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.

MAV - Lectures and Support

When they redeveloped Docklands here in Melbourne, they built a beautiful library on a dock. They weren't brilliantly imaginative when they named it, but it doesn't seem to have mattered too much - The Library At The Dock is proving to be a great hub for all sorts of learning communities that can converge on the city.

One of those communities is the Mathematical Association of Victoria. Each year, they host a series of free lectures for anyone interested in Mathematics. Last year, knowing our school was looking into branching into 3D printing as a Design and Technology and Mathematics endeavour, I was looking for professional development to help me work out what direction this might take in my classroom.

MAV came up on a Google search, and I registered for a free lecture on 3D printing and Mathematics as presented by Dr. Burkard Polster and Dr. Marty Ross. It was a great afternoon, with lots of interesting information about the evolution of 3D printing and how 3D printing gets used now. While they were presenting, I was making some connections to curriculum links, and I came out of it with some really interesting ideas and new concepts to chew over.

MAV offers really interesting topics for their lectures. Last year they also offered 'Was Pythagoras Chinese?' and 'The Mathematics of Futurama'. This year, so far they've done 'The Mathematics of the Simpsons' and 'Footy Maths', and they still have 'Calculus In One Easy Lesson' and 'Yin and Yang Maths' coming up.

If you're interested in changing up how you think about maths in the classroom, as well as updating your own mathematical knowledge and understanding, you can register for the remaining lectures here. MAV also offers support to teachers with lesson plans and resources for differentiated instruction under the 'Teach Maths for Understanding' or 'TM4U' package as part of their membership.

New School Year... sort of?

It's an interesting time of year for educators. Here in Australia, we're racing towards the end of Term 3, which means beginning our work on reports, assessment, online and offline student folios, PDPs, and job applications for next year. On the other side of the world, though, our North American counterparts are heading back to school - and that's great news for us. Not only are there an abundance of sales on online resources and subscriptions, just in time for a new year of planning, there are also about a million parodies out there about back to school scenarios.

Most of what I post here is professional and digitally minded, but today's post is lighthearted and fun. My two favourites from this year's parodies.

One Day More by the Des Moines School District

I Like Big Buses

Making Maths... More... with Vi Hart

A while ago, while looking for an interesting way to teach students about fractals, I came across this amazing video.

It was made by the very talented Vi Hart, a 'recreational mathemusician' of agnostic gender who has worked for/with the Khan Academy as well as being an academic in her own right. Videos on the Vi Hart channel cover a lot of high school and university maths concepts, but they're built from the basics, and often revolve around easily accessible/visible/constructible more advanced concepts. My students may not understand all the mathematical theory in the videos on the Vihart channel, but they recognise the representations of concepts like hexaflexagons and infinity trees and how they fit (at a very basic level) with what they're learning in primary school.

The video above is still their favourite, though! We had a table filling up pinecones, flowers, weird seedpods and photos of vegetables and fruit from home after watching it.

If you're looking for a way to capture your students' attention (particularly your bright little buttons!) and get them wanting to explore the maths they're learning in class more deeply, or in ways they can see and touch in the world around them, Vi Hart is a phenomenal hook, line and sinker. You can also check out Vi's website here and follow Vi's Twitter feed here.

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!

Classroom Blog Repository

I want to share a great initiative getting off the ground in educational cyberland.

It's called Classroom Blog Repository and it's pretty awesome.

Some, only scratching the surface of the site, may look at it and say it's just a collection of links to classroom blogs - but it is SO much more than that. It is a platform from which teachers can draw inspiration, view best blogging practice in action, connect with like-minded educators, and connect their classes with like-minded students. It is an opportunity to showcase student work and receive feedback from others around the world, and an opportunity for students to learn about giving useful, academic feedback, and engage in cyber-savvy discussion about how to improve their own work.

There's no cost involved, and every blog is manually entered by the creators, who touch base with you afterwards to make sure you know your blog entry has gone live. Submitting your class blog URL, in my mind, is the ideal next-step for an educator who has got the hang of posting meaningful, relevant content - and now wants to broaden their audience.

Some interesting notes - while some educators still use Blogger/Blogspot (like I do), many are using Global2 (attached to vic.edu.au). Many choose to include photos of students, featuring identifying data (school logo, etc.), which I don't. Many have students contributing but not moderating (also my practice). The entries act as an excellent tool to encourage reflection!

Click through and have a look sometime!