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In my last blog i wrote some down beat stuff because I had a rough day at school. Actually my school is generally pretty awesome.
It's holiday time in China, so I started browsing the Chrome App store for stuff to do with teaching. I found classdojo. It is a fun class management tool. All the pupils get their own monsters to customise, and you can award them points for positive behaviour and minus points for bad behaviour. It also creates little graphs that pupils and parents can view online to see how they are doing. I'm going to try this with a couple of my classes when school starts again.
I also found a series of videos on youtube about "flipped classrooms". The idea is that instead of spending a lot of time delivering content in lessons, teachers create videos which has all the course content and put it online for the pupils to access any time they want. The class time is then freed up for more interactive activities. What really appeals to me is that it is how I found it most effective to learn Japanese years ago. Though I was reading rather than watching a video, then I would go to my class to put what I had learned into practice. I used to hate going to class without being prepared because the lesson was much less useful.
I'm really excited about using these new strategies in my classes, and I'm getting ready to create my first video in the next couple of days.
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I knew a physics teacher who was planning to do more or less what you describe as a 'flipped' classroom. I think the biggest challenge as the teacher is that creating all the necessary content is a tremendous amount of work before you are even ready to start the course. It might make sense to try to convert a small, specific portion of the course to a flipped classroom design, rather than all content, and see how it goes. Of course, you can ask students about which type of learning they preferred and why.
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I think it entirely depends on what your students are like and what the material is. For myself, in 9th grade English, teaching content in class at least guarantees that they will half hear it once.
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Im in a geology class in my university right now that's "flipped". It's ok, it just seems like a lot of work for the teacher, and it really hinges on how much effort the student puts into it. Like, the mass majority of information in this class is from the book/notes taken reading the book. We learn the concepts that way and then the class time is spent on projects and worksheets that we have to apply the concepts to. It works, but like i said, it seems like a lot more work for the teacher and if a student is not doing the outside work they're gonna be unbelievably behind in the class periods.
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I don't know if the flipped classroom is harder work for the teacher. I guess I'll find out. One reason I like the idea though is that it keeps me honest in that I must have a good plan for my students and I must be prepared. If I'm honest, sometimes in the past I'll be thinking about what I'm going to teach my class on the way to work, and then finding the appropriate resources in a hurry. At least with this method it has forced me already to sit down and work out a plan for the whole semester.
Making the videos also forces a teacher to think about exactly what she/he wants to say and how they want to say it. Often in a class you know the idea you are trying to impart, and you're telling the students examples as they come to mind. Then later after class you think of a better way of saying the same idea.
The videos that the people promoting the method use are what they call "one take" videos. The idea is that you just sit in front of a camera with your whiteboard/slides and do the whole thing in one take, then the video is ready to upload. In this way shooting the video shouldn't be that much more work than preparing for a regular class, and the time it takes could be balanced against the time you would usually spend preparing and marking traditional forms of homework.
How do you make sure the kids watch the videos? I'm going to ask the kids to copy notes from the video (i'm trying to teach them how to make notes as well). Anybody who comes to the class without the notes will be asked to go to the computer room and watch the video / make the notes. They will also receive some some form of discipline.
I agree that students who don't do the work outside the class might suffer, but on the other hand isn't this kind of encouraging them to do the work outside of class? Also the videos are available online for the pupils to review whenever they want, so there is the opportunity for them to catch up if they want to. My colleague once told me that it is a student's right to fail if they so choose to, and unfortunately that is true. The trick seems to be encouraging them to be self motivated rather then forcing them through a series of hoops.
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Will all students have sufficient access to the daily online course materials? I'm not sure if that's a safe assumption.
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Our school already introduced allowing IPads for students in lessons, and we have school wide internet access. The school is a pretty expensive private school, so they all have IPhones and Alienware computers. It's a pretty safe assumption in my school, but if any student can't access the videos in their own time I can schedule a time for them in the school's IT suite.
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EPT
