Flipping the Classroom and Other Projects
Hello Blog...it's been awhile!
I have been extremely busy since my last post in November. Finishing touches were made to my Harrison 2.0: 23 Things for Faculty Development program (with my colleague Erin). We are super excited with the participation so far and are looking forward to monitoring discussion and ideas as the Winter progresses (more information on the program will come soon).
In addition to taking a 12-day vacation (with total relaxation!), I have been working on finalizing plans to flip my classroom for this quarter. If you're not familiar with that term, start Here; then take a look at a better developed curation Here.
Background
The course that I teach (Information Literacy) lends itself to heavy interaction with hands-on activities. In previous quarters, I have run into issues where I would lecture...moving extremely fast through the material for time-sake...and then would have 1 good in-class activity only to find there wasn't any time left for questions or further hands-on research.
Enter the Flipped Classroom Idea
I first got a taste of this concept with the Kahn Academy's TED Talk. It seemed to make sense and in the Fall of 2011, I started making plans to officially flip my classroom (a form of blended learning). Tonight, I was doing a bit of reading in my RSS reader and came across two items that have further peaked my interest:
1) This post, by Andy Schwen made me think... there's GOT to be a way to have Google Docs do this without having to pay for a 3rd party app to work within an already free system.
2) Which led me to follow a search to this post that provided detailed Google Docs info for student assessment.
For this quarter, on the weeks that we have open research labs (my wording for students' in-class "homework" assignments), I am requiring students to have watched an introductory lesson at home. They are also required to fill out a Google Docs form with fill-in-the-blank questions so I know whether students have watched the material like they should have prior to coming to class. After watching the video within point #2, I learned that you can display nice graphs of student responses! I didn't know this (and I'm a HUGE Google Docs user)!
So, with the capability of instant responses and a nice graphical display of said responses, an attendance requirement at the start of every class will allow me to see whether students have questions about the material they were supposed to watch. This could really work well!
To further add some fun to my class, I will also be using Facebook. Having a class Facebook page will allow me to post additional course content (like you-tube videos and articles) throughout the week. Students will also be required to complete a "discussion" post at the end of every class meeting on the Facebook page. I'm hoping that this will help students to be engaged with course material since they know their peers will be reading their responses. My single question for each day will be: "What did you learn today that you didn't know prior to this class meeting?"
I'm hoping my students end up really benefiting and liking this new system. I'm super excited about it and will be documenting how it goes!
And ....
My husband seems to think I should bring along a pineapple upside-down cake to our first class meeting... I'm still pondering this idea...
Infographic Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
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