Blog Post #14

Watch the following video and answer the following question "What is flipping the classroom and what are your thoughts?"

What is flipping the classroom and what are your thoughts?

Flipping the classroom is essentially having lecture at home and having homework done in school. This is meant to be so that students have more hands on learning on subjects and have help directly available from the teacher. Lecture at home is done in the form of videos and this can be just pure lecture or it can be an interactive lecture.

According to the video is a science teacher who has flipped his classroom and mentions how he has more time with his students this way. This seems like a great way for students to participate in school activities and lessons, since the teacher has the whole class period to help them. Another wonderful thing is that flipping the classroom is open and flexible, where you don't have to flip all of the lessons, you can just do one lesson per chapter, and get the students' voice and opinion in on it.

My concerns though are that this can end up being a lot of work for the teacher, unless planned out really well and everything is double checked. Internet issues can also become awry, students may have something stopping them from watching the video, either on the download side or the upload side. This would ruin the lesson plan made for the next day and can cause a slowdown. Another concern is that students are able to ask questions in the middle of a lecture if they do not understand something, and I can show another way of looking at it or use another example or give emphasis what they need to focus on in the traditional classroom. If they have questions about the lecture, their questions would have to wait until the next day and they may forget what to ask and would slow down the lesson plan.

A lot of time and work is needed by the teacher to make flipping the classroom to be effective, a lot more than normal(as mentioned by this other YouTube video). The results when effective are really good for the teacher and the students(since they wouldn't have homework in the class during the flipped times). As for my concerns, the internet issue could be solved by putting lectures onto a data disc or inexpensive thumb-drive as long as the students don't lose the physical media. I will have to look more into it in the coming years and experiment with it as a teacher to see how well it works.