Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The following tools are listed from most basic to most sophisticated and can be used alone or in tandem to make flipped classrooms more engaging.

Google Docs have many advantages over traditional word processing programs, including real-time automatic updates visible to all users, a feature that enables robust discussion and sharing.

YouTube

Ideal for first-time flippers

Teachem

Teachem is a timely and valuable resource ideal for teachers interested in a more structured flipped classroom but unwilling to commit to paid or complex programming.

The Flipped Learning Network

A social media site open to first-time and experienced flippers, the Flipped Learning Network contains resources for all kinds of flipped classrooms while facilitating discussion, collective problem-solving and peer networking.

Camtasia Studio

Perhaps the most popular screencasting technology available, Camtasia Studio is now in its eighth incarnation and has remained up-to-date with educational trends

Edmodo or Schoology

eyond enabling activities fundamental to the flipped classroom, such as video lectures and e-readings, these comprehensive online learning platforms offer educator networks and resources,

iscussion and collaboration features, and grading and assessment options.

What might students do in such schools, in the absence of prescribed subjects? They might work together in diverse teams to build robots, roller coasters, gardens, and human-powered submarines. They might write and publish a guide to the fauna and history of a nearby estuary, or an economics text illustrated with original woodcuts, or a children's astronomy book. They might produce original films, plays, and spoken word events on adolescent issues, Japanese internment, cross-border experiences, and a host of other topics. They might mount a crime scene exhibition linking art history and DNA analysis, or develop a museum exhibit of World War I as seen from various perspectives. They might celebrate returning warriors, emulating the bard in Beowulf, by interviewing local veterans and writing poems honoring their experiences. The possibilities are endless.

Changing the subject, then, means deriving the curriculum from the lived experience of the student. In this view, rather than a collection of fixed texts, the curriculum is more like a flow of events, accessible through tools that help students identify and extract rich academic content from the world: guidelines and templates for project development, along with activities and routines for observation and analysis, reflection, dialogue, critique, and negotiation.

ating Essential Questions (07:01) Coming up with an essential question (also called a guiding or driving question) is one of the first key steps in designing a project. For a fun tool to help craft effective driving questions, check out BIE's "tubric."

BIE's Project Planner Tutorial (02:02) BIE offers a powerul and simple online tool, the Project Planner, for organizing your ideas while putting together a project. You must sign up for a free account, but you can save and print your work to your profile.

Tips For Building Projects (06:17) The audio is a little low on this teacher-produced screen-capture video, but it does a great job outlining the basics things you should be thinking about in your initial project planning stages.

Think Forward: Assessment (07:26) Assessment for project-based learning requires a more comprehensive approach. The poor audio quality is worth it, to hear real teachers describe exactly how they assess for learning throughout a project. From Manor New Tech High School's Think Forward PBL Institute.

roblem-Based Learning for the 21st Century Classroom (05:22) This nice overview from ASCD goes into some of the obstacles to project-based learning, and then shows teachers sharing strategies for addressing those challenges.

cheduling for Project-Based Learning (05:35) Three high school teachers talk about how they re-structured their day to accommodate integrated PBL. Not everyone has the flexibility shown here, but it's fascinating to see how these teachers broke it down.

How PBLU Works (01:15) Hungry for more lessons on PBL? PBLU is an incredible resource offered by BIE. See how you can access two-week training courses and Common-Core-aligned projects that you can modify and customize.

But evidence is weak that there is such a thing as “girls’ learning,” online or offline, if what is meant by that is that each gender has cognitive differences that should be accommodated by different instructional methods. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot has argued persuasively that, while small inherent differences in aptitude between males and females do exist (even as infants, for example, boys seem to have an edge in spatial cognition), society takes these small differences and makes them much bigger—by supporting boys in math and science, and by discouraging girls who study these subjects.

These same dynamics play out online, as Cheryan demonstrated in a subsequent study. Changing the design of a virtual classroom—from one that conveyed computer science stereotypes to one that did not —“significantly increased women’s interest and anticipated success in computer science,” Cheryan and her colleagues reported.

Cheryan notes, “was sufficient to boost female undergraduates’ interest in computer science to the level of their male peers.”

Another way to promote female students’ sense of belonging in online math and science courses would be putting more women at the head of virtual classrooms.

All these approaches have in common a focus, not on teaching girls and women differently, but on helping them to feel differently about their place in the fields of math and science. Just as in the physical world, in the virtual sphere the barriers to girls’ and women’s advancement in STEM fields remain very much in place. With informed intervention and clever design, however, the digital walls may prove easier to scale.

In a culture that audits itself purely in terms of readily quantifiable measures against often arbitrary targets (with very real consequences for the teacher as opposed to the student) the inevitable outcome will be for teachers to do 'whatever it takes' to hit those targets, and this has led to some of the most unethical practices ever seen and yet those same schools are deemed 'outstanding.' 

The "shrinking of intellectual aspiration.

Too many schools now are bastions of anti-intellectualism that exist only to hit targets and where being clever and culturally aware comes second to passing an exam

It turns out that the best way to cause change is for people to actually change someone or something else. We learn what we do, not what we’re told.

If you want people to become passionate, engaged in a field, transformed by an experience — you don’t test them, you don’t lecture them and you don’t force them. Instead, you create an environment where willing, caring individuals can find an experience that changes them.

Habits are nearly invisible. You engage in them without realizing they are there. And you can look at another organization that is succeeding and not notice the real differences between how that outstanding organization behaves and how your organization behaves. When looking at outstanding organizations, you may miss the important trees and just see the forest.