, where a lot of information delivery is done out of the classroom and a lot of the application work is done in the classroom. But this is the first workshop where a teacher literally went through "this is how I do it" and that was really helpful. While I am not about to totally flip my classroom, there were some really great tips that I got that can apply whether you are flipping or not.
One of the most useful parts of this website was the facilitator's demo of how she uses
Blendspace to deliver class content. Our facilitator compared Blendspace to a kind of an electronic filing cabinet. Students create an account and join your class with a key. You create groupings of materials into "lessons" that are pushed out to the students. The way she used it was posting her video for the lesson, along with materials that were related to that particular lesson (electronic copies of assignments, powerpoint slides, etc). You can verify which students viewed the lesson, which is helpful, though I am pretty sure it is just a matter of them clicking on it, you can't verify that they actually watched the video. (The only place I have been able to find where you can verify that students watched a video is on
EdPuzzle.) One nice thing is that you have the option to share a lesson with multiple classes, which is a feature I recently discovered in Google Classroom too.
As far as logistics of making videos, they should be not much more than 10-12 minutes and there are a lot of places to make them. In this instance, they were using
Snagit, which has a free version or a more complete version for $29.99.
Camtasia is another option that I learned from the teachers at the
Mastery classroom workshop I attended, though this is another expensive one. (Note: there are plenty of free screen capture programs, but I am not familiar with a lot of them and am just listing ones that have been suggested in this workshop.) Then, all of the teachers in the building would upload their videos to a shared
Screencast account ($99.95/year). She said that their administration was very against them using YouTube for their videos, so they were willing to pay this yearly fee. She also talked about when making videos, she would give students instructions during the video, like when they should pause to write something really important down, or that they should stop at a certain point if they were comfortable with the concept or continue to see more examples. She also mentioned doing a wrap up at the end of each video, where you go through what they should have gotten from the video/written as notes/etc. For audio, she uses a
Snowball microphone which she says does well to cut down on background noise. Apparently our libraries are supposed to have these for us to borrow, so I need to look into that. She uses SMART notebook to write out demos in the videos, using an Airliner (I had one of these at my last school, but need to track one down for current use...). She suggested to turn off the SMART ink feature so that your annotations disappear when you advance to the next slide.
She gave some examples of things to include in the videos and some of it was what I would have expected but there were a few ideas that I hadn't thought of. For instance, just create a video with you working through review problems. Or create a video answer key for a study guide. Also, you could make it interactive and more like a game or even go through a laboratory procedure. You could do a flashcard format type of review on a video as well. I especially liked the idea of doing review problems. I feel like this is something I can add immediately and fairly easily. To be honest, I am not considering flipping but I have been wanting to make supplemental videos for my students and I think that is a good place to start.
Some of the logistic stuff she covered was really helpful and could be useful even without flipping. Here is a list of random things that I learned about:
1. use familiar logos as identifiers for table groups (picture for each student or each group)--she had facebook, instagram, twitter and snapchat (that's the ghost, right?)
2. use signs on the tables for students to sort themselves based on where they are when they walk in: I got it, I have just one question, I need a lot of help, I didn't watch the video (I like this idea of grouping because then when I go to the table that just needs a little help, for instance, it could be that everyone was confused about the same thing and it would be much more efficient that way)
3. have a set of devices on the table for when students have not watched the video (and require headphones in class supplies)
4. demonstrate how to watch a video at the beginning of the semester--play one of your videos and show them what to listen for, how to know when to stop and take notes, etc. (this is a great idea, and one that I never would have thought of)
5. give a survey at the beginning of the year about access (and include the question "if you stay in two houses, do you have access in both?" for students whose parents share custody)
6. if you have a student who has a device but no internet access, download your videos on a flashdrive for them
7. enlist your librarian to help you--make sure they know how to access your videos so that a student can go to them to get help with access or download them per #6 when you aren't available
8. put a video camera up in the corner of your room and tell students that it will be on sometimes for you to evaluate yourself as a teacher or to share with other teachers to help them (to help students stay on task and be on their best behavior more often)
Once the students have watched a video for homework, they would come into her class and sometimes they would just get right to work. She had crates set up with the lessons so they knew how to find what they needed. Some days, she would have the table signs up (#2 above) for them to assort themselves. Other days, she would post a STOP sign on the door as a signal to the students that they should not come in and just start working--on days when she wanted to start with some full class instruction. The students would know what to be working on from their calendar. As a class, they would fill out the calendar each week or so at a time. There would be a place for teacher initials when they completed a task. She would hang answer keys around the room so they could check their work. Sometimes, she would have other kids who were getting finished quicker be volunteer checkers and she would ask for students who were ready to be checked to raise their hand and her helpers would do the checking. She made this an opt-in situation for the other students in the room--they did not have to volunteer to have their calendar checked by a peer.
This was a math teacher presenting and in our district a lot of the math classes have been going to standards based grading. So, all of the learning experiences she provided were not graded. She would give formative assessments that students would have to complete correctly before they could take their summative. She would grade the formative immediately, standing right next to the student so they got immediate feedback, and she had more practice available for students that did not pass. She talked about having advanced students make a video as a formative assessment. This was another thing that she used her librarian for help with--she would send a student to the librarian for help on making the video.
That pretty much sums up everything I learned today! Here I will add one more tidbit that I must have come across, but I can't remember how/why. It looks like a cute way to make solving math problems more fun:
FACEing math.
