Today I had to do a bunch of work for my real job: teaching. I created five lesson plans and made videos for them. This week I’ll post them to my teacher website and mass learning will occur.
I’m super organized at work this year, because I know that I have exactly NO TIME for messing around. I want to be efficient at work so that I can clear up time for my grad school writing assignments. We started a new textbook series this year that is based on the common core state standards. I decided to try a “flipped” model of teaching, where I record my lectures and students watch them at home. The idea is that they bring their questions and we work on problems in class. Theoretically, students (and their parents) can go back to the video lessons and watch them over and over if need be.
The cool thing is that when I told the other two sixth grade math teachers about it, they both signed on to help. So now we split up the work of creating the lesson plans, and we each post the videos to our own classroom websites. In other words, I’m responsible for creating the content for every third chapter. It was my turn, so today I used some of that fabled teacher “time off” to work on it.
The “flipped” classroom idea is relatively new, and the jury is still out on its effectiveness. However, I contend that I experienced the first flipped classroom as a college student in the year 1998. The class was Curricular Foundations of Language Arts and Reading. I can’t exactly remember the professor’s last name, but I believe it was Garzone. He seemed ancient back then, and he was tough. I welcomed this, as most of my education courses had been exceedingly easy. In fact, I was the only student to get an A in his class (which earned me a job as a TA with him the next semester.) One reason for my success was that I would routinely visit the computer lab and look at his Hyperstudio Stacks. It was funny that one of my most aged professors would embrace this technology. His class was hard, so I’d go review the stacks. Over and over again. It was nice to have the resource.
Kids these days can get my video lessons on their smart phone. Does that mean that most of them do? No, of course not. Kids these days are lazy. Back in my day we worked for our success. Now get off my lawn!
I’m married to a star.
Everyone take note.
You were mad productive today. I made you meatloaf as a reward.
Thanks, love. I appreciate your support. But not nearly as much as I appreciate your meatloaf.
damn kids, always running on lawns and stuff.
I’ve actually never heard of this flipped model, but it seems interesting.
And also, booo on the day job for getting in the way of writing and stuff.