I have just started flipping my social studies classroom, and am already finding some issues., in that I don't feel that I am being successful. I've had 2 or 3 students say to me that they don't understand why they have to do the learning themselves at home and they learn much more from me standing at the front lecturing them (which I've never done, so I'm not sure where that has come from!), students not doing the homework which means them taking an ipad or mac (depending on which I have available) and going outside to do it. As we are an international school, I have a multitude of different cultures, with different educational viewpoints, in one class. I guess I will always have some pushback with the lecturing thing.
Before I started flipping the class, my MYP coordinator and myself developed a rubric, but I hadn't introduced it to the students. Now I have shown it to 1 group and I'm hoping that now they see that the effort they put in (which includes doing their homework!) will have an impact on their grade at the end of the semester, they might buck their ideas up a bit.
I think, ultimately, myself and our ICT director were more ready than the students were. They weren't introduced to the concept and the expectations in enough detail, and they're sticking to the traditional model.
The majority of my students are not being responsible and active learners, and I think that is partially down to their age (12-13) where they haven't developed the maturity to deal with the freedom they have been given. However, saying that not much has changed in reality for them, they even have to do less! Before I started flipping the class, the students did the research/knowledge gathering themselves...the MYP should be a student-lead programme, and so now I am marrying the concepts of the MYP with those of the flipped class in order to free up class time for the activities which allow them to collaborate, engage and consolidate the learning they have done via video (or website...whatever) at home.
I was reading Crystal Kirch's latest blog post, where she was discussing some problems she feels that she is having with her flipped class at the moment, and commented with my thoughts on some struggles she is having with her internal teaching philosophy:
1 - No retake vs retake: I only let my students retake if they get below a 3 on an assignment (it is out of 8). Then it is up to them to get it done and turn it in. If they don't, within a reasonable time frame, they are stuck with that grade. Parents are also informed.
2 - Non-acceptance/marking of late work vs acceptance/marking of late work: Our policy is that it is up to each individual teacher. Personally this is mine: a 2 week cut off, and unless students have informed me and we have come to an agreement, work is expected on the deadline. If it is not handed in on the deadline and without prior agreement, parents are informed.
3 - No homework or homework: The homework is the video, and previously I didn't really give homework as we had time in class to do the activities and assignments. They were allowed to work on their graded assignments at home (and they were expected to). Again, it is different with you being math and me social studies. Flipping the class has meant many changes to the lesson structure I had previously, which I guess was more of a blended learning style.
4 - Don't push the limits, just hide away and be "normal" vs challenge, experiment, and try new things that you think will help students learn: I honestly think that as an educator, you should always challenge, experiment and try new things but it also depends greatly on where you work, and openness to this. Where I worked before, it was all about grades so you stuck to knowledge driven, regurgitating of exemplar work etc. Where I am now, creativity and experimentation is embraced.
Wednesday 22 January 2014
Friday 10 January 2014
The first video
It's been a few weeks since I last posted, I wanted to try and do one a week but it was winter break and...gasp shock horror...I didn't do any work!
I finally bit the bullet and added a voice over to the prezi I created, giving my students an overview of their new unit of work. I found that you can add voice over to each step in the Prezi, in this case I have 15 steps so...that was a lot of stop-start work. I think it looks and sounds pretty good though, so hopefully I am on the right track! I have also found Garageband to be great for the voice overs, this isn't one you see mentioned a lot. Below is the link to the Prezi!
http://prezi.com/grvum0hcsskh/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
Other than that, not much has been going on in my #flipclass world, I've been burying my head in the sand and panicking a lot but now I have one video created and uploaded onto the school Moodle site, I am feeling more confident. I also completed my sophia.org flipped class certification, and although I already knew a lot of the points covered from my own research and reading other blogs, it was certainly very helpful in reinforcing and of course, finding out things I didn't know :) I really like the sophia platform for posting tutorials and lessons for students, it's pretty clear and straightforward however we already have Moodle and Managebac so having yet another platform seems a bit overkill. I'm also planning on developing a specific website for my courses, just to keep everything together in a format that suits me and my teaching style. I started one with Wix but then discovered that the students couldn't have their own editable pages on it so...back to the drawing board there! If anyone has any ideas feel free to comment!
I finally bit the bullet and added a voice over to the prezi I created, giving my students an overview of their new unit of work. I found that you can add voice over to each step in the Prezi, in this case I have 15 steps so...that was a lot of stop-start work. I think it looks and sounds pretty good though, so hopefully I am on the right track! I have also found Garageband to be great for the voice overs, this isn't one you see mentioned a lot. Below is the link to the Prezi!
http://prezi.com/grvum0hcsskh/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
Other than that, not much has been going on in my #flipclass world, I've been burying my head in the sand and panicking a lot but now I have one video created and uploaded onto the school Moodle site, I am feeling more confident. I also completed my sophia.org flipped class certification, and although I already knew a lot of the points covered from my own research and reading other blogs, it was certainly very helpful in reinforcing and of course, finding out things I didn't know :) I really like the sophia platform for posting tutorials and lessons for students, it's pretty clear and straightforward however we already have Moodle and Managebac so having yet another platform seems a bit overkill. I'm also planning on developing a specific website for my courses, just to keep everything together in a format that suits me and my teaching style. I started one with Wix but then discovered that the students couldn't have their own editable pages on it so...back to the drawing board there! If anyone has any ideas feel free to comment!
Tuesday 3 December 2013
Letter to parents
As I said in my last post, I will be working on a letter home to the parents to explain the changes. As these changes are actually relatively minor, as I am at an IB World School and follow the MYP philosophy, it's always good to keep parents informed of what you are up to! After looking at some examples of letters, I decided many were just too wordy for the community here and made a new version. I sent it to some colleagues, who are also parents of children here, and our wonderful EAL teachers suggested that perhaps mine was too long for EAL parents to follow. So, a new version was drafted and sent home today!
As promised, here is the link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2O296kfKblsc1RsdGxPMU93WUE/edit?usp=sharing
Next week myself and Joe will be team teaching the Grade 7 classes, to introduce them to some parts of the flipped classroom. We are both really excited about this and really, failure is not an option.
As promised, here is the link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2O296kfKblsc1RsdGxPMU93WUE/edit?usp=sharing
Next week myself and Joe will be team teaching the Grade 7 classes, to introduce them to some parts of the flipped classroom. We are both really excited about this and really, failure is not an option.
Friday 29 November 2013
Discussions
Today I met with Joe, I was feeling traumatised by the number of posts I had read on another flipping the classroom site, which were from teachers for whom the method just hadn't worked. This wasn't a possibility I had even considered and left me feeling a bit shaken. What would I do if this didn't work? I'm pinning the entire G7 Semester 2 curriculum on it! I guess I will cross that bridge when I come to it. I do really think you have to be honestly committed to doing it, 100%. It isn't going to be perfect immediately but will be something that I take aspects from other flipped classrooms and apply it to my own, keeping what works and replacing what doesn't. I have to have a positive attitude and not be disheartened if/when there are issues.
Had a good meeting with Joe, our technology director, today. I've been putting together a website using Wix, where I can upload course videos, other content, and where each student can have their own page where they keep their digital portfolio. We've also been working on a letter to send home to parents, and a team-taught week with the G7 at the end of this semester to introduce them to the changes that they will face when they come back after break.
I will post the copy of the letter and the lesson resources when they are complete. Hopefully at some stage this blog will reach the eyes of other Social Studies teachers out there. Lots of Maths and English, few Social Studies.
Had a good meeting with Joe, our technology director, today. I've been putting together a website using Wix, where I can upload course videos, other content, and where each student can have their own page where they keep their digital portfolio. We've also been working on a letter to send home to parents, and a team-taught week with the G7 at the end of this semester to introduce them to the changes that they will face when they come back after break.
I will post the copy of the letter and the lesson resources when they are complete. Hopefully at some stage this blog will reach the eyes of other Social Studies teachers out there. Lots of Maths and English, few Social Studies.
Thursday 28 November 2013
The beginning - background
So, I've been thinking about, and working with our technology director on flipping the classroom. He first introduced our upper school staff to it during a training day, and it really got me thinking. I actually do many of the flipped classroom elements with my Grade 7 social studies classes already, in that we are an IB World School and so follow the Middle Years Programme. The philosophy of the programme is that lessons should be student-driven and student-centred, therefore lecturing or spending large amounts of time imparting knowledge is not the way to go. Therefore, most of the time my students are working individually or in small groups researching information and then applying this to tasks, usually assignments. The policy of our school is to have 2 grades per criteria, per semester, which does end up being quite a lot of assigment work...especially towards the end of the semester...but why? If the philosophy of the MYP is to encourage students to be risk-takers, and it completely against grading progress, why do we still do this? Anyway, I digress.
After listening to Joe talk about the notion of the flipped classroom, and the integration of technology, I fired off an email to ask more about flipping the classroom. In return, I was given the links to blogs by Catlin Tucker and Crystal Kirch. I've found both to be incredibly helpful, in different ways. Crystal has masses of really useful information from her own classes, letter templates, reflective posts etc. etc. But, she is a maths teacher and I am not. I have always found it difficult to immediately come up with ways to apply methods from other classes to my own. Catlin is an English teacher and so slightly closer to my own subject. She has some great stuff on source analysis, for example. This is an area that my Grade 7 students really struggle with - how to analyse a source. Especially as they seem to be very used to just using whatever they find, without really thinking about the origins and purpose.
http://catlintucker.com/
http://flippingwithkirch.blogspot.fi/
Joe asked me to send him a plan for a unit I wanted to flip, I did this and we then went through his suggestions. He introduced me to some amazing sites, and incorporated my desire to introduce online games into the class as well. NoTosh has become a new favourite haunt of mine, so many amazing ideas and I would love to see these guys as keynote speakers at a conference sometime!
http://notosh.com/
So that's background in a nutshell about the start of my flipping the classroom journey! The purpose of this blog is really to allow me to throw my thoughts, ideas, opinions, reflections and general 'OMG what am I doing?!' moments onto a page, to give me a chance to reflect on my progress, my student's progress and my general feelings about flipping the classroom.
After listening to Joe talk about the notion of the flipped classroom, and the integration of technology, I fired off an email to ask more about flipping the classroom. In return, I was given the links to blogs by Catlin Tucker and Crystal Kirch. I've found both to be incredibly helpful, in different ways. Crystal has masses of really useful information from her own classes, letter templates, reflective posts etc. etc. But, she is a maths teacher and I am not. I have always found it difficult to immediately come up with ways to apply methods from other classes to my own. Catlin is an English teacher and so slightly closer to my own subject. She has some great stuff on source analysis, for example. This is an area that my Grade 7 students really struggle with - how to analyse a source. Especially as they seem to be very used to just using whatever they find, without really thinking about the origins and purpose.
http://catlintucker.com/
http://flippingwithkirch.blogspot.fi/
Joe asked me to send him a plan for a unit I wanted to flip, I did this and we then went through his suggestions. He introduced me to some amazing sites, and incorporated my desire to introduce online games into the class as well. NoTosh has become a new favourite haunt of mine, so many amazing ideas and I would love to see these guys as keynote speakers at a conference sometime!
http://notosh.com/
So that's background in a nutshell about the start of my flipping the classroom journey! The purpose of this blog is really to allow me to throw my thoughts, ideas, opinions, reflections and general 'OMG what am I doing?!' moments onto a page, to give me a chance to reflect on my progress, my student's progress and my general feelings about flipping the classroom.
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