Educate Bulgarian Children with Khan Academy

Dear Learners and Do-Gooders,
Happy September 15th, the First Day of School in Bulgaria!

It’s been a hot summer, with our focus on working with teachers, adding several people more formally to our team, and dubbin videos. The 50% year-on-year usage growth of bg.khanacademy.org continues uninterrupted, despite the usual students’ summer vacations. In fact, we estimate that about 5% of school children in Bulgaria learn on the site, while we are now working on growing their engagement across time, including by using their registered accounts in classrooms around Bulgaria.

How are we sustaining this? Thanks to your donation personally, as well as to a couple major donors, who believed us after seeing the commitment of our many small donors.

Our learners often surprise us with the ways Khan Academy helps them succeed
Val is a young Bulgarian entrepreneur. He is the creative mind behind one of the first Escape rooms in Bulgaria. However, before achieving his dreams, Val had some difficulties at university. Macroeconomics was not his forte, until he stumbled on Khan Academy videos dedicated to Economics and Finance. And only those videos suddenly made his difficult exam seem doable. He truly values Khan Academy for how it enriches his life.

Parents get liberated when kids use good tools to study
Have you ever been inspired to become a “lazy mom”? A member of our team was recently interviewed by a blog about moms: she was extolling the virtues of giving more independence and ownership to her school-age son. In summary, if you teach your kid that good results are worth pursuing, give access to Khan Academy, and stop yourself from solving your kid’s homework, then his results in school will be consistently good, and your time will be free to do other things. And even more importantly, the kid will learn to deal with life’s little difficulties in his own way, including by using his allotted computer time wisely with KA.

What else we organized, where else we reached learners and educators - a brief summary
- We met KA implementation teams from a dozen other countries this month in Tbilisi, Georgia. We have learned much about working with schools, reviewed the latest translation tools, and even discussed new initiatives, like working with internet providers on increasing access to KA.
- As part of a project funded by the Sofia Municipality, we started a close partnership with 2 schools in Sofia: “SOU #2” and “French High School #9”. Our main goal is to learn about the barriers teachers face in letting technology lift kids’ achievement - stay tuned for more news there.
- We have focused on mapping KA’s content to the official Bulgarian teaching plans. Stay tuned for a clickable map on ObR.education later this year.

State of the translation effort today
Sevdalina and Irina have joined the translation effort, and we are close to the full Bulgarian translation. In fact, KA is now giving us tools to manage the Bulgarian content, which means only fully-translated material will be visible on our version. In the last 3 months we:

• Focused on Biology, together with Math, our favorite subject
• Translated 170 new video subtitles and 770 000 words from the Math exercises and teacher resources
• Edited 390 subtitles and 380 000 words.

Still, much other Khan Academy content across higher Math, humanities and others is not yet available in Bulgarian. And thousands of schools remain out of direct reach. We still need your support. Donate an amount of your choice, devote your donation to a person you love or make it a gift, ask your colleagues or friends to start a monthly donation or just spread the word. For example, a couple of our friends posted on Facebook that for their birthdays they prefer donations to Khan Academy rather than personal gifts.

Thank you!
The Education Without Backpacks team

Links:

• For regular updates - like us on our Facebook page

Dear Friends,

Last three months were really successful for Education Without Backpacks. After we invested much time and efforts in various negotiations and project applications in the last 1.5 years, in April and May 2017 we got approved for three new grants! They will build upon what we’ve accomplished through your help and will further our efforts to translate and implement Khan Academy in Bulgarian. Meanwhile, our usage continues growing 50% year on year.

But before we tell you more, here is a story we’d love to share with you:

Changing futures, one Khan Academy exercise at a time

As we track the interactions of thousands of learners with the Bulgarian Khan Academy, we try to meet as many of them as possible. Some stories inspire us and others exceed our wildest dreams! We will keep bringing those stories to you.

Mimi (not her real name) is a clever 14-year-old. Daniel from our team has been studying math with her remotely for 3 months and her dedication to the work has increased significantly in this period. She is intelligent and learns fast - when she decides to. She still skips Math class in school and still doesn't feel well adjusted to her environment. And that makes sense - she's been living in foster homes for years and that clearly affects her learning habits. But Mimi is stronger than her past and her confidence grows with each solved exercise.

Daniel about Mimi:

“She also has a strong personality. For example, she would challenge me during each meeting: on whether I know interesting people; on whether math can make you rich; or on whether an exercise is "possible". It's hard to keep up with an intelligent girl like her, but so far: I've sent her a signed picture from a Bulgarian hip hop star; I've shared different career paths with her; and we've seen that everything can be learned with enough effort!”

But let’s focus on the job: learning math. Her results on Khan Academy: 15 unique days of solving exercises, 35 exercised skills, 537 minutes of studying, good progress with percentages, reading data, triangle areas, etc., and some struggles with measuring arcs and negative numbers ... 23 580 energy points.

We are sure Mimi has a bright future, as long as she keeps getting emotional support. As for math - after working with Khan Academy Daniel has no doubt that she gets it!

Below you can see a Khan Academy report about Mimi’s exercised skills: we’ve kept the report on Bulgarian, because that is the cause of our project!

Where else we reached learners and educators - a brief summary

Upon an invitation by the regional education governing authority, in March we took part in a training of 50 teachers from North-West Bulgaria - who are now aware of Khan Academy as a great tool for their work. We also presented Khan Academy at the Innovation in Education Forum in the city of Blagoevgrad. And we presented the platform at the exhibition accompanying the Education for Professions of the Future Forum in April 2017, attended by hundreds of Bulgarian teachers and educational experts.

Whole school classes, as well as individual learners and their parents, could talk with our team and try out Khan Academy in Bulgarian at the great annual Sofia Science Festival, where we participated on four consecutive days in May 2017.

With the beginning of the new school year in the autumn, we will start a pilot implementation of Khan Academy in two Sofia schools. This project will be funded by the Europe Program of Sofia Municipality. The mayor of Sofia personally handed us the agreement during an official ceremony, as our project was rated best among all project applications in our category.

State of the translation effort today

During the past 3 months we provided more translated content that is now available for all teachers and learners and for promotional initiatives like the above:

• We translated more than 500 000 words of text lessons and exercises, and

• edited more than 160 000 words of translated texts and 110 subtitled videos.

And other significant news: Since May 2017, for all remaining translations, editing and quality control of Math and Computing content (and for many connected activities) we can rely on the partnership and the generous financial support of the America for Bulgaria Foundation.

Furthermore, the Community Board of Telus International Europe will support us to translate video lessons in Biology.

Still, much other Khan Academy content across higher Math, humanities and others is not yet available in Bulgarian. And thousands of schools remain out of direct reach. We still need your support. Donate an amount of your choice, devote your donation to a person you love or make it a gift, ask your colleagues or friends to start a monthly donation or just spread the word. For example, a couple of our friends posted on Facebook that for their birthdays they prefer donations to Khan Academy rather than personal gifts.

Thank you!

The Education Without Backpacks team

Links:

• A video of Ivan Gospodinov @ Education Innovation Forum
• For regular updates - our Facebook page