Tammy Powell and I (Tiffani Reardon) attended FlipCon Atlanta last Friday to learn about the flipped classroom, and we found a lot of information that applies well to hybrid classes and some cool technologies that we can use in online and hybrid classes. So here is what we learned at FlipCon Atlanta 2015:
The Why and How of Flipped Learning
There are four "T" hurdles of flipped learning:
- Thinking - we have to convince people of what class time should look like
- Training - there is no one way to flip, but there are wrong ways. Here are some best practices in flipped learning:
- Don't make videos too long.
- Replace things, don't add - that is, if you add a video for students to take home, get rid of something in the classroom, like the traditional lecture.
- Don't rescue students who don't do homework. Hold your guns.
- Plan for students who don't do homework - this doesn't mean rescue. This means have a plan. A lot of people said that they will have them sit in the corner and do the reading or watch the video while the rest of the class gets the practice and application time that they are missing out on.
- Don't give up too early.
- Don't make content too difficult to access - that is, don't put videos or readings in a different place every night or make them have to sign in to too many places to access it. With D2L, we don't really have this problem. But it's a good rule of thumb that applies to Quality Matters, too.
- Plan for kids who don't understand the videos - some people at the conference said that they would set aside 10 min or so to go over information with the students who didn't understand while others get started on practice work.
- Build in interactivity - don't just make them watch a lecture video with no accountability. Build in question, make them take notes, anything that keeps them awake and alert.
- Teach them how. Don't just send them home with homework and not show them how to access it or what to do with it. For online classes, we already do this by using a course tour or navigational instructions in our courses to meet QM. But in a hybrid or face-to-face course, you can show them in class how to find their information in D2L or you can post a course tour like we do in online classes.
- Get stakeholders involved - this one applied more to elementary/middle/high school because in higher ed our stakeholders are our students, but essentially it means get the parents involved. Tell them what you are doing in class and even be as bold as to give them homework too.
- Make good use of class time. This is the whole point of flipped learning. If you are going to have them watch videos and do the less engaging stuff at home, make it worth it. Have discussions in class, have practice time in class, do labs in class.
- Time - it's a lot of work. You have to find the time to flip your class.
- Technology - find the right technology for you.
Technology
We learned about some cool technologies! Here are a few:
13 tips for making a good video:
- keep it short
- animate your voice
- work with a partner
- less text, more pics
- video clips
- callouts/zooms
- copyright friendly
- add humor
- audio matters
- don't waste students' time
- annotations
- PIP
- quizzing/interaction
Other Miscellaneous Stuff We Learned About
- Student Choice Boards - where you give a few options for learning the content and a few options for showing that you learned it. Basically, I don't care how you learned it, I care that you learned it.
- Siri-proof your quizzes! - if Siri knows the answer (or Cortana on Windows), your students can look it up too
- Project-based learning is more than just doing a project - form the whole learning experience around a project
- Studies have shown that students respond better to content that you created yourself rather than videos and content made by other people!
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