. 

Instructional Rounds asks four questions: