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:

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