In this presentation we define what a flipped classroom is, what our process was in terms of why we flipped and how we flipped our classes and the benefits and challenges we encountered along the way
3. This Presentation
What is a flipped classroom?
Why to flip
Our process
Evolution of the process
Challenges
Benefits
4. What is a Flipped Classroom?
Defined
History
Current
Strayer, J. (2011). Retrieved from
http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/
5. Our Flipped Classroom
Formal
Assessment of Instructional
learning Video Viewed
Outside of Class
Assessment for Quick
Accountability
Learning Check
In-class
Activities to
Enhance
Understanding
6. Why Flip?
Vertical
Time alignment with
AP Biology
Why we
flipped
Incorporate
Foster student
more meaningful
independence
in class activities
7. Our Process
Looked at a few
different software
Asked tech options
Learn to produce Modify in-class
coordinator for • Community clips
and post videos activity
help • Jing
• Screencastomatic
• Camtasia
8. Our Process
Decided on
Camtasia
Free 30 day
trial
5 licenses
purchased by
district
10. Process: How to Screencast
Presentation
screen capture
Audio recording Webcam for
only possible visual
communication
Record as you
present lesson
11. Process: Before You
Screencast
Quiet
Know content and Make presentation
Space
include student goals succinct
Other Prepare theBlock out
Presentationtime
Considerations
Leave room for Add Imagery,
Student
webcam window animations, hyperlinks
deadlines
12. Process: As you screencast
Balance Don’t
storytelling worry 15 minute
Be natural
with about limit
efficiency minutia
13. Process: After you screencast
Back-end edit
Video rendering
Upload for web
hosting
Give link to students
14. Process: Student
Accountability
Note–taking
Assessment for
of Learning independent
learning
Direct
Assessment
questioning
of/for
discussion
learning
other activity
15. Process: In-class practice
Q/A (Increased efficiency)
More hands on activities
Web-tutorials
“Homework” with guidance and collaboration
16. Process Evolution
Quick in-class
summary of nuances
Reference to LTs and
Inclusion of web cam and complex
additional resources
connections of
content
Assessment for Elicit student
Note-taking template
accountability feedback
Smartphone
immediate student
response assessment
17. Challenges
Technical
Buy-in
Issues
Software Student
learning curve independence
Mac v. PC Parent
questions
District
software
decisions
PC
requirements
18. Time
Students
IEP listen at their
pace
Benefits
Four
walls/ 50 Energized
minutes
Higher
level
learning
Chris: Hi there and welcome to doing the flip. I am Chris GalesJamie: ..and I am Jamie Workman.
Chris: If you have your smart phone you can scan this QR code and you’ll be taken directly to a public shared google doc that has various selected resources that we thought you might find useful. If you can’t scan this QR code on the screen, you can scan the QR code that is on the handout that you have.
Chris: Here is what our presentation entails. Go through the list man.
Chris: Not just one model here but the core idea is for students to use teacher created basic lesson containing instructional video that students access at home. In class, students and teacher work together through problems, reinforcing practice, advancement of conceptual understanding, collaborative learning for high level thinking and or application.Started in high ed with recording of lecture, Bergman and Samms Woodland park HS 2007 started this as a way to get students lesson material if they were absent and found that students that weren’t absent also used video.Sal Khan “Khan academy”This is not just to have students watch videos and be done, students must come to class with prepared notes and or questions.
Jamie: This is the general pattern or cycle of learning and assessment as we use.
Jamie: We flipped in order to have more time to work with students individually. This is especially helpful for students that are struggling or confused and there is time for individual conversations. There is also more time for extended learning and discovery and greater depth of understanding through incorporation of more and different in-class activities.Ms. Jennifer Wolf, who is our AP biology teacher has decided to flip her class as well. She is having her students learn basics by viewing Paul Andersen video based lessons bozemanbiology YouTube site. As she decided to do this, and we want our students to be prepared for AP biology, we decided to have our students do this.We also really wanted to have our students learn how to learn independently. As one goes further in their education, the more one has to know how to teach him/herself. It has been our experience that students rely so much on the spoon feeding method of learning that when they get to higher levels of education they flounder. We want our students to be exposed now to an environment where the onus of learning basics is on the students themselves.
Jamie: As we began this in discussions this August, we decided we needed some help. We asked Jon Orech (who is one of the spotlight speakers here today) for help. He told us about the 1st 3 choices of screencasting options as they were free and easy to use. We tried community clips (freedownload from Microsoft Labs) and Jing and screencastomatic (web based screen capture) and I “found” camtasia. We experimented with all of these screen capture options and in doing so learned how to record a presentation that we would normally do in front of our students “live”. We then loaded them to our class websites and told our students to view them.As we had time in class that we normally wouldn’t have, we spent a lot of time figuring out what to do during class. We felt like first year teachers planning new activities that we suddenly had time for. This is a major point to be made, if you do this flip without fundamentally changing what you expect your students to do or inquire about in and during class, there is no real reason to do this.
Jamie: Ultimately we decided that camtasia was the best option after downloading a free 30 day trial on our home computers. A point to be made here: we aren’t pushing this product or selling it we have no association with techsmith. We just found that community clips jing and screencastomatic just wouldn’t do what we wanted in terms of back-end editing of the screen capture. After showing what was possible while using camtasia, we worked on convincing our district to purchase licenses so we could do some of this work at school instead of the middle of the night at home.
Jamie: Our district is a blackboard district and initially we posted our videos on our class web pages through the Bb LMS. Multiple end users concurrently downloading complete video files overtaxed server and some students were unable to access the files. Bb sends our complete files to end users, so multiple students attempting to access the same files concurrently is akin to the entire herd of cattle all trying to drink from the water trough at the same time. There was also the issues= with loading the screencasts as either .wmv files or .m4v files or whatever.Resultantly, we decided to start our own YouTube channel. As YouTube streams the files instead of downloading the files entirely, the water trough issue and the file format issues were no longer a problem. Giving students the direct link to the lessons to be viewed means that there are no excuses and no problems for students to access. Almost every kid uses Youtube. access is not an issue. Edmodo?Moodle?
Chris: Basically you work at a computer with screencapture software and record your lecture as you would present it to students, just while sitting in a chair in front of the computer talking to the computer rather than to an audience. Computer needs some sort of internal microphone or you’ll need some sort of external microphone as picture here. Using a camera (internal within the computer or external as pictured) to record your face for a visual is optional. As we will discuss later this visual recording along with the audio recording is something we decided we needed to do.
Chris: Before you screencast, you need to think about modification that you might need to make to your PowerPoint or keynote presentation. The “normal” rules for good presentations apply here. Be succinct in your written language (6X6) You don’t ever want an entire slide filled with loads of information. Think about imagery and animations or relevant hyperlinks that you can add in to your presentation. (picture worth 1000 words etc.) Leave space for a webcam window. You need room for your face if you are going to decide to do a visual recording of your face along with the audio recording of your voice.Prepare yourself (as you would normally) to know your content and include the learning goals for students in your presentation. Consider including the web cam as when students saw our faces (web cam) it helped them concentrate. “It feels like you’re looking at me”. Students get greater connection, facial / non verbal communication / demonstration with models etc.Other considerations: Make sure you have a quiet space and blocked out and sufficient time to do your recording. This won’t work if you are trying top record a ptresentation with a bunch of other teachers in the office or kids in the classroom. Also be mindful of giving students a timeline for working through the screencast. Some students will want or need to watch it multiple times in order to really get what they need to.
Jamie: Recording a good screencast is a challenge in that we are accustomed to really elaborating and telling our infotainment stories in our classes. These videos need to focus on the essence of content to be learned and one need not and should not expound or be extemporaneous. If you mis-speak or stumble over something simple, don’t feel like you need to stop and start over completely. We all only have so much time. Be dynamic and compelling, but this is not a place for goofiness or overly humorous presentation. Remember, you are going on record and publishing yourself. Making your presentation professional and appropriate. Make it manageable for students in being succinct and efficient. Chunk your video lessons so that they aren’t too long. A time limit of 15 minutes should be your goal.
Jamie: After you record a screencast, you need to consider what editing you might want or need to do. Sometimes transitions / the fading in or out of your webcam window or a smart focus will be something you want to add.Video rendering takes some time and computing power. You can’t record a video and have it ready for the next period. Depending on the software that you use to record your video, you have a variety of choices for file formatting. Ultimately you need to get to your file so that it is unloadable to whatever web hosting site or service you have available to you. Finally, you need to give your students access to the video link and give them their parameters for when they need to have viewed and learned from the lesson. Wherever it is hosted be it YouTube or whatever LMS your district might have.
Chris: As we began this, we discovered that we needed some mechanism for holding students accountable for viewing and learning from the screencasted lessons. So we developed “quick quizzes” that students would take during which they are allowed to use their notes they’ve taken during the screencasts. We taught students how to take two-column notes and while working with a literacy / reading specialist we even designed a note – taking template that some students have chosen to use while viewing the screencasts. These quick quizzes have minimal impact on calculation of grades and we included potential for bonus points associated with the more difficult conceptual questions.Also need to think about creating the urge to learn in our students. Ideally, we do not want students to learn from our lessons (whether or not they are video based or live) “just because it is on the test”. PBL GBL IBL models are used in order to foster student motivation here.We have also used these quick quizzes as “assessments FOR learning”. It is through the discussion of why the correct answers to the questions are the correct answers where students learn more deeply and correct their misconceptions and mistakes. Students can sometimes learn best by learning from their mistakes.Learning activities (collaborative literacy circle activities, laboratory based inquiry activities) that we had time to design and implement are utilized to help students further their understanding.Finally, formal assessments of learning based on video lessons and activities are used. It is these assessment that are the primary measuring tool for our student learning. By far it is these assessments that are the major factor we use in determining our students’ grades. Homework is largely removed from the grade as would be appropriate in the Stiggins Assessment literacy model. We have been able to modify and increase the level of application of understandings to our major unit assessments as a result of having greater opportunity for the learning activities alluded to earlier.
Chris: Say the slide man. Kids come in with more pointed questions, they know what they need help with. Chance for 1:1 conversations to help students. “Guide on the side” rather than “sage on stage” during class time.
Jamie: Our process really evolved over this year. All of these are all things that we changed or added as we went through this process. We didn’t know that having our faces in the video lessons would help students pay attention more until we tried it. We didn’t add in learning targets to the beginning of each presentation until we thought of it. It became apparent that students needed some quick summary of material covered in screencasts, because frankly, some of it is tough to understand. At first we weren’t asking students to bring their notes in from the screencasts, and we weren’t doing the quick quizzes wherein they were allowed to use those notes. It wasn’t until this past January when we decided to give students the note-taking template to help them isolate the main ideas, and we used a google form survey to elicit feedback from students about what they like and what they don’t about screencasting and our note-taking template that we provide for them. Just this past month we stared using socrative.com with kids to give them immediate feedback rsults on a quiz they are taking using their smartphones.
Jamie: Initially, figuring out how to screencast and deciding which type of software was a challenge with the time constraints of being a full time teacher. Really difficult to string together a couple hours to learn how to use editing features of the software. One of the reasons we didn’t start with using web cam window is that we didn’t know how to do that initially. Our 30-day free trial was on our home computers (macs). The district has PCs so the software licenses were for PCs – had to learn the software all over again. Still to this day we are learning how to do the intricate and detailed animations and transitions that are possible. At least there are good video tutorials on how to make videos. District took a while to acquiesce to purchase the software. Had to demonstrate why it was better than free options. The very thing that made it better also made it harder to learn, ironically.The PC that the software was loaded on initially was a single core processor with not a lot of RAM and we had to convince tech folks that we needed a computer with greater capability (dual core processor 2GB RAM etc.)Students are resistant to doing independent high level learning work as it is more difficult. Needed to help students recognize the importance of learning how to learn independently. Some parents had questions along the lines of “does my student have to learn it all by themselves?” After parents began to see what students were doing at home with the lessons, some reported that they began to watch lessons with their students, talk with their students about the lessons, share the learning experience together. “Learning as a family”. Article in D99 newletter
Chris: Really just go through the slide here. We have more time with each of our studentsWe have more time for activities and guiding students through HWStudents can listen to lessons at their pace, stop rewind, review, etc. This is now a documented accomodation for a couple students that have IEPs and have a note – taking accomodation to get notes from other students or teacher as they have processing disorder that doesn’t allow for good in class note-taking.We felt energized as a result of this planning all sorts of new activities excited like 1st year teachersWith the new activities, we can have students engage in higher level thinking and science literacyThis is a tru extension of learning past our four walls and our fifty minutes with our students.
How helpful are our screencasts for our students? Responses to survey of our students: Not at all useful4/131 = 3% Marginally useful 28/131 = 21% Useful 51/131 = 39% Very useful 47/131 = 36%Now we wish our students viewed and learned from our screencasts in a more mature way, as you can see, most of our students responded that they view the screencasts just one time. We asked our students about this, many students did say they responded “just once” but that still meant that they were pausing often and rewinding in chunks but that they didn’t actually review the entire screencasts multiple times.