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Comment by casenelson | Hacker News Reader

This is also a problem for some school boards. My sister is using Khan Academy with her ELL students (they don't speak any English but Khan's working great for them).

Signing a student up to a standalone service is no problem, but as soon as that service includes email or other student communication, the teachers need to get parents' consent.

This is really limiting the adoption across the rest of her school, they don't really want to get everyone a new GMail or Facebook account.

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We're aware of this, and as @genieyclo said, Google Apps for Education is currently the easiest way for a whole bunch of students to get going. We've been successful using Apps for Education with all of our pilot Khan Academy schools so far.

That being said, we're thinking about becoming our own identity provider as well, primarily for this reason.

Just one of those things that's on the list and has to be weighed against everything else -- the majority of our users are doing just fine w/ Google/Facebook.

Super, great to see it's on your radar. Thank you very much for all your hard work.

This is a problem for schools using usually custom-built tools to manage the district's resources and administration. For the more flexible charter schools that are more open to the idea of adopting something like Khan Academy into the curriculum, they are small enough (usually one school) to switch over, and are often already using Google Apps as their default method of email and collaboration.

I know that at my sisters' charter school (2 schools, K-8 and 9-12), the entire school is on the Google Apps Education platform and getting started with Khan Academy was really simple for them, as they already had name@school.com email accounts they were used to using.

I know the school board where I live has banned teachers from using Facebook, and to further your point students under a certain age are not allowed to use either Facebook, or Google.

That's a really compelling point. Thanks.

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