More Tips for Flipping the Classroom

This morning as we continued to discuss Flipping the Classroom, a fellow teacher and I shared ideas on making the transition to the Flipped Classroom a little easier. As students probably love the idea of watching instructional videos for homework, over the standard drill and practice of working problems and answer questions on a worksheet, there will still be those who may need some period of adjustment. With that, here are a few tips on making that transition.

Breaking the instructional videos into small enough chunks so that they can digest the information helps quite a bit with attention span. You have to remember that they will be doing this on their phone, or home computer. With that, there will be distractions. As you develop your videos, you might spend about 10 minutes of instruction on new material followed by examples and real world applications. Videos should be anywhere from 15-30 minutes. After that, it becomes too much for them to consume in one setting. The next day, follow up with hands-on practice activities.

One problem you may encounter is that there will be a few holdouts during the first week that will not remember to go home and view your videos. To prevent this, spend the first two days showing them where the videos are on the web possibly viewing the first one in class to reinforce that this is their homework. Then keep the following in mind:

• Try to minimize their excuses by making the material easy to retrieve (no difficult logins, web addresses, etc...).
• For students that have a phone (android or iphone), show them how to make an icon on their device that links them directly to your website. This keeps them from making excuses if its right on their phone.
• After the video, give them a preview of what they will cover in class the next day - linking the video with the in-class assignment.

Happy Flipping!