Educate Bulgarian Children with Khan Academy

Dear friends,

With Christmas and New Year's Eve coming we will delight you with great news!

Record-breaking number of users

Last months marked a record number of users studying with Khan Academy in Bulgarian. In November 2017 we had more than 23K users at bg.khanacademy.org! This is a 215% increase compared with the same period in 2016. December shows a similar and stable upward trend.

Pilot application of Khan Academy in schools

The increased numbers are result of our hard work, also beyond translations, proofreading and dubbing of educational content. At the beginning of September we've trained 30 teachers with the financial support of Sofia Municipality’s Europe Program. We have also organized several events for school kids and for parents. So since the beginning of this school year, Khan Academy is being used by teachers and at least 500 children from 1st to 12th grade - only under this project! And we know about many more teachers piloting to work with Khan Academy in the whole country.

Vesko

Vesko is one of our pilot students from the 6th grade in 2nd School “Emiliyan Stanev” in Sofia. He shared that he is learning many new skills with Khan Academy: “I use KA for learning math, for decimals and fractions, circumference... Also I am programming with Javascript and draw animations. I like KA because it’s is fun!”

Watch also the video testimonials of our pilot teachers and students.

Our fans surprise us!

In the past months Studio Think Forward and Primary School "St. St. Cyril and Methodius" in Sveti Vlas have been working on transforming the biggest hall of the school “into space where students can study subjects that excite them and develop their talents”. And guess what? They’ve made a computer corner for self-initiated learning where Khan Academy is the main option. Isn’t this great!

High-level events 

During the annual conference Education 2017 we held a special panel: “Digitalization of Education?”. We talked over the future of education with representatives from schools, universities, educational non-profits and authorities. Deputy Minister of Education, Mrs Denitsa Satcheva, took also part, shared important policy developments and promised to consider our recommendations for digitization of the education.

We have “chameleon-ized” bg.khanacademy.org! Hurray!

On November 15 we switched to a new content management system called Chameleon. The content of the Bulgarian website is now exclusively in Bulgarian. No more surprising texts in English. The Bulgarian team manages on its own the upload of new content, ensuring a stable and fully translated version of Khan Academy. Our team is 1 out of 8 in the world to pilot this novelty. This is a proof and acknowledgment of our hard work, not only over the Bulgarian version but also as an active member of the Khan Academy language community.

All content that is not translated yet is available on en.khanacademy.org

State of the translation effort today

Our team is growing. Thanks to the financial support from you, our main partner - the America for Bulgaria Foundation, and the Community Board of Tellus International Europe, we have started working with 7 more people who translate, proofread and dub educational content. What we did in the past 3 months (Sept, 17 - Dec, 15 2017)?

• Translations: 600 videos and 263K words in Math and Biology
• Proofread content: 500 videos and almost 650K words
• Dubbed lessons: 330 videos for our youngest users

We advance in making Khan Academy accessible in Bulgarian with a good pace. However, there is much more content that can be available for Bulgarian students! And thousands of schools still 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.

Have warm and fun-filled holidays!

Thank you!

The Education Without Backpacks team

Links:

• Video testimonials of pilot teachers and students
• Our chairman article on technologies added value for edu
• Our chairman with an article on technologies' added value for ed

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