Hello,
Over the last three years my students have learnt a ton from Khanacademy programming but this was facilitated by the progress section and an easy to track completion record.
Will this be ready for the fall?
Always eternally grateful for this incredible resource.
Thanks for your time and consideration!
Progress tracking has always been an essential part of Khan Academy - where a traditional classroom requires kids to all be working on the same lesson simultaneously, 'Khan-style' has 20 kids doing 20 things, and me keeping all the plates spinning, with a combination of progress trackers, spreadsheets and dashboards.
For the last year (or more?) the Intro to JS Programming course has sported a banner asking me to 'Please use the old-style tracker page for now', but since June 30 even that has gone! There's currently no way for me to view my students' progress from last year - and doesn't look like there'll be any way for me to know where they're at from September. This was important BEFORE covid, now it's essential.
I've used a dozen intro to programming courses over the years but keep coming back to Pamela's Intro to JS. It really grounds the kids well and has them thinking purpose-driven rather than reactive. Great - just needs a progress tracker. Even a link to download the CSV would be enough for me, since I prefer to push that to Google Sheets.
At least if we could get some information on what they are planning on doing next that would be great.
I know we can use the assignments to track this but that progress tracking was essential to "keeping the plates spinning", I can do it without it but yikes we will definitely miss having that progress tracking.
I thought that they would transition us over to something right away.
Now I'm wondering if they will have anything ready at all.
Maybe we will need to make other plans.
I'm not a staff member or anything, but I myself can tell you that the staff is not going to tell you when they make an update, unless it will affect the site in an extremely major way, like when they took out Missions.
I've been a member of the programming community over a year now, and it's no question why people are leaving. The community is nice and all, but Khan Academy has been making many changes that may be beneficial to the website, but not the people who use it. I almost quit out of frustration after several very skilled programmers were banned.
I am not a teacher, so I do not really feel the problems you're having, but I do understand that it seems extremely frustrating to work with, and know I'm annoyed right along with you.
Codecademy has a decent plan for 100$ for 100 seats for the year. Still not the greatest tracking system but definitely has deeper content than Khan Academy.
I use an asset based model that does require a decent amount of monitoring but allows students to be guiding towards success through khan+codecademy. There are still students that refuse, because of a maturity barrier and generally not an ability barrier, but using tools like these and continuing to guide students back to the assigned lessons on "khan and code" cademy and using that to populate an assessment rubric, along with allowing students to generate their own assessment rubric(that gives you a sense of the "mark they expect" and telling them that you always have a "swing" of "4 points"/"2 categories" in "levels" so you can put them in a place where they can find more success in the time frame of the course) it gives enough content to keep them focused on the curriculum, in general, and also busting past it as there are plenty of aspects that are essential to their progress but are not in the curriculum(no matter where in the world you are).
For instance: an honest connection between trigonometry and computer science. No, not just slamming Sin/Cos/Tan into places for them to calculate angles and distances (but that is a start... kind of) but begging to build the awareness(and honestly the incredibly fascinating aspect) that trigonometry is the bringing together of geometry, number theory, and algebra!
Even so... khan will always be a goto for me and the AP comp sci course is pretty great but getting the programming back where you can scroll down a list and see what has been done or not(no not just a list of assignments but at any point in time) was really a magnificent tool that students really appreciated and I could use to help students keep themselves held to accountability.
On the other hand... beggars can't be choosers and since this is free... I'm just grateful this exists!
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