In the last few months, I continued to push in to the realm of flipped classroom teaching. I created videos on 13 of the topics covered in my Digital Electronics class this fall. I may never win an academy award, but the results have been fairly positive. It did in many cases, as I had hoped, give students more time to work on their projects in class with direction and help available. I say in many cases because it has taken some time to get everyone in the habit of checking for or watching a video for homework. Even if they didn't, though, those students sit in class and review the videos with their assignment in front of them. If I thought it was strange to be teaching a lesson in an empty room to nobody, it is even more so to hear my voice coming from 2-3 different computers in the room while I am there!
Feedback from the students has been positive. Many said that they benefited from the ability to watch the lesson, pause and rewind when necessary, and work on the assignment right away. It hasn't been perfect, but the results were good enough to encourage me to expand my efforts. I added a short review video for the Intro to Engineering class and plan to create a review for them as we come back to school after the Christmas break. Even if they don't watch it before class, they can take advantage of the ability to watch and do simultaneously.
Along the way, I have gotten some better at using a few of the tools that helped out. Those 13 videos are all posted on Youtube, which I had done little more than watch videos previously. I recorded the lessons mostly using my school document camera and screencastomatic.com with editing using Microsoft's Movie Maker. All of those are free, but screencastomatic has a premium version that is cheap ($29 for 3 years) that claims to allow editing and direct upload to Youtube. I look forward to trying that out in 2013.
In November, I attended a class on flipping the classroom that was very helpful. I already knew much of what was presented, but there were still some good tips and ideas that I had not yet explored. Primarily, we used iPad tablets to create a short sample lesson video. That will work well with my new Christmas present (Galaxy tab 2 10.1" version for the sight-impaired). I can certainly look forward to using that in the future.
In short, it has been an exciting year of change in my classroom. As I had hoped, I look forward to expanding those changes in to new areas and incorporating even more new tools & ideas. That, I think is the essence of teaching. As teachers, we should demonstrate for our students that the way it has always been done is not the only or even the best way. Exploring options; trying new things; learning new ways. Those are what get me up in the morning excited about going to work.
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