Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Least Common Multiple Woes? Khan Academy to the Rescue!

This year I’m going to brush up on my Algebra I and II skills, as my 7th grade son is taking a combined, year-long Algebra I and II class at Classen SAS in Oklahoma City. Today he’s completing his summer math packet, and among other things he’s having to find the least common multiple of algebraic expressions like these:

Find the least common multiple

I haven’t thought about LCMs for years, and didn’t remember how to calculate them. Thankfully, this summer I learned about the Khan Academy:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, this 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month. We are complementing this ever-growing library with user-paced exercises–developed as an open source project–allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World.

I searched the website and found a video demonstration for how to calculate LCMs. Salman Khan demonstrates two methods, and although this video uses integers-only we were able to use the formula he shared with algebraic expressions as well.

To learn more about Kahn Academy, check out the following nine minute video. If you have middle or high school students taking math classes, make SURE they know about this INCREDIBLE resource!

Many thanks to Salman Khan, the educator! Learn more about him on his WikiPedia article. Also check out this February 2010 video, “PBS NewsHour piece on the Khan Academy and Salman Khan.”

The video includes footage of Salmon and interviews with students at Castelleja School in Palo Alto, California. I led a full-day workshop for teachers at Castelleja this past June, and that is where I first heard about Khan Academy!

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