This is a a guest post by Jon Bergmann, pioneer in the Flipped Class Movement.
As the school year starts, many teachers are wanting to implement flipped learning into their classes. Before you begin, I encourage you to answer each of the questions below.
The purpose of the questions is to help teachers BEGIN the process of flipping their class. This is only the first step. Flipped Class 101 can lead to Flipped Learning, which is a second stage of the Flipped Class. Many teachers are asking for some step by step guidelines as they begin.
- What will you flip? (A lesson, a unit/chapter, a subject, or a class)
- Who will make your videos? (Curate, create, or a combination)
- Assuming you will create videos, what software will you use to make your videos? There is no right answer here. Choose the tool that works best for you. Explore some of the choices below before you start. Learn one of them and use it. I encourage you to start out simple, but as time goes on you may want to switch to a more feature-rich (and usually more expensive software solution)
- Once you have created your video, where will you place it so that your students can access it? We find it best to put these in a coherent place on a learning management system (LMS). Vendors include Blackboard, Moodle , Schoology, Haiku Learning, Canvas, Edmodo, My Big Campus, Info Mentor, etc. The videos can also be hosted on video servers like YouTube , SchoolTube, Screencast.com, Dropbox,Google Drive, and other sites.
- How will you check (or will you) if your students watch (or should we say interact) with your online content?
- How will you communicate to your students how to access your flipped content?
- How will you teach your students how to watch your video content for comprehension? You don’t watch instructional videos in the same manner as a popular film. When we first started, we spent class time intentionally teaching our students how to watch instructional videos.
- How will you communicate to your students about how Flipped Learning will change their experience at school?
- How will you communicate to your parents about how Flipped Learning will be a different experience for their children?
- How will you reorganize class time now that you have extra time? This is maybe the MOST important question: WHAT will you do with your class time? This question depends upon what you teach, what level you teach at and your own individual educational philosophy.
This list should get you started. I would love to hear your comments on these questions and suggestions for any others you think should be included.
This post first appeared on my blog here.
