Author: Peter Pappas

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Class 10: The Flipped Lesson

The traditional classroom is filled with a lot of lower-order, information transmission that can be-off loaded to “homework” via content-rich websites and videos. That frees up more classroom time as a center for student interaction, production and reflection.

While some may think flipping is all about watching videos, it’s really about creating more time for in-class student collaboration, inquiry, and interaction.

Designing a flipped lesson begins with thinking about what’s the best use of classroom time.

Flipping content is also a catalyst for transforming the teacher from content transmitter to instructional designer and changing students from passive consumers of information into active learners taking a more collaborative and self-directed role in their learning.

Over the first 9 weeks of this class, I have used video tutorials to pre-teach material using a flipped approach. For example here’s a sample of a TEDed video lesson we used earlier in the course to teach historical thinking skills.

I’ve also used short tutorial screencast to provide specific just in time training for students as needed. This has freed up class time since we haven’t had to teach for example, how to use WordPress.

I’ve sent a link out to students to watch the slide deck in advance of today’s class. So we’ll spend time exploring two options to create content. Students will be asked to design a flipped lesson during this class using one of the following methods.

Use TEDed to host existing YouTube content

Teacher can use existing videos on TEDed and YouTube to create customized lessons. They can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TEDed, or create lessons from scratch.  Visit this YouTube Playlist to a few short tutorial videos on using TEDed.

Create your own screencast to share with students

There are many free and easy to use apps for creating screencasts. One option is the free Snagit Chrome extension for screen casting (great for Chromebook schools). For our class activity we’ll be using the  QuickTime Player app built into Macs.  Here’s a how to video tutorial on creating a screencast with QuickTime Player.

Assignment for Class 11

Students will design a lesson using one of the two methods above. They will then write a blog post that showcases their flipped lesson and reaction to designing it. Feel free to generalize on the challenges and opportunities of flipped delivery of course content. See student posts here.

Students that develop a screencast can upload and host the video on Media@UP edMethods Flipped Lessons.

Students that use TEDed for lesson design can include a link to their TEDed lesson in the blog post.

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Class 9: Digital History

The Kaiserpanorama is a form of stereoscopic entertainment medium - 19th century
The Kaiserpanorama is a form of stereoscopic entertainment medium – 19th century

Digital historians:

  • Find, decode and critically source information.
  • Responsibly curate and archive collections with available digital tools.
  • Collaborate and share their findings with the world.

This class leads off with a live demo of professional networking on Twitter.  Social studies teachers make frequent use of of the hashtag #sschat. Adding it to their tweet makes it searchable by others. On Mondays 4-5 PM (Pacific) many social studies teachers log into Twitter at the same time and post using #sschat. Chats are archived here.

 We’ll use the event to explore how to use Twitter to build a personal learning network (PLN). Students that have not already done so , will be asked to create Twitter accounts. More on Twitter hashtags here. Article on Twitter for teachers here.

Next I will give a demo of GapMinder – a web tool that provided easy access to and visualization of historic economic, social and demographic data. GapMinder for Teachers here.

Finally, students will work with NGram Viewer and NYTimes Chronicle – web tools that quantify and visualize word usage. More on using nGram viewer and NYTimes Chronicle 

As part of an in-class demo of the power of  word frequency research, students will share their results via a Twitter hashtag: #WordFreq   We did this activity in our fall ’14 class and used Storify to curate a social media stream and create a Storify archive of our research Need some Storify ideas? 4 Ways to Use Storify in the Classroom

Books Ngram Viewer and NY Times Chronicle have many interesting applications in the classroom. For example, they can both be used to introduce the research method – form a hypothesis, gather and analyze data, revise hypothesis (as needed), draw conclusions, assess research methods. Working in teams students can easily pose research questions, run the data, revise and assess their research strategy. Students can quickly make and test predictions. They can then present and defend their conclusions to other classroom groups. All skills called for by the new Common Core standards. Ideas for classroom use Books Ngram Viewer and NY Times Chronicle.

Assignments for class 11

  1. By 11/1 write a blog post responding to our exploration of digital history in today’s class.
    What’s your reaction to using tools like Twitter, Storify, GapMinder, Books Ngram Viewer or NY Times Chronicle? How can historians leverage new digital tools for research, instruction, or professional growth?  Or you might design a short lesson using one of these tools.
  2. Come to our class on 11/2 with an idea for a flipped lesson. That night we will meet in the Digital Lab to design a flipped lesson using either a QuickTime screencast Samples or TEDed lesson built from a YouTube video Sample. You will have class time on 11/2 to create your flipped lesson, but you should arrive with an idea.

Image credit: The Kaiserpanorama (or Kaiser-Panorama) is a form of stereoscopic entertainment medium used chiefly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a precursor to film, invented by August Fuhrmann (1844 – 1925). It was patented by the inventor ca. 1890. There would be a number of viewing stations through which people would peer through a pair of lenses showing a number of rotating stereoscopic glass slides. By 1910 he is said to have controlled exhibitions in over 250 branches across Europe, and in the central archive have up to 100,000 slides stored.

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Class 7: The 1 to 1 Classroom

France_in_XXI_Century._SchoolWe’re using the iPad cart today to explore the challenges and opportunities of the 1 to 1 classroom.

Our class will open with a bit of “speed dating” of our ideas for the Document-Based Lesson Assignment. Students will form two lines and have 2 minutes to pitch their DBL design idea to each other and share some feedback. Then one line will shift and we repeated the pitch exchange. In all students will pitch their idea three times.

The goal of this phase is to gather feedback from peers regarding the following:

  • You have an interesting generative / essential question worth answering.
  • Your initial appraisal indicates there are suitable documents available.
  • You have an idea for how students will be asked interpret your documents.

Then we’ll break out the iPads to get idea what can be done with iBooks Author. We’ll look at three iBooks to develop some insights into what we might do with our iBook project.

Then we will have some time to explore three iPad apps that would have use in the social studies classroom.

Padlet – a simple tool for curating and collaboration. Tutorial
Haiku Deck – presentation software.  How to video (made by 6th graders – nice)
SimpleMind – a very basic mind mapping app. How to video

Three assignments:

1. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, create one. On 10/26 we’ll take part in a Twitter chat. BTW – you should be thinking about your digital profile. Your future employers will Google you.

2. DBL proposal – Submit a preliminary idea for your DBL design project for Peter’s feedback. It should be posted to a shared Google folder. It can be in the form of a Google doc that addresses. Proposal due 10/19. Here’s a short video on using shared Google folder

  1. Where will you use it?  Grade, course, etc
  2. An interesting generative / essential question worth answering.
  3. 3 -5 suitable documents (include links).
  4. A brief explanation of “what are the kids going to do?”

Note: This is not intended to be a fully developed lesson. Just an idea of where you intend to go.

C. Blog post – Assume you have your first full time teaching job and the principal tells you that you’ve been selected to pilot the  “1 to 1 Project.” (1 to 1: where ever student is provided with a device. Could be iPads, laptops Chromebooks, or other device) Blog post due 10/25

What are your thoughts about the opportunities and challenges that 1 to 1 (with a wifi network) presents?
Note: This is not a research project on ed tech devices or 1 to 1 classrooms – it’s a writing prompt.

Here’s a few questions to get you thinking. No you don’t have to answer them all.

  • How would you respond to teaching in a 1 to 1 environment – feel empowered or scared?
  • Would the student use them for consuming information or creating?
  • Would the devices be an asset to learning or distraction for students?
  • If you were able to “flip” some content, what would you do with the class time?
  • How would the devices impact the roles of teacher and student?

Have fun with it – Give me 2-3 paragraphs, a catchy title and interesting public domain image. Might as well get thinking about the prospects, because that’s where this is all heading. Remember you can search for contemporary or historical public domain images using this advanced Google image search strategy.

 

Image credit: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

A series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the then distant year of 2000. There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists, the first series being produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. More information and cards here.

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Class 6: Literacy DBL

I is for India

I is for India,
Our land to the East
Where everyone goes
To shoot tigers, and feast

Common Core offers an incentive for teachers to use historic documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But a document-based lesson (DBL) in this context requires four key elements to be successful:

  1. The right documents.
  2. Knowing how to look at them.
  3. Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found. These historical thinking skills correlate with edTPA’s language functions.
  4. Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.

Class 6 offers strategies for assisting students to more closely read a document (in all their multimedia formats) by answering three Common Core questions.

  1. What did it say?
  2. How did it say it? See: SHEG – Sourcing, Contextualizing
  3. What’s it mean to me? See: SHEG – Corroborating

Here’s a handout of my slide deck 3.2MB pdf

Assignment:

Students will design their own literacy DBL. Assignment (note – various due dates)

For source material, I’ve collected some great websites that include many of the major archives from around the world.

Best Sites for Primary Documents in World History

Best Sites for Primary Documents in US History

Here’s some some sample DBLs that I have designed:

Page from: “An A B C, for baby patriots”
Creator: Ames, Mary Frances
Publisher: Dean & Son
Place of Publication: London (160a Fleet Street E.C.)
Publication Date: [1899]
Archive: University of Florida UF00086056:00001