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?
Glad you like the ability to make a distinction between beginner, intermediate, and advanced playlists. The new features MentorMob develops depend on user feedback, so we always love to hear what’s working!
I think your idea of using the playlist to frontload your instruction is great. I just shared the idea with two teachers on our staff.
That’s fantastic to hear. Thanks for commenting and checking the blog – I’d love to hear how you get on!
I’d love to hear how it goes- I’ve just been finding out all about flipped classrooms by watching Katie Gimbar’s videos here:-http://www.fi.ncsu.edu/project/fizz/pd/lecture
I’ve been flipping my class for a few weeks now, initially using you tube videos that students make notes on. The students have taken very well to this and the knowledge they are bring to class from homework being set as a prequel rather than a sequel has allowed for extended learning opportunities.
I’m aware of Mentor Mob and this Blog has inspired me to look at this as being the next step forward. Mark you mention ‘delicious’, how does this compare to ‘pocket’ and ‘keynote’
Hi Mark, this is a brilliant idea. We’ve just started doing Flipped Class with our 6th formers. Currently uploading our Explain Everything made videos onto school You Tube account. This is a great addition to storing stimuli and going from easy to difficult. Thanks for sharing!
My pleasure Debbie. The Mentormob resource is brilliant. Let me know how you get on with it! I’d love to hear more about your flipped experienced in P16. Do you have anything online about it? What’s the YouTube channel?
Thanks,
Mark