Module 5-Flipped Classroom Project

Typically learning in school is seen as a classroom activity. A teacher will present information before a class, typically in a lecture setting, and the students are encouraged to take notes. It is given at the pace that the teacher decides and you have to keep up and react to that level. There is not really any varied pace or direct contact with every student, which hinders some kids’ learning. They need to work extra hard to get at what the teacher was saying because they were not able to get it the first time. They cannot rewind it and relearn it in the same moment. How can this be helped.

            Enter the Flipped-Classroom Project. While it is not possible nor practical to do this every time, it can be effective if used periodically. The Flipped-Classroom follows the format of teaching a concept online before a class and then testing the class on whether they learned the concept or not the next day. This can effectively allow students to focus on the material at their own pace. They can stop the lesson, look over it more in depth, process it well, and then move on. It can be effective at reaching different learning styles as well, given the flexible and adaptable nature of such a lesson.

For this project, I worked with a partner in my dear friend and colleague Jon Fossell. We developed our lesson by first creating a presentation on Smart Notebook. We focused on developing the presentation with many images and visuals that would draw in our class. We focused on putting only necessary words on the slides, avoiding “over wordage” so that the students could develop the ideas themselves. Next we used a program called Screencast-o-Matic to record over the presentation and work our way through the lesson step by step. This portion allowed us to effectively teach our concepts and develop them more than just our visuals would. This project forced us to not only pay attention to what a student might want to see, so as to draw them in, and to what the student needed to hear or consider to fully grasp the concept.

Overall, this project was a creative way that we were able to educate other people. We were able to both formulate a project and present it easily and effectively. This type of project could be effective in reaching different types of learning styles, as well as allow in depth and self-paced learning. Along with that, this format of presentation could also be a way that students could do a project in which they teach the rest of the class on a certain topic. Overall, this was an effective tool to use.