In order to serve the needs of our teachers during our transition to Google Apps for Education, I've created a website with articles, tutorials, and information about Google Apps. You can link to my page from this blog or by visiting http://everythinggoogle.com
You can also subscribe to posts and updates to Everything Google here:
Looking for a few good apps to use in your classroom? Here is a short list of apps for iOS devices and some for Android. Thanks to the ladies at SimpleK12 at #ISTE2014 for sharing these:
iTunesU -http://www.apple.com/education/ipad/itunes-u/ Download the app or visit the link for more information on virtual courses from a wide range of K-12, Colleges, or Universities.
Yesterday at ISTE 2013, I attended a breakout session facilitated by John Bergmann and Aaron Sams. They did an outstanding job and I thoroughly enjoyed their presentation. I had been using an app that allows me to edit and then post directly to my blog, but it lost the entire post when I hit send. As a result, this is my attempt to repost my thoughts.
First of all, Bergmann and Sams have come a long way since they started flipping their classrooms. Many people think they started out full flip, but as they said in their presentation, it took them 6 years to get where they are today. As they spoke, they reinforced the idea that flipping is not the same for every student and for every teacher. Some teachers start out small and flip their lectures, while others flip utilizing many resources such as interactive objects in which students explore content as inquiry based learning, in addition to videos, books, etc....
Students do not always get the same experience out of the flipped classroom, so it is up to the teacher as facilitator to manage those students and help them along the way. As Bergmann and Sams stated, they have students all along the spectrum, who either get it and are able to master concepts and move on, or need a little more coaching from their teacher or peers. That bit of coaching and facilitating to all students helps to establish a relationship that is important to learning. Although they mention that we need to teach students that learning is their responsibility, Bergmann and Sams say that establishing a coaching rapport helps.
While they say that teachers occupy many different spots along the flipped continuum, they say that teachers usually do best when they rely 15% of the time on pre-created materials and 85% of the time on material they have created themselves (This is a total paraphrasing of what they said, but I hope it serves well). The reason there is an emphasis on more self-created videos is because it goes a long way into reinforcing the teaching relationship with students.
Teaching for Tomorrow: Flipped Learning with Aaron Sams
If you're just thinking of flipping your classroom or have already done so and would like to take it to the next level, here are a few resources to think about.
Popcorn Maker- https://popcorn.webmaker.org/ this web tool from Mozilla allows teachers to transform flipped instruction videos into interactive learning tools. By having the ability to insert links, text, pictures and live feeds from the web, your instructional videos will take on a new life by giving your students the ability to interact with content as it is covered in the video.
TED -Ed - http://ed.ted.com/ - if you're just starting out, creating a video for each piece of instruction in your curriculum can be daunting. YouTube has a wealth of informative and instructional videos available for use as a great starting point. Working from this base, TED-Ed allows you to flip videos by providing a direct link and adding questions, extension activities, and web quests to YouTube videos - all accessible by one URL and complete with tracking to give teachers a feel for overall student understanding.
