Whiteboarding

Whiteboarding

White Boards provide an opportunity for students to engage in collaborative learning, clear communication and to reinforce their learning by teaching each other.  

The white boards are large enough for two students to work simultaneously on a problem.  

Teachers can easily view the work and use the process as formative assessment. 

Students can share their work in small groups or display to the entire class. 

SOCRATIC - Science and Math Tutorials at Their Finest

SOCRATIC

I am very impressed with a relatively new start up web site called SOCRATIC. 

The site offers access to video tutorials for Biology, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Physics and Calculus.  Each subject is organized into a separate page with the topics for each subject organized by into sections, each section provides a series of videos from educators who have been invited to share their material.  

The Socratic site is clean and easy to navigate. All of the videos that I have viewed have been extremely helpful and well made. The lead educator is Tyler DeWitt. Who does an outstanding job of presenting material in a clear and a concise manner. He breaks the material down in such a way that it is   logical and easy to understand.  Some of you may have seen his TED Talk - Hey Science Teachers --- Make It Fun. 

Currently for Chemistry, Socratic provides the opportunity for students to post questions for the Socratic team of educators to provide explanations or solutions. 

I have incorporated videos from the site as support and reinforcement for my owned flipped lessons.

Here are some links to examples of the Socratic site.

http://socratic.org/chemistry/the-behavior-of-gases/ideal-gas-law

http://socratic.org/biology/introduction-to-biology/the-characteristics-of-living-things

http://socratic.org/physics/forces-and-newtons-laws/defining-force/videos

http://socratic.org/calculus/limits/finding-limits-algebraically/videos

10 Reasons to Flip Your Classroom

10 Reasons to Flip Your Classroom

Flip to reach students anywhere, any way, any time and at any pace.

Find them where they are.

Most students spend a great deal of their time attached to a device linked to the internet.  They connect with each other, they connect outside their own circles, find resources, exchange information and learn.  Why not take advantage of this? The educator can use this same technology to connect students to the content necessary to learn for the classroom.

Flip to aid over scheduled and/or chronically absent students.

Students have access to the digital resources on their time. No matter what their schedule looks like.  Students can get ahead, catch-up, keep-up, follow-up and review, when the academic environment provides access at any place and any time.

Flip to improve your students' learning skills.

When you give students the opportunity to learn on their terms and hold them accountable, students will adjust accordingly.  This type of learning demands that study skills, organizational skills and time management skills be addressed as students balance their daily schedules with the expectations of the learning environment of your classroom.

Flip to provide alternative access for all ability levels.

The educator can provide a variety of choices in the digital content resources.  This allows for differentiation within each classroom in the delivery of content and the activities for assessment and accountability in the classroom environment.

Flip to allow students to pause, rewind, and fast-forward their teacher.

Students can view the digital resources at their own pace, as often as they need to and whenever they need to.  Through the digital portal they can check for their own understanding, take notes, repeat sections, and review at a later date.

Flip to increase student-teacher interaction.

It may seem that digital content resources would make the teaching-learning dynamic less personal, but in reality the classroom activity provides additional time to provide one-on-one and small group assistance which actually increases the student-teacher interaction.

Flip to improve classroom management.

In an environment where students understand the value of learning and see the application of the content in action there are less students who find methods to be a distraction to the learning process and therefore there is less need to address discipline issues.

Flip to educate parents and other stakeholders.

Administrators, advisors, counselors, tutors, and most of all parents can have access to your digital content resources and can become facilitators and guides to assist the student in the pursuit of learning and knowledge.  

Flip to make your class more transparent.

District administrators, school administrators, advisors, counselors, tutors, and most of all parents can have access to your digital content resources and can see what your teaching and what students should be learning. 

The online portals offer access to the world, bringing experts into your learning environment at zero cost.     

Flip to teach when you are absent.

Do you hate to be absent because it takes more work to create lessons that are educational and do not waste the student’s time?  Is it difficult to create lessons that any substitute can oversee?  Do you avoid professional development opportunities because it takes too much energy to get students back on track?  Flipping your class can eliminate most of these issues as the content has already been delivered and students are comfortable working on their own or in peer group learning modules.  You can even post the instruction in the digital learning resource to make students aware of the expectations for their learning.  

Planning Flipped Video Lessons

Planning the Video Lessons

Key points to address while planning and organizing of your videos.

Introduction -  Introduce the puropose of the video.  Identify the concept and create a connection to previous knowledge if necessary.

Objectives -  Identify 1 or 2 objectives or standards that will be addressed in the video.  Whenever possible list Common Core or State Standards or Next Generation Science Standards met by the concepts in the video.

Overview -  Provide a brief explanation of the concept that will be modeled in the lesson.  Include new vocabulary, skills necessary and other related materials.

Examples -  Model concept providing as many examples as possible.  Keep in mind lesson link.  If necessary make more than one video to provide additional examples and solutions.

Self Assess – Provide opportunities troughout the lesson for students to check their understanding.  Encourage students to pause the lesson in order to answer questions, think about the concept or complete a sample problem.

Going Further – Provide opportunities for students to continue to explore the concept through additional sample problems, further research, articles, websites or additional videos to add to the knowledge base.  Add higher order questions to  help students synthesize the content into a knowledge base that can transition back to the classroom.

Closure – Bring the  lesson to a close by revisiting the objectives or standards that were demonstrated in the video lesson.  There is no need to summarize or repeat the key concepts as this will only increase video time.  Students always have the option to re-watch any part of the video as many times as may be necessary.

 The more organized and prepared you are, the less re-takes and editing you will have to do later.

The editing process can deplete your energy and waste

your valuable time.

Creating Accountability in the Flipped Classroom

Creating Accountability in the Flipped Classroom

How do I make the students watch the videos?

The flipped learning model is not a silver bullet and there will still be students who do not do the homework.  There is no magic elixir or special potion that can be used to solve this problem.  There will be problems with the internet.   Mom and Dad will be using the computer.   Viruses will attack.  And of course dogs will eat hard drives. Like anything else when it comes to education it all comes down to who will be held accountable and how will that be accomplished.

The best way to approach accountability in the classroom; is to create a student centered environment where the students have both control and ownership of their learning.  Develop an attitude that learning is a process to be valued not for the grade achieved but for the knowledge gained.  Impress upon students that learning is the one skill that is guaranteed to be part of their life for the rest of their life.

BER Flipped Classroom presenter Corey Papastathis uses the concept of CANT to develop this accountability with his students.   

C - Choice  (videos and assessment)

A - Accountability

N - No Excuses

T - Three Before Me

C – Choice

Provide choices for the students to meet their responsibilities for learning.  Options in the videos they watch, the articles they read or the media used to acquire knowledge.  Provide a bank of options for students to utilize and encourage them to explore other options on their own. 

Provide choices in the methods used to demonstrate their understanding of the content and ways the standards have been achieved.  Assessment opportunities should be both formative and summative and demand that students be capable of dealing with higher order thinking.

In providing students with choices, they can take ownership of the process and mean by which they learn.

A – Accountability

Educators must hold students accountable for the information and content delivered outside of class.  Students must produce something that demonstrates their completion of the task.  The danger is when educators fall back on lower order questioning students can simply borrow answers from their peers without actually completing the expected learning process.

Examples could include: developing questions for the next class review of the material, creating or responding to a blog post on the content, presenting further research on the topic, developing a lesson for the class, teaching a peer, what they learned.

Gary Philips of the National School Improvement Project, found in his research on what the brain remembers thirty days after what we have been taught.  His findings demonstrated that we remember 92% of what we have taught someone else.  Peer to peer teaching is the most effective method of solidifying understanding and synthesizing material in long-term memory.

Louis Mangione – “Dynamic Teaching in the Block Schedule”

N – No Excuses

To create an environment of accountability there must be no exceptions to the expectations. Each student must be held accountable. There must be an understanding that each student has a responsibility to themselves and to their classmates to be prepared with the content knowledge necessary for the entire class to succeed.  That is coming unprepared students are not only cheating themselves but they cheat their lab partners and the entire class by not being able to participate fully in the class.

However, educators must provide students with ample opportunities and choice to be successful.  Students must have a variety of media and other sources available to attain the content knowledge.  Options must be available that serve each students needs, whether that be offering time outside of class to view videos before or after school, in the library.  Are videos burned to DVD’s for students to watch through DVD players or zip drives made available for students without internet connections at home.

The No Excuses mantra does not only extend to the students but also to the educator as a teacher facilitator. 

T – Three Before Me

Students must take charge of their own learning by developing the skills necessary to problem solve and move forward when a rough patch comes along.  Therefore the rule must be check three resources for possible solutions before asking the teacher.  Students can ask each other, read the text, check their notes, review the media, watch an additional video etc… etc….  Students must build an attitude of self-advocacy, and responsibility for their learning. 

The teacher facilitator must in turn take an authentic role as the “guide on the side”.  Do not provide the easy out for the student.  It may be easier to just move them along, but this is a disservice to the process of learning.  It cripples the student as they try to take of their own the process of learning.