Post:  Discuss your thoughts about flipping the classroom.  What are the benefits, challenges?  How might you overcome them?

                                                                                           

     Kids get bored when they hear the same voice and see the same things.  They get frustrated when their minds are not visually stimulated by light, color, contrast and action.  They “blow out” when they are bored, tired and hungry all at once.  Maybe it's a visceral reaction to lack of control.  Maybe they expect to get what they want when they complain. Is the solution to flip the classroom?  When I think about the idea of flipping the classroom, I get really sort of pumped up and excited about the implications, the possibilities and the potential outcomes. Discipline problems could quite possibly become eliminated.  Students who don't like reading at home may never have to do it in a traditional way.  They could see it and hear it from the light source they ultimately desire, an iPod, a tablet, a lap-top or even a Smart TV.  Their minds could be stimulated by music and images that are vivid and visually pleasing.  Kids could download their teachers’ lectures onto thumb drives or burn them onto cds. Students could weigh in on wikis, blogs, podcasts and what’s more, when they need help in the classroom, the expert is there to guide them.  Students can work collaboratively, as well and they can get help from students in different blocks or teams.  In addition, students could work at their own pace, conferring with each other electronically.   Further, an increase in the number of students completing major assignments becomes the norm since kids have class time to collaborate with their peers. 

     In a perfect world…A digital Utopia…an electronic Nirvana…—This is the phraseology of an ideal before it is put into practice.  The truth is that the caveats could be so plentiful that the ideal is veiled. The challenges include availability of devices, connectivity to the internet and the sense that the same boring lessons are being taught the same way as they are in the class room but with an added dimension of the electronic device (Novemberlearning.com). For me the latter is the gravest concern.  You Tube has countless videos on the subject and the concept is growing in popularity; however, I think the lessons need to be more interactive and the same principles of engagement need to apply to flipped lessons.  The availability of the teacher as the expert is realistic but its emphasis overshadows the importance of the on-line or the flipped lecture.  I believe teachers need to import the relevance of the flipped lecture so that students have something to which they can refer during the collaborative time with teachers and other students.   Some teachers are asking students to meet via Skype to confer about lessons or projects.  In any case, anticipatory set and closure are key in concretizing the essential elements of a lesson.  The importance of engagement in the classroom is such that students will retain the essential learning by the end of class.  Therefore students need evidence of the relevancy of a flipped lecture.  Hand in hand with relevancy is rigor.  What evidence can be provided by the student to show that he or she can demonstrate the relationship between the digitally transmitted material and the class work?  Cornell notes or interactive journals may be some old school solutions, but students can also journal online or email teachers. Perhaps the answer lies in a wealth of survey sights which teachers ask students for their feedback intermittently or by responding through Twitter, etc.   Students can respond in chat rooms, even on Facebook or Instagram.  I say, therefore, flip the lesson when students can understand and demonstrate relevance, thus providing rigor. 

                                                                                           

    

How do you currently network and learn about teaching resources?  What have you learned from reading and watching the resources provided?  What will you do to expand your PLN?

There is so much information available on the internet that people have begun to express their frustration through humor by creating new words like intronet, worldnet, or interweb.  You Tube and Facebook were romanticized on a national sitcom when an obvious digital immigrant lamented seeing his picture on “The Face Tube.“  LOL!   Many teachers are equally as dumbfounded by technology as the general public.  There are so many ideas to use out there, that many of them go unnoticed, in spite of their merits. 

A Personal Learning Network is one way to help teachers organize, utilize and proselytize the benefits of engaging kids through electronics. 

Currently,  my educational networking capacity includes interaction with the staff of my school through email and professional development, and more recently, Edmodo.   There is so much useful information available through the worldwide web it is hard to recognize what would be useful.  I thought of the following funnel analogy. 

A funnel is a device that allows the use to control the flow of liquids into a small opening.  A funnel prevents waste and saves time and money.   Having a funnel around can also offer peace of mind.  What do you do when you can’t find your funnel? You buy another one, or you ask your neighbor if you can borrow their funnel.  If your neighbor is not home, you give up and watch football or a movie. Sunday’s are for resting anyway, you convince yourself. 

How can we teachers funnel what tools we want to use from the web and put them to use efficaciously?  Perhaps that frustration is what many educators experience when they begin to think about ways they can utilize the many wonderful resources such as Facebook, You Tube, Pinterest, and others to help students become engaged.  Think of all the resources available as the fluid from a vast ocean that you want to pour into a small opening, recognizing that you need only so much and too much would be wasteful, or  perhaps you don’t have time to decipher through all the information.  A Personal Learning Network, [PLN], is a good way to funnel all the resources available in that vast sea of  of information known as the world wide web, a container of sorts for educational tools.

In my current practice as a middle school teacher, I rely on what I learn about technology through professional development and the testimony of other teachers.  I have a couple of blogs for students, which I share with my cohort in the masters of education classes I am taking at the University of Hawai’I at Manoa.   This is an exciting beginning and has opened my eyes to a ton of possibilities.  I really want to use technology in school and I so look forward to implementing all that I am learning about engagement with the use of electronics.  Following are some of the ways I plan to use what I have learned.

1^st.  In the new paradigm shift of flipping the classroom, Twitter can be a useful tool.  Teachers are using Twitter to write their Do Now lessons on their own devices.  I have seven beautiful screens in my room which are not being used but most would be happy to use them for a change of pace from their tablets.   Fundamentally, I don’t get Twitter, but I can see how useful it could be.  I could Tweet a vocabulary word a day, or a link to a poem.  I could Tweet my thoughts about the extended metaphors of bowling and seafaring in Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, how his life as a World War II pilot surely found its way into the adventures of James Henry Trotter and his menagerie of super-insect friends.   I can imagine myself relishing each response and holding my smartphone as though it were a gold medal or a scepter of truth, the way I do when I hear from an old friend on Facebook or the way I used to feel when I got letters from my high school friends over the summer, reading them over and over again.            

2^nd   Beyond flipping the classroom, I saw the idea of Pinterest and Facebook as tools to share really great ideas and useful practices.  I can like a Pinterest item that is shared on Facebook and Twitter instantaneously and others will like it and sort of  “pay it forward.”  Edmodo is another great source of funneling information.  It’s like Twitter without the character limit.  Teachers can share ideas and links and blogs and decipher whether any new information will have impact on their current practice.