Don’t Flip Out! – Part 2

Image courtesy of GoodReads

After devouring Berghmann and Sams’ epic regaling their journeys in flipped learning, I was keen to learn more about what had worked for teachers in different curriculum areas and at different levels of schooling. I’m P-12 trained, so I needed breadth of practical suggestions as well as plenty of pedagogically sound depth to back up my choice to flip my classroom. Once again, my Kindle came to the rescue! Amazon pointed me towards ‘Flipping 2.0’, edited by Jason Bretzmann, as the ‘next step’ in my reading.

In his foreword, Bretzmann refers to going beyond watching videos for homework and doing homework in class as the ‘2.0’ of classroom flipping. Interesting, I thought. Parallels between this and Web 2.0? As it turns out, yes! In Flipping 2.0 there is emphasis on the quality and increased accuracy/sophistication of output by students after a change in teacher input, much as the Web 2.0 movement emphasised creation and dissemination of information rather than simply the absorption of information curated by others.

Various education practitioners collaborate in this anthology of recommended practices. Some suggestions are more practically usable in different contexts than others, but there is a relatively even spread across all curriculum areas and from both highly experienced and dynamic graduate teachers – making it widely accessible, useful and sufficiently empirically based for many.

The book is more heavily weighted towards being of assistance to secondary teachers than those in the primary sector. However, this could be seen as a bonus in making it more viable for teachers to extend their brightest students at their own pace, with practical tips for how to further their subject-specific learning beyond the scope of the primary curriculum. Interestingly, the book also includes a section on flipping the classroom as a part-time teacher which may also be of interest to those working in tutoring, private education providers or governess positions.

This book was, to me, a really logical follow-on to my first foray into literature regarding flipped classrooms. Have you read it? Do you agree? I’d love to hear! Leave a comment below.

Bretzmann, Jason (2013). Flipping 2.0. Bretzmann Group LCC. Pennsylvania: USA.

Don't Flip Out! - Part 1

Photo courtesy of GoodReads

I’ve done a fair bit of reading about flipping one’s classroom over the last few years. While I was at MPS, I was encouraged to start developing asynchronous units of work for my students – which, after completing some study on virtual classrooms with Coursera, I realised was me unwittingly taking the first step towards flipping! How exciting! I turned to my trusty Kindle to find out a bit more.

The first book I ‘picked up’ was Flip Your Classroom by Jonathan Berghmann and Aaron Sams, two gentlemen credited by some as being the grandfathers of flipping classrooms. It discussed their respective journeys in developing a flipped model that worked for them, in their contexts, and offered pedagogically sound advice about how to develop your own.

I finished the book with mixed feelings. Having worked in remote, rural and regional schools, it was wonderful to hear that provisions were starting to crop up to maximise the time some secondary students spent commuting to and from school and their extra-curricular activities. The Montessorian in me was rejoicing over the possibilities for students to learn at their own pace, with as much repetition as they needed through an engaging medium. And the graduate in me – struggling to fit everything into the day for her students - was overjoyed that there was a possibility to combine the concept of meaningful home learning with more efficient use of face-to-face instruction time. Streaming or downloading instructional videos seemed like an excellent option.

On the flip side (see what I did there?!), I was aware of my urban-dwelling students’ diverse home backgrounds. Some had no access to internet. Some had no guaranteed access to a laptop or tablet. Some didn’t even have ready access to a library as a back-up (too far to walk by their primary school selves). Remote, rural and regional students in Australia, I realised, have patchy reception on their phones (sometimes in their homes). The bandwidth they have comes at a significant cost – and not all families can prioritise that above other day-to-day living costs, even if it is for their child’s education.

So what have I taken away from the book? That the model most commonly purported as the grail of flipped learning is not necessarily the best or most practical the world over. Berghmann and Sams seemed to know I was going to come to this conclusion, though, and provide a plethora of practical suggestions to trial in developing a model that worked for me and my students. Additionally, they discuss how their ‘flipped mastery’ model (regardless of how it is ‘technified’) dovetails with other best practices in education in terms of learning theory. Good for those who can implement it in justifying their choices.

If you’re after a great overview of flipped learning and how to get started in developing your own workable scheme, this is the book for you! Have you had a read? How are you going with your flipped journey? Leave a comment below!

Bergmann, Jonathon and Sams, Aaron (2012). Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student Every Day. International Society for Technology in Education. Virginia: USA.

Coursera for PD

\PD (professional development) is hard to do sometimes, as a teacher. The best courses are in the holidays, are affordable, and are applicable straight away. Flexibility is a bonus, because as with every occupation - and life in general! - things crop up and the weeks get busy. Providers like Open Universities are great, as their courses are recognised as formal qualifications here in Australia. So are standalone or non-award units from bricks and mortar universities, and short courses through TAFE or CAE.

Me, I've chosen a slightly different route. Mum put me onto Coursera about two years ago, and I kicked off by doing a short art appreciation course before starting on education-based courses. You can do courses on just about anything! Art was great but you can study IT, business, marketing, engineering, health sciences - you name it, someone has probably put together a course on it. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are easy for universities to run once they've set them up, because they're asynchronous and assessments are automated or peer marked, so many very reputable higher education providers are putting them together. They're a bit of a cash cow when they're set up through Coursera, too, I would imagine - you can get a verified certificate for a small fee, though you can still do the course for nothing if the certificate doesn't bother you.

After my art course, I hooked up with the Virtual Teacher Program, a specialisation (series of related courses) run by the University of California Irvine Campus. I've currently completed the first four modules and am waiting for January when they will run the final unit (the Capstone Project) over four weeks. I'll be completing it while on the road on our summer trip, so I'm proving the flexibility of the courses first-hand! I've been able to complete the rest while working full time (and studying another course or two part time!).

MOOCs were intially designed for adults, but there is a movement towards them diversifying to be accessible and appropriate for children, such as the Stakers and Brain Chase. I feel like it's the next step in online learning for children - recently someone said 'If there's an internet connection in your classroom, you're no longer the smartest person in the room!' and it's true - it's really true. The MOOC movement makes learning available to all - in the education industry, that includes children seeking different knowledge presented in different ways than what's available in their learning environment, and includes teachers seeking flexible, affordable PD solutions.

Check out Coursera, and also this article which talks about child completion rates of age-appropriate MOOCs. Fascinating stuff.

Screencast-o-matic

So this year was the year of the great e-portfolio shift in my pedagogy. I've used them for the last three years, but this year, I've been able to embed it much more holistically into my classroom program as we've had all four members of our level team on board to develop, trial, review and assess elements of the platform.

I'll do a post on our platform - EduPLEX by OzInterbiz - another time, but today I want to share a Web 2.0/3.0 tool I was encouraged to become familiar with by our outsource instructor, George Sorgi. We had a lot of instructional videos at our fingertips to embed into our portfolio artifact pages, but not one for a graphic manipulation tool we wanted to use, so George suggested I make one. I had seen my Virtual Teacher instructors on Coursera use software where they could play their presentation and talk to it, recording it for us to stream later, and they had briefly mentioned that it would be useful for us to learn to use said software, but they'd never gone into much detail about what to use, or how to go about making a good video.

Screencast-o-matic has a free online version of its software that you can use for just such a purpose! Prepare your presentation by whatever method you like, then load up Screencast-o-matic, and talk to it while you record - voila! Well, not quite voila - it took me nearly two hours to make my first, very short video. Since then, I've become a bit more streamlined in how I go about making videos - I make a running sheet of what I need to cover (usually in point form on the back of an envelope!), practice once and then record. I try to make sure I'm ready to record it in the evening, as the mic picks up background sound very easily (as you'll hear in my example below!).

Feedback I've had from my students has been positive! It took a few of them a little bit before they paused it, took off their headphones and, looking at me with big eyes, asked "Ang, is that YOU??" as they are used to hearing George or one of the other instructors on the videos. It's been a great tool for testing whether they can extrapolate instructions about one task and apply it to another, too, as the examples in the videos are showing how to use functions on the tools, not complete the artifacts themselves.

This was my first Screencast-o-matic video, explaining how to create a graphic using SketchPad. Enjoy!

Chatterpix

A colleague who came to the iii2015 conference with me picked up this very entertaining little photo-to-animation app, which she spoke about during our PD round up this evening. It's called Chatterpix, by the developer group Duck Duck Moose, and it's vastly entertaining.

Chatterpix in a nutshell

Take a photo, draw a mouth, record your message, add accessories, share it. Sounds like a frivolous, purely-for-entertainment app on the surface, right? But the implementations for flipped learning with younger readers are awesome. Using characters from school-wide curricula, such as the You Can Do It program, or the Kimochis, or school-specific mascots, can help you create presentations for students to watch from home in preparation for workshops or lessons the next day.

Meet Ricky Resilience

Follow-up to this is a brainstorm session (collaborative creation of a KWL chart using the stickynotes widget and the touchscreen) used as a pre-assessment of students' intrapersonal learning.