23 Things Week Six: Flipping the Classroom

17)  Make a screencast or try out a flipped classroom tool

I used Explain Everything to make this video lesson on setting up a new project in Book Creator. 

 

 

18) Share your thoughts on flipped learning

I think the idea of “flipping” some kinds of  lessons is a great way to challenge our thinking about what types of learning can take place best in the classroom with the teacher and students together, and which types of learning are better done by the student alone. In the most simplistic model, the “flip” is great. If the previous method of instruction was for the teacher to talk at the students in class, and then for the students to do some kind of independent work (problem sets, answering questions, document analysis) for homework, then the flip makes perfect sense. But I don’t know any classroom at Castilleja that has been like that in decades (certainly not when I was a student, and not now). There are certain parts of many classrooms that might seem to follow that model, but even when a teacher lectures, that experience of being in the classroom is a HUGE part of it. Direct instruction (let’s get rid of the word lecture for what happens in any small classroom), when done thoughtfully, it a very interactive experience. If it is not, then by all means, there is a situation where the flip metaphor works. So back to my first point, the challenge posed by the idea of flipping the classroom is an important one. And they type of instruction I did the short screencast about, how to set up a document in a particular software and follow naming conventions, is certainly something that students could be doing outside of the precious time the teacher has together with students.

But the experience of making the screencast also made me think of two other things. It took a long time to make this short (2 min) screencast (I am sure I would get faster if I made more of them) and when I was looking for instructions myself, I wanted to read text, not watch video! For basic technology things, this method is not particularly efficient. For something more complex, something students might want to watch several times, there would be more value here.