New Academic Year - Flipped Teaching Continues

A new class and a new year group. A chance to develop further the concept of flipped teaching. I am now teaching Year 6 rather than Year 5 and am looking forward to involving them in the flipped classroom.

I am really pleased that my school has been so positive about the flipped teaching experiments last year and this year they have asked me to lead a research group of teachers to develop this further and extend flipped learning throughout the school.

As part of that I am very excited to be going on FlipCon Middle East and meeting Jon Bergmann himself.

I have created a new class blog for my new class  but I am also hoping that we can use the new and upcoming school website and app to communicate and distribute the flipped videos.

As the dust settles on the beginning of the new academic year, I shall be soon be back to developing some more flipped videos and lessons.

Back to the Flip!

It's been a while since my last flipped lesson - report writing, assessment time all played  apart but, also, I felt my class had reached a saturation point with them. Therefore, I decided  to take a break, do some more research and reconsider where to take the project.

I found that fewer and fewer of the children were watching the flip videos and I wondered why this was. I believe it was partly due to there being too many in too short a time but also because I wasn't using the lesson time as effectively as I could.

I read a book called Flip your Classroom by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams and this really helped refocus my flipped teaching project - the flipped lesson itself has to be creative, stimulating or, at least, challenging. I think my videos became just another way to impart information than as a way to preserve time for an exciting learning experience in school.

Reading the book reignited my enthusiasm, but also made me more conscious of picking the lessons which I chose to flip more thoughtfully.

So, this week, I made a video all about the Water Cycle for our science lesson. All but 3 students watched it (it was exciting again!) and we spent our science lesson making dioramas about the cycle. The ones who missed the video had to go through the flipchart with me, while the others brainstormed everything they could remember from the video.

I would never have had the time for this in a traditional lesson. It was great - all on-task for the last 2 hours of the last day of the week, superb high-level conversation using scientific language, collaboration, creativity...we had a great time!

Children Producing a Flipped Video

At a recent parent-teacher interview, I suggested that the children who may be struggling with a concept, make a flip video about that concept to teach others. The idea behind this was that then they would have to revise and practise that concept so thoroughly that they themselves would understand it.

I have just received my first one - about equivalent fractions - and I thought it was brilliant. We actually all watched it in our maths lesson rather than as a flip video although I could have done either. Her it is - the glass analogy I thought was particularly clever...

Short, Simple and Snappy!

The very clear feedback I am getting from the class is that the videos must be kept shorter.

The initial enthusiasm for watching the flip videos has gone now, so I think this is imperative if I am going to keep them watching. Therefore my next one about area and perimeter is only 1min 45s long.

It will be interesting to see how it is received and how useful it is - I am hoping that they will pause the video at certain points to practise the learning points and make sure they understand.

One of the great side-effects of the project has been my own learning about ICT and video-making. For this latest video, I used Corel's VideoStudio to make a flipchart (using one of the templates in the program). I just took screenshots of each of my flipchart pages then stuck them into the template. Added a few speech bubbles and that was that. Didn't take long at all...

The other great side-effect has been how it has led on to other great apps and programs - my class are now regularly using Animoto (to show their spelling lists, make animations for literacy etc). Presently, they are working on a 'glog' (from www.edu.glogster.com) project in science. I wouldn't have used any of these unless I had done this flip teaching project.

Here's the video:

More Flipped Lessons in Year 2

Two of our Year 2 teachers have been trying out flipped lessons.

The first one was in maths about interpreting data and was done as a Prezi - you can watch it here

The second one was in literacy and featured the children having access to a PDF file, which it was felt would be easier for the children (and parents) to access.

Read about their experiences here:

'"After the first flipped lesson ran fairly successfully in one class and was unable to take place in another (children had not been able to access the Prezi for a variety of reasons), we decided to do something quicker to produce, easier to distribute and was more easily shared with children along with their parents at home.

The second flipped lesson happened today and was a revelation.

Most children had completed the home based task prior to the lesson, and after a very brief introduction, many of the children went off to work on a task as soon as lesson started. Ten minutes in, all the children were working on the task. We were then able to get them working on another task which would lead into the work planned for tomorrow, although this was not included in the planning for the next lesson. This will allow them to really focus on the next piece of writing and hopefully allow them to produce something of a much higher quality than usual.

The result of this is that we will be able to add in an extra writing session with children conferencing with their peers, teacher or teaching assistant on uplevelling the writing they have produced so far this week." 

The Flipped PE lesson...

Our infant PE specialist teacher recently had a go at doing a flipped lesson with her Year 2 class in volleyball - focusing on the rules about serving. She produced a wonderful video using Lego figures to show the children what they needed to know.

You can watch it here Volleyball for Year 2 

This is her evaluation of the lesson:

' I definitely felt that having 2B watch the video beforehand enhanced the learning in the lesson. The serving rotation in Volleyball is a complicated concept and 2B coming to the lesson with some kind of understanding was great! They all went away with a better idea of how it works and the evaluation at the end showed that a good number (more, I feel, than in previous years) understood it better, with a low amount feeling like they were still unsure. It also enabled much more practical time and less teacher talk. . I continually questioned them through the lesson as well which helped.

I don’t think I would need to do this all the time, but for something that is tricky and difficult to understand it was of definite benefit.' 

Blogging...Glogging

Having bit of a rest over the half term holiday but I have been trying out Glogster as a medium for delivering flipped lessons and as a tool for the class to do their own projects. I think they could use it as a resource for delivering their own lessons too.

Loved making it - it helps to have lots of images and videos etc already saved ready to upload onto your Glog though. I like the idea of uploading a flipped video alongside some key facts and maybe some activities for the class to try before the lesson.

http://robvde.edu.glogster.com/seed-dispersal

So I'm making a flipped video next then going to try uploading it to a Glog with extra information...With a bit of luck, if it all works I may never actually have to get up and go to school again!