6 COMMENTS

  1. I realize this post is a bit old now, but I thought my story might be of interest.

    I came by the flipped classroom quite by accident. This summer I was teaching a Moore method style introduction to proofs class. Because of my schedule and my students schedules my office hour were going unused and my students were struggling. On a whim I made a pencast after one class to tie togather some loose ends and give a little advice. I ended up making at least one a week after that. My student really seemed to appreciate the videos inspite of the fact that I never did example problems for them. (big ideas only)

    This fall (after reading a bit about reverse classrooms) I made the pencasts a formal part of the course with good success. I would still call what I do a modified moore method course but I think to others it would be a flipped classroom. In the spring I am colaborating with a colleague to try it in a calc 1 course.

    John

  2. I teach film studies and no longer waste time with lecture-style lessons. Students view the necessary learning via our school’s LMS, freeing up valuable class time for practical application. For example, we are covering Weimar Republic cinema. I grab the students’ attention with a short video before moving on to some hands-on learning: http://vimeo.com/31581783

  3. I teach a course where students learn how to build simple Web sites. It’s a skills course. Knowing how to design a site to meet user goals is more important than knowing a bunch of HTML tags.

    (It’s an intro college course, but the principles below apply to K12, and to topics other than Web tech.)

    Practice is key. Students do maybe 100 exercises that start easy, and get harder over time. Students get formative feedback for each solution, that is, a list of things they could improve. Students resubmit as many times as they like, until they get it right.

    When students work outside of class (call it the independent learning phase), they spend their time in read/practice/feedback cycles. There’s a little video, but mostly text. I think that mixed text and video is better than only video, but that’s a different question.

    In class, the only thing I do is help students one-on-one with problems they’re having. The one-on-one is important. I get to know students better than I would in a regular class.

    IMHO, this is better than Khan Academy. In Khan, the independent learning phase is mostly passive. In my approach (which I call CoreDogs – I love dogs), independent learning is active. Students are always creating something and getting feedback.

    I wrote software to make this work, esp. grading. CoreDogs is feedback heavy, so I needed to make giving feedback as quick and easy as possible. BTW, feedback is given by a human, not a computer. Computers can do multiple choice, but can’t grade Web pages, writing, or other student-created work.

    I’d like to release the software as open source, so that anyone could use it. But the s/w should really be rewritten, to make it scalable, multilingual, and usable by non-geeks. Ideas on how to get that work done are welcome.

    Kieran
    kieran@coredsogs.com

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