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.
Tuesday, 3 December 2013
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)