Teaching with Technology / Technology & Pedagogy
The article I chose to read and
review was entitled, “Flip Your Students’ Learning” by Aaron Sams and Jonathan
Bergmann. There were several reasons why
I chose this article. First, the
superintendent of my school district e-mailed it to all of us teachers, so I
thought it would be a good idea to share it will all of you. Second, I am very interested in flipping my
classroom, at least for one unit of study next year so I always like to get
more information about it. Third, this
article definitely relates to what we have learned in this class.
For those of you who don’t already
know, a flipped classroom is where the instruction is presented to the students
at home through use of online videos and practicing these concepts is done in
class where the teacher can help. The
article explains that a lecture given by a teacher in class does not challenge
students with higher order thinking. A
lecture, they explain, will lose very little if presented outside of the
face-to-face meeting of the classroom setting.
Therefore, they argue that the delivery of new content should be done
outside of the classroom, through use of instructional videos that the teacher
can make, and the traditional homework assignment where students work on
problems, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create, all higher levels thinking skills
according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, can be done in class while the teacher is there
to assist students. Flipping a
classroom, they also argue, inherently differentiates the lesson. Students can move at their own pace and can
rewatch the videos as necessary.
The second half of the article
discusses suggested assessment methods for a flipped classroom. The teachers in the article have students
retake the assessment until the minimum level of mastery is achieved. They offer alternative forms of assessment –
the traditional test or quiz, a project, a presentation, creating a blog or
videogame, etc. I think the idea of
having alternative forms of authentic assessment is great, but I think having
students retake tests and quizzes until they mastered the material would be a
challenge for me in my classroom, at least for now.
Throughout this course, we have
discussed three different types of multimedia – still, audio, and moving. This article focuses on the moving aspect of
multimedia, videos. On the last page of
this article, the authors even go into detail about how to create an
instruction video through the use of a screencast and what equipment is needed
to create this screencast. It brought me
back to the MDMC project we did and the different multimedia tools
available.
