5 Steps and 10 Tools for Flipping the Classroom

5 Steps and 10 Tools for Flipping the Classroom

If yesterday's infographic got you curious about Flipping YOUR classroom, click on the link above to learn about how to flip your class and some cool tools to help you do it.  Even if you aren't flipping your class, you may learn some neat tips and tricks.  The link includes a downloadable e-book for reference.

The Flipped Classroom

Nya:weh to Tom Deer for sharing this infographic on the Flipped Classroom.      

5 Educational Trends for 2013

Check out this article on 5 Educational Trends for 2013.  The video below is one of the trends...

McGraw-Hill Exec: Tech Will Make Us Rethink Age-Grouping in Schools

Sep 27, 2012 - 1:34PM PT
by Ki Mae Heussner

http://gigaom.com

As digital learning platforms continue to personalize education, McGraw-Hill SVP Jeff Livingston believes schools, particularly at the high school level, will need to rethink grouping students by age and instead organize students by competency.

Online platforms like Khan Academy are already starting to flip classrooms across the country so that students can learn at their own pace. But some think it might not be too long before technology pushes schools to personalize education in even more structural ways, so that students are no longer grouped by age, but by competency.

Noting advances in educational technology –- from online platforms that deliver instruction to programs that analyze student learning data -– Jeff Livingston, senior vice president of College and Career Readiness at McGraw-Hill, said Thursday he thinks that in the next five to six years, schools and educators are going to have to rethink age-grouping as the primary organizing principle for K-12 education, especially at the high-school level.

In a virtual roundtable with reporters, he said, “What does it mean to be a 9th grader or 10th grader beyond being a certain age? … It doesn’t make sense that all the 15-year-olds are in this grade and all the 16-year-olds are in that grade. It should be where your interests, your skills and your mastery of certain concepts takes you.”

Competency-based vs. seat-time-based learning

Mixed-age classrooms, not so unlike those from the days of the one-room schoolhouse, are already espoused by many Montessori and Quaker schools. In those environments, the thinking is that real learning is best accomplished when students are motivated to progress at their own pace and help each other.

But as technology helps teachers guide students through content at their own pace -– and effectively assess their mastery of skills and concepts -– multiage classrooms could become a reality in more traditional classrooms.

Some schools and teachers already seem to be trying the model using Khan Academy. And, led by higher education, Livingston only expects that trend to pick up.

In a conversation with me after the event, he pointed to the online Western Governors University (a McGraw-Hill partner) as a model for learning based on competency, not the number of hours a student spends in a classroom. He also highlighted the growth in students taking online courses as well as college courses on campus to offset the limitations of their local schools. As more self-motivated students start cutting their own path -– increasingly with the help of digital platforms –- educators will have little choice but to figure out how to accommodate them, Livingston said.

What does the high school diploma mean?

New models of learning based on competency will also contribute to new ways of thinking about certification and credentialing, he said. That debate is already brewing at the higher education level, as startups like Udacity and Coursera start to certify students’ skills online. But Livingston said the high school diploma will also increasingly be challenged to prove its value against other kinds of certificates that are “organized around what you can do, more than what you know.”

In the past couple of years, digital education has experienced such profound growth and investment that it’s not hard to imagine that its momentum will only continue to build and re-shape schools and classrooms. But as important as building the technology to enable competency-based classrooms is building teacher support and education for new models. The technology is increasingly there, but the challenge is breaking through bureaucracy and overcoming entrenched ways of thinking about how education is structured and experienced.

10 Talks on Making Schools Great

10 talks on making schools great

Check out these amazing TED talks focused on schools and education.  Some of them I've posted on this blog before, but with the upcoming U.S. election, the TED Blog itself put together a list of Top 10 talks. 

Give yourself some excellent flipped classroom homework and have you and a handful of colleagues watch one a night and discuss over lunch time the next day at school.

To give you a hand, I'll post them throughout the week.  Here's the first one from Sir Ken Robinson:

The Paperless Classroom

The Paperless Classroom One New York City teacher, Rachel Fein, is on a quest to rid her classroom of paper –- thousands of pieces per year -- using Google's Chromebooks, and adopting educational-based, social media platform, Edmodo. "I'm really excited about what’s happening in my classroom this year,” said Fein, who got the idea to explore Chromebooks after Teq's professional development specialists Donna Gobin and Morgan Duffield discussed what a digital classroom could look like. Read more... Flip Your Classroom for More Time with Your Students In the flipped classroom, classroom-based teaching time and traditional homework time are reversed. A teacher provides video lessons to be reviewed outside of class, which in turn gives students more time in class to focus on higher-order learning skills. This gives teachers more time to focus on critical thinking skills and expanding the application of inquiry, collaboration, and discussion. Watch our latest webinar Just Flip It for 10 tools to help flip your classroom. Search 365,000 TV News Broadcasts The Internet Archive website is a library of archived PDF’s, audio tracks, videos, and articles — anything that exists in digital format. A new feature, TV News, allows you to search and watch television news broadcasts since 2009. Read more...

MIT Launces Student-Produced Educational Video Initiative

The intro to this article on MIT's latest foray into flipped classroom learning is just as interesting as the article itself.

The Flipped Classroom

Nya:weh to Tom Deer for sharing this link to a neat little infographic on The Flipped Classroom. Like it or not, elements of this style of learning will continue to creep into the traditional school system. It may not be the exact model of The Flipped Classroom, but the idea of student practice and engagement on a task in a lab type setting, with tutorials and instruction accessed through other means, is something we can be experimenting with. Obviously, the technological divide will dictate the degree to which this is possible, but at its basic heart or philosophy, adding an element of the Flipped Classroom to our own practice will have similar effects of success. Feel free to leave your own comment after viewing the infographic...