Many is the time when I’ve been considering ways to flip my classrooms. MentorMob provides an excellent way of doing this. A web 2.0 tool to share ‘learning playlists’ - a bit like micro favourite lists as you might see on delicious, the site allows members of the community to build the learning playlist based upon a specific topic. Where it differs from a posh list of links is that you can build the list with an order of difficulty, ‘beginner’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘advanced’. One of the coolest features of the lot (for teachers) is that you can also add in pop quizzes within the playlist. Adding in learning checks based upon multiple choice or true/false options. Okay, this doesn’t lend itself to higher order / extended abstract responses but it’s not there to completely replace the role of the teacher!
I dipped my toes in to the MentorMob community last week with a playlist aimed at putting all of my resources about the power of Twitter for teachers all in to one place. I linked up all my blog posts, put them in ascending order, added in the great screencasts by @DavidMiller_UK and published.
In the course of a week, the playlist has had a total of more than 10,000 hits. I’ve been receiving stories about how the playlist has been used by schools and teachers all over the world to help teachers looking to join Twitter to support their own professional development. It’s been amazing.
All that to one side, it has really struck me how this tool could be used to construct learning playlists for students to work through prior to their attendance in lessons. What I am going to trial next week is sharing playlists with students prior to their lessons. I am going to ask students to work through the playlist for their homework and then when they attend class, I will build upon and develop their learning, using the flipped model. I think it’s going to work really well. What do you think?
Further to the flipped learning discussion on #ukedchat last week and Daniel Edwards‘ brilliant organic post about planning flipped learning in light of OFSTED requirements here, I thought it would be opportune to mention the O2 Learn site. This is a site which has literally hundreds of screencasts and videos of different topical areas broken down by subject area which are all accessible for free.
There is added incentive on the site too as there is a weekly award for the video that is voted most popular. There is a £2,000 prize given away each week, which is a really good incentive to put some of your content up there.
Visit the site and check it out here: https://www.o2learn.co.uk/
Tonight I’m hosting my first #ukedchat session on Twitter. I’m really looking forward to it. There have been changes in the ‘lead’ over the course of the past week, with Flipped Learning taking an early lead and then ‘Secret Spaces’ fighting back. The poll had 234 votes and 768 views. Cool! Here’s how it all panned out:
So with the ‘Flipped Learning’ topic taking the lead, I thought I’d provide some background information and reading to the topic.
Wikpedia states:
Flip teaching
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Flip teaching is a form of blended learning which encompasses any use of using Internet technology to leverage the learning in a classroom, so a teacher can spend more time interacting with students instead of lecturing. This is most commonly being done using teacher created videos that students view outside of class time. It is also known as backwards classroom, reverse instruction and reverse teaching. [1]
The traditional pattern of secondary education has been to have classroom lectures, in which the teacher explains a topic, followed by homework, in which the student does exercises. In flip teaching, the student first studies the topic by himself, typically using video lessons created by the instructor[2] or shared by another educator, such as those provided by the Khan Academy. In the classroom, the pupil then tries to apply the knowledge by solving problems and doing practical work.[3][4][5] The role of the classroom teacher is then to tutor the student when they become stuck, rather than to impart the initial lesson. This allows time inside the class to be used for additional learning-based activities,[6] including use of differentiated instruction and project-based learning.[7]
Flip teaching allows more hands-on time with the instructor guiding the students, allowing them to assist the students when they are assimilating information and creating new ideas (upper end of Bloom’s Taxonomy).[8]
With that baseline, part of the issue which is getting Steve Wheeler a bit “flipping irritated” is that the term is (as admitted by Aaron Sams) ambiguous and seems to only really include the preparation and dissemination of videos on topics ala the Khan Academy.
So what is the way forward? How do we get flipped or instructional learning in to our classrooms? Should we have flipped learning in our schools? If we do, how do we deliver it? Does it require access to technology? If so, how do we provide that? Is video the only way forward? Could we use a more analogue method (anyone heard of books? Or in a digital world, iBooks?)? What do we do about the digital divide if it is a requirement for technology to be used? Should our school day change to give students more time and chance to reflect on the ‘flipped learning’?
Flip or flop?
What do you think?
See you at 8pm tonight for some hopefully lively discussion around this topic.
In the meantime, here are some more sites with information on the topic of the flipped classroom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_teaching
http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/03/flipped-classrooms/
http://flipped-learning.com/
http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/how-the-flipped-classroom-is-radically-transforming-learning-536.php
http://www.flippedhighschool.com/
and for some already lively debate, check:
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/what-flip.html
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