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http://ctl.utexas.edu/teaching/flipping_a_class/what_is_flipped Many teachers have heard of and are using the idea of a flipped classroom. Some are only providing videos to students to watch at home, to allow more time in the classroom for experiments, discussions, projects, or challenging homework Q&A time. The problem that some of these teachers might face is that students aren't accountable to watch the videos - and many of them simply don't. This teacher (Ramsey Musallam) has found a way to engage students during this stage of their learning, how to hold them accountable, and how to help them learn concepts better. The video embedded in this page shows an example of one of his flipped lectures. He's using a combination of video and Google docs forms - the video on the page for students to learn from, then a form underneath that students must fill out with their names, summary of the video, and the important part - to finish his last example and provide an answer. He always shows two examples in his videos, but the second one he doesn't finish fully, and lets the students finish it. I thought this was brilliant! This form also allows him to capture all of the responses from the students in a single location, can sort them, check for duplicates (plagiarism), and he shows the list to the class on the projector screen - double accountability! I found it very interesting that he was then taking the responses and pasting into a wordle word cloud, and using that as a discussion stem about the subject! How smart... this is useful technolo The other great example of student engagement and interaction with flip teaching is the use of ed.ted.com - a central location to find educational videos, then create questions and discussion about the video. This method also encourages student accountability, and allows the teacher to gather student responses for grades, or progress. In any case, I will be teaching with a flipped classroom in the future, and hopefully will get a good taste of it during my PSIII placement. Another great resource to learn more about flipped teaching can be found at http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture/ This summary and response are based on this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x71hjtTgQ0E
observation: - attitude regarding technology, motivation, interest, self-learning, voluntarily helping other students, distraction or benefit? Checklist: - most points being met suggests that the technology was a success. Rating scales - similar, but more involved (mostly like a rubric) Rubric - more detailed, deeper levels of learning/achievement based on levels of quality and stages of development. Re-evaluate at regular intervals, like every year. Students, learning objectives, etc change over time. Keep the technology applicable to the real-world, and current. Sample year-end evaluation: At the end of the school year, think back and reflect on the technologies used in your class - whether it be software, hardware, the internet, or any combination of the three - to help you determine whether the resources are working and/or where you need to make changes. One way to help you determine this is to think about whether your students know how to select and use technology to help them find, analyze, and convey information effectively and creatively. If so, then you have a good indication that technology has at least enhanced students’ learning. Also consider whether it helped you as a teacher, such as helping you track grades and other information, or create classroom materials. Exit Slip surveys are also a very useful feedback method from students to gain understanding about a technology mid-stream, instead of waiting until the end of the year or unit. Evaluate digital tutorials: Give young students either an online or CD tutorial that teaches them phonetics and how to read. After they have sufficient practice with the tutorials, evaluate the effectiveness of the digital tutorials. To help you in your evaluation, sit with each student and have them read aloud a short story or a series of sentences that they should be able to read after using the tutorials. Use either a rating scale or rubric to evaluate. My Response: Though this isn't stated in the video, I agree that sometimes technology is used sometimes just for the sake of using it. Educators need to be assessing their use of technology in the classroom, and considering if it is in-fact useful and beneficial to student learning. The fact that a lot of technology integration needs to be assessed through it's own medium is a great method, and does indeed require more thorough assessment techniques such as rubrics and check lists. My concern is that some teachers are biasing their assessment tools to grade the use of the technology, rather than the real content and learning which should be demonstrated through the technology. In many cases, the ITC curriculum is more of a tool, than an end-of-year outcome. This is certainly something that I will be considering, especially some of the evaluations from a teacher's perspective on how effective a tool was throughout the year, where I need to improve or adapt, and what to toss in search of something more effective for learning. Below is an embedded concept map I made as a summary of Jeff Bradbury's podcast about PLNs (the podcast is about 45 minutes long). As of right now, my PLN consists of youtube subscriptions to other science and technology educators, as they are helpful resources for teaching science, or learning different topics which I am not fully comfortable with (yet).
I liked Jeff's ideas of connecting more face-to-face; it doesn't always have to be an online network. (Though I'm a fairly quiet and reserved person when it comes to conferences and conventions... we'll see how that evolves over time). I agree with everything that was mentioned in his podcast, and can see many benefits of twitter inside and outside the class, and see it as a potentially extremely valuable tool inside and outside the classroom, as more students are bringing internet-connected devices to the class (or can use school devices). In a Virtual Reality for Education class here at the University of Lethbridge, we are using an OpenSim VR environment (Second Life clone) with FireStorm viewer to interact with classmates. This 3D VR environment/server still has a few glitches, one being that the audio chat feature is not working.
In our group meeting last night, we discussed some of our findings from internet searches about the Pros and Cons of using virtual reality in a classroom. We shared our lists, then had a little discussion around the combined lists of pros, then for the cons. This PDF file is my summary of our discussion. |
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