By Guest Author | April 05th, 2018 | No Comments
(Today’s guest post comes from our partners at Panopto, who are working hard to support flipped classrooms across the globe. This article originally appeared on the Panopto Blog.)
As more and more classrooms embrace blended learning strategies, it’s only natural to expect questions to arise. That’s especially true when new technology enables a whole new approach to the learning experience — as is the case with one of today’s most buzzed-about classroom innovations, the flipped classroom.
Today educators want to know what strategies might work best for their needs, and which tools may help them make the most of these new pedagogies.
Students are curious as to how technology will change their day to day learning experience, and whether it may help improve their grades.
School officials and administrators are asking how they can support both the needs of their faculty and the needs of their students as teachers pursue these exciting approaches.
And as anyone who’s led a classroom before would expect, parents too are taking a keen interest in the ins and outs of inverted learning.
As parents seek to better understand the learning environments they’re sending their students into, teachers planning to flip their classrooms — whether it’s middle school math, high school history, or even collegiate calculus — are getting more and more questions from curious moms and dads.
The flipped classroom is a new method for structuring classroom learning activities. While there are many ways to flip a classroom, at its most basic, it works like this:
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The goals of the flipped classroom concept are to enable students to learn at their own pace and to maximize the amount of interactive learning possible in the classroom. Here’s what makes flipping work:
This answer will be unique to each classroom, depending on each teacher’s own plans for your inverted classroom. Here, it’s important to let parents know which class sessions teachers plan to flip, how they’ll deliver your lecture materials for those sessions, and their overall expectations for students to review those materials and participate on those flipped days.
4. Wouldn’t it be easier for the students to hear the lecture from you in person?
Flipping doesn’t separate the teacher from student — it actually brings them closer together.
The single most valuable aspect of every flipped classroom model is the opportunity for real learning it creates during class time. For most students, lectures are a passive learning experience — but in a flipped classroom, the lecture is already done and class time means interactivity, discussion, and experimentation. The day to day experience of a flipped classroom is always different, and designed to support the lesson at hand. On any given day students might demonstrate their knowledge with interactive quizzes, discuss their questions about what they’ve learned, write or present their ideas for how what they’ve learned might be applied, or just complete the normal homework they’re already used to — but inside the classroom, where they can readily ask questions and earn from their peers and their teacher.
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“Homework” in the flipped classroom may have multiple meanings. Most directly, the real “homework” for students in a flipped class will be reviewing the lecture materials ahead of time and coming to class prepared to apply what they’ve learned. Whether they’ve done so will be tested as it always has been — through in-class tests and quizzes.The more traditional homework — assignments, essays, and other exercises — still exists, although the goal of the flipped classroom is for students to work on many of those activities while in class, where they can ask questions, clarify responses, and hopefully, have more positive, less frustrating environment for proving their knowledge. These assignments too will be graded just as they always have been, and along with the tests and quizzes noted above, as well as standard midterm and final exams, will make up the majority of the students’ final grades.
The flipped classroom is the newest trend in improving the classroom experience. According to Campus Technology, already 29 percent of faculty in the United States are now using flipped instruction to some degree, and another 27 percent plan to add it to their repertoire within a year.The flipped model has taken off quickly because it really does seem to work. The research is early but powerful. Of teachers who have flipped their classrooms:
This answer too will change depending on how teachers intend to deliver their flipped classroom lectures, and how they expect students to review them. The good news is, the flipped classroom has succeeded in large part because it’s already passed the hurdle of technology. Most video lectures, for example, can be recorded with the webcam already installed on a teacher’s laptop or smartphone, can be hosted on YouTube, and can be shared quickly via email. As schools seek to provide improved support for flipped classrooms, a video platform for education like Panopto gives teachers a secure, centralized tool where they can record, manage, and share their videos, and where their students can search, view, and even take notes on each recording.
The single most essential element of any flipped classroom is whether or not its students actually review the lectures ahead of time and come to class prepared. If the students don’t do the homework and watch the lecture, they simply won’t be able to keep up with the rest of their class. For parents, we ask that you make sure your students are really reviewing the lecture materials. Parents who always find themselves asking “What did you learn in school today?” may even want to watch together with their student — it’s a great way to ensure they’re paying attention, and you can really make a difference by talking with your student about the subject as you watch.
The flipped class concept is still new! We’re always looking for new ideas to better engage with our students, and to help each receive the personalized learning experience they need in order to grow as mature, intelligent individuals.
Panopto’s flexible video platform makes it easy for teachers to record and share just about any information, anytime, anywhere. And Panopto’s web- and mobile-based learning tools enable students to search and view any classroom recording on-demand — and never need to worry about whether or not they have the right equipment.
To try Panopto in your classrooms contact our team today for a free 30-day trial.