Monthly Archives: June 2012

How to Flip Your Classroom

Distance-learning, Education reform, Teaching, Uncategorized, Workflow

HOW TO FLIP YOUR CLASSROOM

2012-06-30

by Richard White

Flipping a classroom consists of off-loading (usually to the Internet) some of the non-interactive aspects of one’s classroom, in favor of using time in-class for activities that take advantage of the teacher’s immediate presence.

Perhaps the most obvious example might be this:

At school At home
Standard classroom Student listens to teacher introduce new math topic Student goes home and tries to do homework, often unsuccessfully and without the opportunity to get questions answered in a timely manner.
At home At school
Flipped classroom Student watches brief video explanation of new topic online, or reads new material to be discussed in class the next day. Student works on “homework” problems, with teacher answering questions or providing clarifying follow-up as necessary.

Pretty straightforward, right? It’s a good idea, and there’s lots to recommend it. In fact, you may already be implementing some aspects of the flipped model, even if nobody has ever referred to it by that name before. Some teachers give students time in class to read a chapter in novel, and then discuss it in the remaining class time. Others choose to assign the reading as homework, leaving more time in class for re-reading passages, interpreting what the author has written, or general discussion.

If you’ve done something like this, congratulations—you’re officially part of the most recent trend in education, and you should feel free to strut around saying things like, “‘Inverted learning?’ Honey, I’ve been flipping my class for years…”

If you haven’t tried this yet, or you’re just looking for a few ideas on how to get started trying this out, let’s take a look at the stops involved in doing such a thing. And then read below for some specific bits of advice regarding the process of converting to a flipped classroom.

Things to think about:

Start with a single day, or a single week, or a single unit.

You don’t need to reorganize your entire semester to begin trying out a flipped model. A day or two will give you a chance to see what the benefits and challenges are, and give you some good ideas on how to go about designing a flipped model on a larger scale.

Be patient with the students.

It may take them a little time to adjust to this at first. Under the traditional model, it’s easy for a teacher to ascertain whether a student has turned in a homework assignment, and easy for students to recognize something tangible like the piece of paper with their writing on it. A flipped instruction model is going to ask them do something rather than make something—watch a video, read this section, interview their parents about something—and this is a little different from what they ordinarily do for homework.

What can you flip in your class?

We all teach different subjects, in different ways, so it’s a uniquely personal challenge, figuring out what you can try flipping in your own class.

Here are some ideas to get you started, following the same format listed above.

The French Revolution

At school At home
Standard classroom Teacher lectures on the the origins of the French Revolution Student goes home and does a worksheet or write answers to problems from a textbook.
At home At school
Flipped classroom Student at home watches a Khan Academy introduction to the French Revolution, and is asked to take notes on that presentation. Student comes in to class with notes prepared for a discussion. Students are asked to take additional notes as the discussion proceeds, and teacher collects notes at the end of class for evaluation.

Adding Fractions

At school At home
Standard classroom Teacher presents the idea of adding fractions with different denominators, and does an example. Student goes home and does homework problems from his or her textbook.
At home At school
Flipped classroom Student at home watches a YouTube video on adding fractions, and is asked to do attempt two different practice problems at home. Student comes in to class with practice problems completed (or not), and instructor gives an additional 15 problems of varying degrees of difficulty to reinforce the skill.

You get the idea.

Think about assessment.

When students walk into class the next morning, how are you going to know whether or not the students have done their flipped-style homework from the night before? A warm-up activity? A quiz? A discussion in which each student is monitored for participation? My own students tend to try to get away with doing less rather than more, so you’ll need to identify a means for checking that they’re doing their new homework.

Allow for varying access to technology.

If students don’t have some sort of comparable access to technology, you’ll need to develop strategies for managing those differences. If a video lesson is being watched online, a teacher might send home a DVD that the student can watch at home. At-school access to the video, in the library perhaps, can be arranged for during other times of the school day. These factors can complicate your efforts to flip the classroom, but it’s important that all students be accommodated in one way or another.

Create your own resources.

Ultimately, there will come a point at which you’ll find that what you need your students to see doesn’t yet exist, or maybe you’ll be inspired to develop something unique and personalized for them. Creating and uploading videos to YouTube is a relatively easy thing to do with the webcam that’s probably already included in your laptop computer. If you want a higher production value, or you want to capture your computer screen while showing a PowerPoint presentation, you’ll almost certainly have to buy some software that will allow you to experiment with that process. TechSmith’s Camtasia for both PC and Mac, and Telestream’s Screenflow for the Mac, are currently popular and powerful screen capture utilities. If you run Linux, you can do a $ sudo apt-get install xvidcap to install XVidCap, a live screen capture utility that’s very good, but lacks some of the high-end editing capabilities built into Camtasia and Screenflow.

Make your materials available on a website.

Google’s YouTube is a powerful means of delivering videos, but it can be a distracting place to send a student for flipped homework assignments. At some point you’ll almost certainly want to create a webpage or website that will give students a one-stop shop for finding materials used in your course. Your school may offer the means of putting up a course webpage, but if not, you can certainly create your own. The quickest, easiest, and certainly cheapest way to do this is to use Google’s Sites feature, available with any Google account. Once you’ve got your page set up, you can use it to easily deliver flipped assignments to your students.

When you look at all of that up there, it seems like it’s a lot of work, but you certainly don’t have to jump into this all at once. Begin at the beginning, and move forward as your time and teaching assignment allow.

For more resources on Flipped Classrooms, see:

Notes On the Flipped Classroom

Distance-learning, Education reform, Google, Teaching, Uncategorized, ,

NOTES ON THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM

by Richard White

2012-06-27

Okay, the singularity has arrived. My friend Sharon, an outstanding English teacher who has remained, to this point, a very traditional and non-technology-based instructor, just texted me from an ed conference she’s at, and she wants to try out this whole “flipped classroom” thing.

She wants to know how to go about doing that.

Let’s take care of some terminology first.

What’s a ‘hybrid classroom?’

A “hybrid classroom” or “blended classroom” (the terms are synonymous) is one in which, in addition to meeting in a physical classroom on a regular basis, some significant amount of the work for a course is conducted, or at least available, online.

This is typically something more than just a single online assignment. A course in which students regularly work online—perhaps via a discussion board, a wiki, or blogging—or a where content is delivered online, or assignments submitted online… these are all aspects of a hybrid course. (It should be noted that historically, non-online activities might be part of a blended course as well, but today, nearly all references to hybrid courses refer to Internet-mediated work.)

Traditional Activity Online Equivalent
Watching/listening to a classroom lecture from the teacher. Watching/listening to the teacher in a pre-recorded podcast or video.
Participating in a classroom discussion Reading an online Discussion Board and contributing one’s own ideas to a topic of conversation
Asking the teacher or other students for clarification, or help on an assignment Emailing, texting, online chatting, or videoconferencing with the teacher or classmates
Taking a quiz in class Taking an online quiz (via Google Forms, for example)
Writing an essay on paper Writing an essay on Google docs
Turning in papers in class. Turning in papers via email, Dropbox, or by sharing the document with the teacher
Collaborative projects in class Online collaborations via shared documents
Classroom presentations to students Online presentations—websites, wikis, videos—to the world

You can read about people’s experiences with, and the ideas behind, hybrid or blended learning here, and here, and here.

What’s a ‘flipped classroom,’ then?

A flipped classroom is simply a type of hybrid classroom in which activities traditionally conducted in class are shifted to an out-of-class time, allowing for valuable face-to-face class time to be used for other work.

Most commonly, this currently consists of teachers recording short videos of material that would have been presented in class, so that students can watch that presentation at home. The idea, then, is that students can do their “homework”—working on problems, asking questions of the teacher—in class, where the teacher is available to assist.

Why Would I Want to Consider Changing What I Do?

There are lots of reasons why you might want (or might not want) to change the way you look at how you teach. There’s no question that students find technology-mediated experiences more interesting, and teachers interested in exploring new possibilities tend to be enthusiastic about these ideas, which has a positive effect on their teaching.

Many teachers, and I count myself among them, also feel that we should not only be teaching content, but process; having students learning to use technology is critical to preparing them for their future.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, teachers who have shifted to a flipped classroom model feel that that model actually allows them to make better use of the time they have with their students. Why have students work on their homework at home where the teacher is unavailable to answer any questions they might have? Why have students sit in class listening to a presentation when they can just as easily do that at home, on the computer?

What are the Challenges Associated with Hybrid Classrooms and Flipped Learning?

  1. Time
    It takes time to make these changes. Teachers will have to spend time reorganizing their courses, recording video for flipped classrooms, developing and maintaining the website, communicating new processes and expectations with students and parents…

    This isn’t meant to dissuade you from taking on the process, but for teachers who already occasionally feel overworked, it’s important to acknowledge this at the start. A good strategy is to make small, incremental changes, rather than trying to re-do your entire course at one time. See the follow-up post on one strategy that you can use.

  2. Student Access to Technology
    It may well be the case that not all of your students have access to a computer connected to the Internet, which is obviously going to have an effect on how a teacher or a school chooses to approach these strategies. Some schools already require technology experiences for students via a 1-to-1 or Bring Your Own Device program, some provide financial or hardware support for students-in-need, some teachers will provide non-technology-based alternatives, and some teachers/schools will restrict new learning strategies unless every student can be provided with the same experience.
  3. Not Enough Research Yet on Learning Improvements
    If you’re an evidence-based guy or gal (as I am), and you’re looking for data that suggests all of this improves learning or test scores, I’m afraid that the jury is still out on that.

    From the U.S. Department of Education’s Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-analysis and review of online learning studies:

    …Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K–12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education).

    This doesn’t mean that a flipped classroom isn’t worthy of exploration. On the contrary, interested and enthusiastic teachers are encouraged to consider new ways of looking at how they teach, and implementing new instructional strategies that they feel might be of benefit to their students.

Okay. So how do I get started?

If it turns out that you’re interested in taking some steps towards making your course more hybrid, and in particular you’d like to play around with the idea of flipping your class a bit, the next post will give you one possible path.

See you then!

Five Things To Do at the End of the School Year

Computers, DIY, Workflow

FIVE THINGS TO DO AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR

2012-06-15

by Richard White

It’s the end of the school year, and maybe you’ve had a chance to close things out in your classroom. How about taking a few moments to close things out on your computer, too?

Here are six things to do with your computer at the end of the school year.

1. Backup Everything
This should go without saying, but I’m always amazed at how many people don’t have a backup of their computer. If you don’t already have at least two local backups of your Documents folder, and if you don’t already have a subscription to an offsite backup solution like Backblaze or Carbonite, you’ll be pleased to know that you are excused from the rest of this assignment. YOUR assignment is to:
a. order one of these or something similar with 2-day shipping from Amazon, and then set up your computer to do automatic backups (Time Machine on the Mac, Backup and Restore on Windows 7).
b. While you’re waiting for your hard drive to arrive, you can go to Backblaze or Carbonite, give them $50-$60 on your credit card, and sign up for a year’s worth of offsite, in-the-cloud, backups. Because… your computer is going to crash. If it’s happened to you already, you know what I’m saying, and if it hasn’t happened to you yet, don’t worry: it will…!

2. Archive Last Year’s Material
With any luck at all, you’ve already got someplace in your Documents folder where you’ve saved all the work you’ve done this year: those tests you wrote, those handouts and worksheets you created, etc. Those should all be dragged into a folder called “AcademicYear2011-2012” or something similar. And if those documents are scattered willy-nilly about your desktop, that’s all the more reason to take advantage of this opportunity to assemble them all in one place.

(The reason for this is two-fold. You want to reduce the amount of time and energy you waste digging through old documents that aren’t actively being used, and you want to reduce the amount of time and energy you spend looking for those documents when you do need to find them.)

You get extra credit for organizing the files from this academic school year into sub-directories labelled by class.

3. Archive your email
If you’re like many teachers I know, you have a drastic drop-off in the amount of work-related email you get during the summer. Now’s the perfect time to tidy up that Inbox. Archiving or exporting email, depending on which email process you use and what facilities there are for archiving, may make your Inbox faster loading and easier to navigate.

There are numerous strategies for doing this. Google’s web-based Gmail and Apple’s Mail.app both offer convenient commands for doing this right from the interface (see screen captures below). Consult the documentation for those services, or check in with your local IT staff for specific advice on how to export or archive your own email.

4. Digitize Your Stuff
If you’re still carrying around paper copies of your class materials, the end of the school year is a perfect time to digitize. Anything that’s a Word document or a PDF is easily stored in the appropriate folder on your computer. Anything that’s NOT, and that you need to keep for future reference, can be scanned as a PDF and tucked away into a folder on your computer, where it will be (in most cases) far easier to find, and take up far less space (like, *none*) in your filing cabinet.

5. Get Organized
Everybody loves a little Spring Cleaning, and the chance to clear out the detritus that naturally accumulates over time. (You have heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, haven’t you?)

There’s a note I keep on my computer to remind myself of the benefits of keeping organized. It’s from a talk on What We Know About Learning given by a professor at Caltech last year, and it simply says, “Simple frameworks reduce cognitive load.” The idea is that creating a framework or structure that you can use to organize your understanding makes it easier to learn, and I’m obviously extending that idea to the hard drive on your computer. Get things organized on your hard drive, and it will be easier for you to access and work with that information.

Here’s the directory structure of a folder on my hard drive called “edu,” into which I’ve placed a number of different folders for various educational contexts. The “poly11-12” folder contains sub-folders of the files I’ve used this year in my courses and other contexts at school. I leave those files and folders there as a record of what I did that year. If I need a copy of a file for the new school year, I do just that: I make a copy for the new year, and leave the original in place.

⌘

An Introduction to Dropbox

Computers, Workflow

AN INTRODUCTION TO DROPBOX

by Richard White

2012-06-11

Have you heard of Dropbox? Are you using it yet? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘no,’ then sit back and prepare to be freaked out. In ten minutes or so, Dropbox is going to change your entire world.

Dropbox is, at its simplest, an online directory (folder) where you can store files. It looks like a folder on your computer, but everything in that folder is also stored “in the cloud,” on Dropbox’s servers.

Why would you want to store your stuff on their servers instead of on your own computer? Two common use-cases will demonstrate.

  • You want to share files with another person.
    Have you ever tried to email a 50MB movie to someone, or wanted to send them a set of photos from your vacation? Email doesn’t let you do it because the file sizes are too small. But you can place those files in a Dropbox public folder, or created a Dropbox shared folder, and your friend can use Dropbox to access those files. Problem solved.
  • You want to share files with yourself on another device.
    I have a few files that I need to have access to from multiple machines. With Dropbox installed on my Mac, on my Windows machine, on my Ubuntu Linux machine, and even on my iPhone and iPad, I can work with those files without having to email them to myself or go through any of those other machinations. Any changes I make to the file on one machine are automatically synced nearly immediately to all devices.

The nitty-gritty details: Dropbox is free for the first 2GB of storage. If you want more than that you’ll have to pay, or have people sign-up for Dropbox using a link you provide in which case they’ll award you a little referral love by increasing that amount for each person bring in. You do have to download their software to install on your machine—this is not a browser-based program. You’ll need network access, obviously, if you want files to be synced between machines. You can access local copies of the files on most devices, although mobile devices (iPads and iPhones) don’t keep local copies (unless configured to).

Dropbox states that files are stored securely, and maybe you’re satisfied with that. The truly paranoid, or those with files of a particularly sensitive nature, will almost certainly encrypt their files or folders before uploading them.

One other caveat: if you share a directory with someone else and they decide to alter or delete a file in that folder, then it obviously gets altered/deleted from that Dropbox folder, which means that your copy—perhaps your only copy of that file—also gets altered/deleted. Thus, it may be in your interest to keep an archive copy of whatever files it is that you’re sharing with others—those business documents, those vacation photos, etc.