Welcome to Flipped Classroom

Good afternoon readers,

During our last class, we were introduced to the topic of flipped classroom (it origins, advantages and disadvantages):

The Flipped CLASSROOM2

Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams started to introduce this strategy, as a possible solution for the difficulties they found with their students, as they needed to reteach the lesson for those who were absent, but they run out of time for it. For this reason, they came up with the idea of recording videos full of explanations of the concepts previously taught in class, so as the students who had not attended could watch it online.

Surprisingly, when they upload those videos they found out that, not only the absent students were the ones who watch the video, but also the rest of the class, in order to review and reinforce the units learnt. Besides, they found also teachers among the users of their videos, who reused the contents so as to put in practice in their lessons.

This brings up to the first advantage of the Flipped classroom, the possibility of sharing online information with other teachers and students across the country, facilitating a new way of reusing other materials for the creation of more interactive lessons.

In addition to this advantage, this new strategy allows students to improve their self-learning achievement, since their awareness of their learning process is increased and besides they can create a more personalized one, according to their necessities and personal characteristics.

One of the major problems teachers have always found with students, was that as they are all different, they present different aptitudes and skills, and the previous method did not pay attention to diversity in the classroom. For this reason, as the lesson was taught equally for the whole group, some of them were lost during the lectures. Therefore, with the use of flipped classroom, students are now able to freely decide the number of times they particularly need to understand the contents. As a result, they can all follow the lecture no matter the different aptitudes they present between them.

After that reflexions, Michael and Marcos showed us another tool to improve our digital competences as teachers. EDpuzzle (I already have it on my Symbaloo) It is a very useful tool that verify the information students have learnt at the same time the explication is played. How? It is a video of an explanation that stops in certain moments to make questions students must answer.

We also were introduced to some new courses: MOOC (Masive Online Open Courses), NOOC (Nano Online Open Courses) and SPOOC (Self - Paced Online Open Courses)

Even though they are all very useful, the problem is that students need human interaction and that is what all these courses are missing, so we started a debate with the question: What do i NEED a teacher then?

Finally, they explained us our next task which is mainly to create a Flipped Classroom in groups. Our group will try to create a flipped classroom based on Shakespeare literature, we will see if we can achieve it!

See you soon,

Ángela.