Flipped!

One of the new trends happening in education is the Flipped Classroom.  I have heard a little about this before and really haven't thought much of it. Watching the video Teaching for Tomorrow: The Flipped Classroom, helped me to understand a little of the idea behind the Flipped classroom.  Lectures that teachers would give are videoed and recorded for the students to watch.  Instead of doing the teaching lesson in the classroom, students watch them at home so that more classroom time is spent practicing and doing more of the experiments.  Students watch the lessons at home for homework instead of spending hours doing hours of busywork.  This then frees of the teachers time to devote more classroom time to reaching each child at their own level.  The students that mastered the subject can do more challenging work while the teacher can still review for those that still didn't understand.  This would really help keeping kids from being really bored reviewing material that they already mastered.

Watching the video Flipped Class 101 really helped with understanding how to start.  It showed two science teachers who are now using videos that they made to flip their classroom.  I really liked when one of them said that you should not just look at where you can add a video.  It's not just showing a video that makes a flipped classroom work.  They showed a picture of blooms Taxonomy.

The videos show at home would cover the bottom two areas of understanding and knowledge. That would leave the rest of the class time to reach the higher levels of learning.

I did really enjoy watching and learning about the flipped classroom.  I teach second grade and most of what we do is a lot of repetition.  I love the idea of spending more time with creating.  Every year I have at least two or three children that don't have access to computers at home.  This year will be the first time that our library at school will have computers for the students to use.  But even if I have all of my students on line I still have parents that are very reluctant to let their child have too much screen time.  They are worried about their eyes and in my opinion really don't want to reduce the actual tv time since that is free baby sitting for them.
The one thing that I would really find helpful if I did this would be for the parents to see what their child is learning and how I am teaching it to them.  The parents are often worried about helping their child or confusing them by showing them another way.  They want to be consistent with the way their child is taught.  I thing my biggest thing would be that I really am a little camera shy.  I would have to have my students watch videos that didn't have me featured.  Now it's time to find some to use with second grade.