Why the flip’s a flop

I don’t like the Flipped Classroom approach because its foundation is in flipping lectures from classwork to homework.

There are two problems with that.

1. Lecture
   Lecture is not the most effective method for learning and,
2. Homework
   Not only should families not be forced to bring school into the home, but there is a growing body of research shared by education thought-leaders like Alfie Kohn, Peter Dewitt, Ira Socal, and Joe Bower that says there’s little to no benefit in doing so.  

When this is pointed out to flipped classroom proponents they often carry on about the model being more than lecture-driven homework. Especially, they explain, for those who have evolved to flipped classroom 201 or 2.0. But for those teachers who are enlightened to know that homework and lecture are not best ways to support learning, why hang on to a term rooted in that?  

Get Down and start flipping with videos for primary school students

Guest post by Shawn Rubin

Whether you're flipping your classroom, or enhancing learning, there’s no denying that instructional video can be a powerful tool in the classroom.  With older students video has the ability to stimulate conversation or elucidate a complex concept, but with younger children we don’t “sit down” to watch video. We use video to “get down” or more appropriately to get up, move around the room, sing, dance, and act. In grades k-2 video is more than a digital method of conveying information it’s an engaging catalyst for learning that is used to grab attention. This allows for repetition or practice, which leads to retention of information as well as the expansion of ideas, thoughts, and conversations.

There are many skills that are valuable for early readers and mathematicians. Focused attention is important in order for that initial concept acquisition to begin. When channeled properly this focused engagement allows children who may be struggling on pencil and paper the ability to flourish through visual stimulus. Whether it’s vocabulary acquisition, concept memorization, item sequencing, story retelling, or simply learning a song, video has the power to imprint visual cues and mental bookmarks onto teacher lessons.

Unlike most teacher-centered introductions of skills and content, video has a clearly defined start and end point. Students understand that they must bring their attention forward at the time the play button is clicked and for the next few minutes they know exactly where their focus should be.

There are some great videos, like this children’s song or this nature clip that have the ability to imprint themselves in students minds the first or second time they watch them. But teachers who let the video do all the work while the children just sit and watch will ultimately limit how often video can go be used in their classrooms because eventually the new “fantastic videos” will replace the learning that was derived from the previous clips the students watched.

However, when teachers combine the power of digital media with the kinesthetic reinforcement of movement, dance, acting, sign language and finger play they double the video’s impact and give it stand-alone capability.

By creating unique movement based features for each video that enters the classroom the teacher allows the child a greater chance at recalling the content, process, or skill, while increasing the student’s ability to apply and own this learning for later application.

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Shawn Rubin serves as the Director of Technology Integration at the Highlander Institute in Providence, RI. Shawn oversees the Institute’s blended learning and technology integration professional development programming. Shawn is also the CEO of Metryx, a start-up mobile software company that is building flexible assessment tools for educators to use on tablets and smartphones. Shawn began his education career as a founding faculty member of the Highlander Charter School teaching a range of grades including four years of kindergarten during his 11 years in the classroom. Shawn lives in Providence with his wife and two sons. You can find Shawn @shawncrubin or srubin@highlanderinstitute.org.

Make your flipped classroom interactive

Another reason I'm not flipping over the flipped classroom model is that passively watching videos isn't great pedagogy. Now there's a product that remedies this by allowing you to turn YouTube videos into online classes. 

Teachem is a free teaching platform that allows users to create time-stamped flashcards and review quizzes right on the videos themselves. The flashcards can not only help viewers check their understanding of the material being presented—like traditional flashcards, these can contain a question on the front and the answer on the back—but they can also serve to organize the information in the video, sort of like a table of contents.

Classes are created within a school making it easy for innovative educators to organize all the classes that they want to share with their students. Professional development providers can keep all of their training videos together in one convenient spot.

Teachem is free, simple to use, and gets the information that is already out there into a more concise, organized platform. Check it at at Teachem.com and learn more by watching the video below.

Free tool for flipping the classroom

If you’re flipping over the flipped classroom, you may also be looking for a tool that can record and broadcast real-time screencasts in your chosen platform (i.e. Skype, MSN Messenger, UStream) that you can use for capturing webcasts, tutorials, and more.

PCWinSoft is offering readers of The Innovative Educator free licenses for ScreenCamera (normally $49.95) to do just that.  

ScreenCamera enables you to choose to record a section of the desktop, the whole desktop, the area around the mouse cursor or an ‘exclusive window’. The exclusive window is where the program will continue capturing the chosen a Window even after it is not the active or the topmost one. ScreenCamera can also take snapshot images and it can also work as a normal screen recorder. Once you record the video you can save it on your computer. ScreenCamera works on PCs that have Windows 2000 and newer.

Try it out for free, by simply visiting this link to get the activation key.

Flip your classroom and more with TedEd videos

Guest post by Shawn Rubin

TedEd is a a new resource from TED talks with a focus on the flipped classroom model. The idea behind TedEd is that teachers can take the best of YouTube or create their own videos then flip them, which means adding titles, directions, questions and links to other resources.

These videos then live on the TedEd website. They each have their own unique URL and can be sent around to the general public for viewing and learning.

The beta version is quite useful for teachers looking to enter the flipped classroom space. Educators should note that there are a few missing features that will hopefully be addressed in the future, but until then, users should note that you don’t have the ability to create or edit the “Quick Quiz” section when you flip your lesson and once you flip your lesson you cannot edit it any further.

Educators Examine Flipped Classrooms

I was recently interviewed by NPR about why I'm not flipping over the flipped classroom.  Here is the story.  

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Credit James Sarmiento / Flickr

By ADAM COTTERELL


Listen to the interview

Educators from all over Idaho meet in Boise Tuesday and Wednesday to talk about creating 21st century classrooms. One of the themes of theEduStat conference is flipping education.

Greg Greene is principal of a high school in suburban Detroit. A few years ago he banned lectures in classrooms. Instead teachers assign online videos that students watch on their own. In class teachers work with individuals or small groups. Greene is considered a pioneer in the flipped classroom, homework in class, class work at home. He’ll tell Idaho teachers about it at the state department of Ed’s EduStat conference. Greene says the flipped classroom solves the education dilemma of teachers vs. technology.

“We have been struggling trying to figure out how the teacher and technology survive together," he says. "In a flipped classroom the teacher is helping guide students down that path of success.”

Greene says in this system technology frees teachers to work closely with students. It’s a model that’s growing nationally. Some Idaho schools are experimenting with it, including in Star and Gooding. But one education author and blogger Lisa Nielsen hasn’t flipped for flipped classrooms.

“It sounds like it’s an innovative idea but it’s just talking about doing the same old boring, tired pedagogy in a slightly different way," she says.

Nielsen says technology could transform the education system but flipped classrooms are built around lectures and homework. Those are things she thinks don’t belong in 21st century education. Objections like those on Nielsen’s blog aren’t on the agenda at the statewide conference in Boise, but two of the speakers will be touting the benefits of the flipped model.

The Flipped Conference

Conferences can be a terrific form of professional development, but much like school, little has changed in structure since the last century.  Sure, there are some updated features here and there i.e. backchannels and taping of sessions, but things are more or less done the same way they’ve always been done.  

So, I got to thinking.  

Everyone’s flipping for flip classrooms (well, except me).

Why not flip the conference?

I mean do we really have to crowd into a main room then an overflow room to listen to someone speak at us for an hour?  Couldn’t we watch these presentations on our own and have our time with presenters spent in a more engaging and interactive way?

For example, at the recent International Society for Technology Educator’s conference (ISTE) a select few participants had the opportunity to “Speak with Sir Ken Robinson.” Boy was I jealous. I didn’t even know about it. I only got to listen to him in the overflow room with a crappy sound system.

What if instead of us all sitting silently together watching Sir Ken we watched him on our own. Then, during the conference, we were scheduled in more intimate conversations with him around our topic of choice, followed by group photo!? I don’t know about you, but that would certainly be a more powerful memory than the one I had scrambling to find a speaker that I could hear in the overflow room and even more powerful than if I had been shoved in a room sitting silently with a few thousand others.  

This isn’t hard.  We already have endless videos of keynote presentations just waiting for us. Let’s spend our time with these folks discussing and doing rather than sitting and watching.  

Make sense?

The Little Video That Could! A new cartoon from Jeff Branzburg

How to Help Stop Math from Sucking

When in comes to math, for many Sal Kahn, the flipped classroom (if you don't know what it is skip down to the infographic below), and flipped classroom materials like this are all the rage. But for others, we're not so enamored.

Here's why:

While there are some for whom math is magical, there are even more of us that will never ever, ever get excited when you suggest we're going to learn about polynomials, integers, or slopes.  Sure, we get that fact that if we want to go to college, we need to jump through hoops to memorize and regurgitate, but we aren't learning in meaningful ways.  For that we need to rethink math instruction.  

Below are some guys who've done just that.

Five Reasons I'm Not Flipping Over The Flipped Classroom

If you've read my thoughts about the Flipped Classroom in USA Today, you probably are either in agreement with my caution over the excitement around the flipped classroom made popular by Sal Kahn or you are a flipped classroom advocate who wants to convince me and other innovative educators that flipping is for everyone.

While I certainly see benefits in flipping instruction as I wrote about earlier this year, there are also reasons to move ahead with caution. 

Here's Why:

You and Your Students Can Be The Next Sal Kahn with ShowMe

Regardless of whether you buy into or are critical of the whole Kahn Academy concept, most people  agree that providing on demand learning resources is a good idea.  With the new ShowMe App, any teacher can become the next Sal Kahn making educational tutorials for your kids or for the world. Or you can do what math teacher Eric Marcos does on his terrific MathTrain.tv site and let kids be the movie makers.

What's nice about the ShowMe App is that they take care of all the details.  Just open the App on your iPad and all the tools are built in and upload is a piece of cake.

Here's a video to ShowYou how it works.

ShowMe iPad App from San Kim on Vimeo.

Flip your instruction for real learning

I just came across this video over at Justin Tarte's blog which features something many of us (like Alan November, Will Richarson and me to the NY Times) have been talking about lately which is flipping instruction.  I mean when you think about it does it make any sense that school is generally a place where people come together to sit and listen to the person at the front of the room?  It generally doesn't make the most sense to get a group of people together to sit and stare.  What if instead, educators spent class time doing and homework time for the watching of lessons/lectures.  The other benefit of this is that these can be viewed and reviewed anytime/anywhere.  The result is a lively bustling classroom where students can spend their time learning, talking, doing.

Another bonus is that educators can stop fighting and start embracing the technology that students use because there's no competition for attention.  Technology becomes a learning tool and the teacher becomes the learning supporter.

Take a look at what this looks like from a teacher doing this work.




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Futher reading:  How the Flipped Classroom has Transformed Learning