Group items tagged

Below you will find a collaboratively written document produced in Bangkok, Thailand, at the March 28-31 teacher's meeting of EARCOS, the East Asia Regional Council of Schools.  EARCOS is an organization of 130 primary and secondary schools that primarily use English as the language of instruction.  These include AP and IB schools and a number of other private schools.  We produced the document below on a public Google doc at a workshop, which I structured on the model of an "innovation challenge" of the kind that web developers use to bring together communities to complete a project.  We hope this guide will be useful to any teacher confronting the challenges of introducing new technologies into the K-12 classroom in meaningful, inventive, productive, creative, and connected ways.

Reverse instruction is a hot news topic these days. Here's 15 news stories from the last month about flipping the classroom.

Make: Projects is a living library for makers, a how-to community hosted by MAKE magazine. Here you can build something from our growing cookbook of projects, tweak existing projects to improve them, share your own step-by-step instructions, discover new ideas and techniques, and learn how to make just about anything. And it's a wiki, so everything is hackable. Connect with the collective smarts of the maker community!

I've learned from many great teachers before me that the idea of a flipped classroom is nothing new.  While the term 'flipped class' is a trendy new catch phrase, the idea of the flipped classroom model is something teachers have been practicing for years.   Defined: The flipped classroom is an instructional  method used to engage students at home through the use of video in effort to enhance the classroom experience by a more hands-on approach to learning.

In response to all of the attention given to the flipped classroom, I proposed The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture and The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture for Higher Education in which the viewing of videos (often discussed on the primary focus of the flipped classroom) becomes a part of a larger cycle of learning based on an experiential cycle of learning. Universal Design for Learning has also been in the news lately as a new report Universal Design for Learning (UDL): Initiatives on the Move was released by the National Center on UDL, May, 2012. This post describes the principles of Universal Design for Learning and how they naturally occur when a full cycle of learning, including ideas related to the flipped classroom, are used within the instructional process.

How to make ... stuff!

The preliminary results of our TeacherView Survey on Flipped Learning are in based on responses from close to 500 teachers nationwide.  These results should make any school or district administrator look seriously into how to begin flipping instruction broadly. Here's a quick sample of the findings. Click on the infographic to expand:

As our students grow dependant on Internet being a primary source for their  information, it becomes of urgent necessity that we, as teachers and educators, should know how to evaluate web content and decipher credible resources from spam and irrelevant ones. Regrettably enough, some of the teachers who are using technology in their instruction still don't come to grips with  the mechanisms used to sift through internet content. There is a crude analogy to this situation . A teacher who does not evaluate the web content he shares with his students is like a person driving a car without having a driver license, he can still drive his car  but he does not know the real dangers he is putting himself to in doing so.

"According to Andreas Schleicher, there is no evidence from the PISA data yet of a consistent relationship between the use of education technology and superior student performance.  That, however, certainly does not mean that no such relationship will exist in the future, just that it hasn't happened yet, at least not at the scale required to show up in the PISA surveys. "

"iPadagogy is a YouTube channel dedicated to instruction videos of useful iPad apps for education"

I asked some of my kiddos and my music teacher colleague, Monica Femovich, to help me explain our very new efforts in teaching curation.  Usually game for anything Glee-ish, our singer/actors brilliantly and generously created an introduction I can use for instruction and in upcoming workshops. This may be the first song about digital curation.

"APPitic is a directory of apps for education by Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) to help you transform teaching and learning. These apps have been tested in a variety of different grade levels, instructional strategies and classroom settings."

"Google understands the importance of finding the right information at the right time. We create tools to let you find the information you need, of the kind you need, when you need it. In most cases, a simple search works really well. But for more specialized questions, a bit of instruction in how to search improves all searcher--from middle school students to trained professionals--and lets you discover and use more, higher quality sources than ever before."

Advocates say that "flipped classrooms" help overburdened teachers differentiate their instruction to reach more learners, provide an avenue into more hands-on and student-driven learning during classtime, and shift the teacher's role from "sage on the stage" to learning coach and facilitator. Critics say it's just a fad, relies too heavily on rote instruction, and doesn't go far enough in making the needed changes for teaching and learning reform. I've rounded up this list of videos so you can learn more about the challenges and benefits of flipped classrooms.

Informative article on Flipped Classroom with links to the 'Flipping the Classroom' video playlist and Mary Beth Hertz's excellent blog post, "The Flipped Classroom: Pro & Con" 

One of the perplexing things that teachers and educators encounter when trying to understand educational technology and leverage it to their classrooms is the abundance of those baffling techy terms. Blended Learning is different from Differentiated Learning, Educational Technology might not be necessarily Instructional Technology, a Virtual Classroom is different from an Electronic Classroom or Flipped Classroom; There is also asynchronous, synchronous, and personalized learning, these and many more are but some examples of the growing terminology in this field.

Instructions on how to setup an Unblock Us account on your computer

APPitic is a directory of apps for education by Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) to help you transform teaching and learning. These apps have been tested in a variety of different grade levels, instructional strategies and classroom settings.

New webtv webinars series to demo new principles of school2.0 instructional design. Case studies.

"Back to the title: was the SMART Board a dumb choice?  I'm going to say yes, only because of the way that it was brought to bear.  Without a plan, without training, and without supplement, it was nothing more than an expensive, fancy toy for teachers (and the occasional student).  If we are to justify the funds that we need for instructional technology, we must be smarter about how we approach and implement them.  We must be ready to show real power to boost student achievement and motivation using these magnificent tools.  To do so, we must be prepared to use these tools in the same ways that our colleges and top employers are using them-to solve real problems."