Despite the buzz about the flipped classroom and its promotoin as the “real revolution” in learning, there has been plenty of pushback and lots of questioning this year about what exactly this practice entails. What expectations and assumptions are we making about students’ technology access at home when we assign them online videos to watch? Why are video-taped lectures so “revolutionary” if lectures themselves are so not? (As Karim Ani, founder of Mathalicious pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed this summer, “Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it’s a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it’s a ‘revolution.’”)
And as the year rolls to a close, some teachers who’ve experimented with flipping their classrooms are evaluating the practices and questioning the hype about its transformative potential. Shelley Wright, for example, had written a blog post last year about why she loved “the flip.” But by October of 2012, she’d penned another: “The Flip: The End of a Love Affair.” She noted that she didn’t really disagree with anything she’d said last year, but that flipping the classroom “simply didn’t produce the tranformative learning experience I knew I wanted for my students.”
And that question is likely to lead to an incredibly powerful “flip” — one that isn’t about video-based lectures assigned after school, but about flipping the classroom away from the focus on teachers’ control of content and towards student inquiry and agency. (Here's hoping that's a trend I get to talk about in 2013.)
The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students’ experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad, they were focused on what was going into it.
But most eye-opening, he said, is watching children have their own “aha” moments after watching recordings of themselves and talking to teachers about what they were thinking at the time.
Ten years ago, Stanford’s Larry Cuban noted that computers in the classroom were being oversold and underused. In short order, the iPad craze could take the same turn. My lesson from ZIS is that we should make sure we have teachers who understand how to help children learn from the technology before throwing a lot of money into iPad purchasing. It wasn’t the 600 iPads that were so impressive— it was the mindset of a teaching staff devoted to giving students time for creation and reflection. Are American public schools ready to recognize that it’s the adults and students around the iPads, not just the iPads themselves, that require some real attention?
The school has an unconventional take on the iPad’s purpose. The devices are not really valued as portable screens or mobile gaming devices. Teachers I talked to seemed uninterested, almost dismissive, of animations and gamelike apps. Instead, the tablets were intended to be used as video cameras, audio recorders, and multimedia notebooks of individual students’ creations. The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students’ experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad, they were focused on what was going into it.
The school has an unconventional take on the iPad’s purpose. The devices are not really valued as portable screens or mobile gaming devices. Teachers I talked to seemed uninterested, almost dismissive, of animations and gamelike apps. Instead, the tablets were intended to be used as video cameras, audio recorders, and multimedia notebooks of individual students’ creations. The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students’ experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad, they were focused on what was going into it.
Sam Ross, a second-grade teacher at ZIS, sees real potential in moments like this. “Children are being able to show what’s in their minds by adding the oral explanation,” he said. “That’s off-the-charts amazing.” Particularly helpful, he said, is to watch the recordings made by young children and English-language learners—students who may not speak up much in class but can actually show deep learning when asked to interview each other or record what they know. But most eye-opening, he said, is watching children have their own “aha” moments after watching recordings of themselves and talking to teachers about what they were thinking at the time.
In addition to Explain Everything, they include MyStory, iMovie, Animation HD, Google Earth, Book Creator, Show Me, Brushes, and Comic Life. They also feature Follett Reader and Overdrive, two subscription-based services to digital book collections.
They’re often accused of being intellectual slackers and anti-social beings who lack even basic social skills. However, many bodies of research point to the contrary
The problem is that what they expect and experience in their world outside of school with their games and websites is completely at odds with what they experience in the classroom where everything is controlled by adults.
Every generation since the time of Socrates and Plato, including our parents, has looked at the next generation, including ours, and said, “What’s wrong with those kids?”
That’s the thing—there’s nothing wrong with these kids. They’re just neurologically different, and that’s why they see the world and engage with it differently than we do.
when used effectively and with specific goals in mind, iPads can have a positive impact on education
shouldn't be looked at as a computer, because it isn't...it is more than that.
one of the first points I make is that these are shared devices and the way we use them responsibly is to not open, delete or share any work that isn't yours.
a battle between those with utopian and dystopian viewpoints, over who can have a more extreme perspective on technology. So where's the middle ground?
With this complexity in mind, I would like to introduce a question that I have been struggling with for the past few years: what role does social media play in generating or spreading societal fear?
We fear the things – and people – that we do not understand far more than the things we do,
The internet makes visible things that we want to see, but it also makes visible things that we don't want to see. It exposes us to people who are different. And this is the source of a great amount of fear.
Social media is here to stay. We need to get past the point in which we celebrate it or lament it in order to figure out how to live productively with it. We need people engaging critically with the dynamics that unfold as a result of a new structure of connecting people.
We all need to think critically about the information we create, consume and share. We all need to take responsibility for helping shape the world around us.
I agree with the substantive point that many educators don't have skills to teach these things directly, but I do think we can create environments in which they can emerge and be developed.
At its core, what’s the point of tech integration? I would argue that it isn’t to teach students how to use a single tool – any tool we teach kids to use now will most likely be obsolete by the time they enter the workforce. But just like we don’t teach students to read every book they’ll ever encounter, we don’t need to teach them to use every tech tool they’ll ever encounter. Rather, we need to teach them the skills – the grammar, the phonics – that will allow them to navigate the tech tools they will eventually use.
"So your district or school is planning or in the process of implementing some sort of 1:1 device initiative. Seeing as these are all the rage, seems like it's a given that your deployment will be a smashing success, right? Here's the truth….
…it will fail.
It may not be monumental failure, but parts of your deployment will not work. Whether it be the MDM that manages them or the rising stack of parent concerns, you will be faced with a choice as a district: retreat or carry on. In the wake of the LAUSD story and the recent Ft. Bend ISD news here in Texas about 're-evaluating' their deployments, I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on why some deployments work and some don't work. I'll let you know that our deployment was far from flawless, as I've listed here, but we had tools in place to overcome issues before they became an "Implementation Killer"."