Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Flipped Content Video assignment


I am a 5th grade teacher and I have created a modified version of the flipped classroom. Because I have 25 students, and because I have my kids all day long, I have my students watch the instructional videos I have created in groups of 5-5 kids each. While say group 1 is watching a math video, I am totally freed up to work with the other kids in my class. Then, after group 1 is done watching that math video, they go back to their desks and start working on their assignment. Group 2 now goes over to watch that same math video. I am still totally freed up to work with the group 1 kids on their math assignment. We actually do this all day long, and for every subject as well. I love this model. It is the single most powerful, overnight change in education I have experienced in my 16 years in the classroom.
In my classroom, the kids watch the videos in class in small groups, because I teach 5th grade, as I mentioned in the above post. For junior high and high school students who are going to watch the videos outside of class, the teacher can put them on a flash drive, cd, dvd, or even on “old-school” vhs. They don’t need to be only on the Internet. The important thing to remember, is that instructional videos are a tool, they are to help give the kids the basic concepts, therefore practicing and mastering those concepts still happens in the classroom. In fact, that is the power of the video. It frees the teacher up to become a tutor or coach to individually help their students even more, rather than having to spend so much time in front of the class delivering a one size fits all lesson/lecture. In science for example, the teacher would have the kids watch the lesson the night before, therefore allowing way more time to do the lab experiment the next day and allowing the teacher to be totally available to help the kids with that experiment, because they would have received the basic information the night before in the video. For anyone interested, I have created a short video introducing this flipped classroom concept a little more. You can find it at
http://www.mrrbrown.org/videos.htm

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