Flipping

I’ve been reading a lot on flipped class instruction and trying to figure out how this might look in my class. There’s got to be more to it than watch the video and home and do the homework in class, so I am following smart people on twitter and looking at how they are doing this in their English and social studies classes.

With only ten (!!) weeks left of instruction, I don’t think I’ll make any major changes this late in the game, but I am trying to make some screencasts to support students outside of class and trying little changes before going all in next year.

If I do what I am thinking of doing, I will have a full summer of prep ahead…daunting!

What I am thinking about is creating LOTS of screencasts – to teach specific skills and concepts and to review important passages in full class texts. It helps that I know most of the kids I’ll have next year; otherwise, I think it would be a little weird to create videos to help them without knowing what kinds of students they are and what kinds of issues they normally have.

 So ideally, I will create videos on how to write a rhetorical précis and why you’d want to use it, how to and why they should use the templates in They Say, I Say, what a narrative/informative/argumentative essay looks like, how to integrate quotes, etc. Then they will watch the videos on their own, freeing up class time for reading, writing, and conferring. Still trying to wrap my head around what that self-paced learning looks like, day to day, in the classroom, but I’m hoping to get ideas from others who are already doing this.

The other part of this is how to keep track of it all in the gradebook. At this point, I’m leaning towards two gradebooks: one that shows completed tasks (watching the videos, rough drafts, participation in online and in-class discussions, comprehension checks, etc.) and a second that shows progress towards mastery on the standards. The first gradebook would be simply pass/no pass – either the task was completed or not (still thinking about deadlines and late work – and would provide parents with the answer to “is my kid doing the work,” help me manage where kids are, and enable students to self-monitor. The second gradebook would be for the semester and final grade and would somehow reflect their progress towards mastery on the standards. Not sure how one letter grade would represent progress on all the standards, but hoping to have some more concrete ideas by next August.

Still not sure how this would work in reality, but in theory, I like where I am headed.

 

 

Back to writing boot camp

So I saw this tweet from the amazing Jim Burke:

11/17/12, 6:14 AM Thanks to all those at #NCTE12 who have talked to me about the voice feedback technique illustrated here: youtube.com/watch?v=f7fjqh…

First, I don't know how that guy has time to do all that he does -- teaches, writes, presents, thinks big thoughts all time...

Second, I am hopeful this might actually save time. I'm guessing it will take some time to set up initially (getting all the kids' emails into my contacts sounds tedious) and some practice so that I'm not recording dead air. But since I HATE writing comments that kids many times won't actually read anyway, I'd like to try this.

I like the way he has built in accountability for listening to the comments by having students create a to do list for revisions.

I'm curious about reading only the revisions using the track changes feature in Word. Will I really be able to limit myself to only reading the changes and will those make sense in isolation?

Two concerns. First, I hate the sound of my voice on recordings. And the paranoid part of me is a little worried about sending students recordings that they could potentially remix into something other than what I intended.

I will definitely give this a try, though.