BACK GROUND OF THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM

A few years ago, veteran Woodland Park High School chemistry teachers Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams stumbled onto an idea.

Struggling to find the time to reteach lessons for absent students.

They bought software that allowed them to record and annotate lessons, and posted them online.

Absent students appreciated the opportunity to see what they missed.

But, surprisingly, so did students who hadn’t missed class.

They, too, used the online material, mostly to review and reinforce classroom lessons. And, soon, Bergmann and Sams realized they had the opportunity to radically rethink how they used class time.

They had flipped the classroom.

What is a flipped classroom?

While there is no one model, the core idea is to flip the common instructional approach:

With teacher-created videos and interactive lessons, instruction that used to occur in class is now accessed at home, in advance of class.

Class becomes the place to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning.

Most importantly, all aspects of instruction can be rethought to best maximize the scarcest learning resource—time.

The tablets have a camera???

“The flipped classroom approach offers clear advantages:

•  Video lectures can be edited, polished, and rerecorded.
• Students can pause, replay, and watch lectures repeatedly at their convenience.
• Teacher may even find that with editing, lectures become shorter and more on point.
• By a simple analysis of performance on past examinations, identification of trends in frequently asked questions and student course evaluations, Teacher can determine areas where students often falter, and use this information to determine how classroom time will be used.
• Teacher may then devote time to helping students develop synthesis and explore application during class time through:experiential exercises, team projects, problem sets, peer teaching and activities that previously had been assigned as independent homework.
• In particular, students can receive direct teacher input on those segments of the material that have historically been the most [difficult] or ambiguous.

“I also suspect the increased focus on the synthesis and application of knowledge will find considerable liking with employers ...................”

The eLimu app or website http://learn.e-limu.org/ has vidoes and content that as a teacher you may assign to your students before the lesson therefore using the lesson time to do exercises and deepen understanding.