Flipped Class Week 5

My thoughts on Week 5 of my Flipped Class

1. Pages of content...
It's official, based on my students' notebooks, I have delivered as much content as I did all last year. Well, that's not entirely true. However, last year, students took notes on my lectures, but I never really had the time to check the quality of their notes. I checked a students' notebook I had from last year. It had 36 pages of notes. No, I didn't count them. I have my kids number their pages and put in a table of contents. I noticed this week that several kids are easily to 36 pages already. By that standard, I will deliver at least 4 times the amount of content. I'm not sure that is true, but I know I am still delivering significantly more content than I've ever been able to in the past. As I'm planning my videos, I've already finished my list for 2nd quarter and have made most of the videos. I am beginning to plan 3rd quarter videos and am having a bit of a struggle filling out the video list. I know some content I traditionally cover in 3rd quarter. But, with the extra time flipping provides me, I am stretching to come up with content. I'm worried I may run out of material in the 4th quarter. I'm realizing that I will have the ability to teach the kids material that I haven't even considered in the past.

2. My new toy...
I mentioned in my last post that I received a Livescribe Pulse pen. I found an excellent use for it last week. Many of my students were struggling to determine the difference between linking verbs and action verbs. As I circulated the room, I was getting many of the same questions. I went home that evening, pulled out the Livescribe pen, and created a quick pencast explaining an easy way to tell the differences along with examples. The pencast was 6 minutes long. Including upload time, the whole process took maybe 20 minutes. I offered it to the kids as extra credit. The feedback I got from the kids that watched the pencast was that it was very helpful.

That's all the thoughts I had for this week. I'm really getting into a groove with the video process. Most of the kids are as well. I did have a kid say one day, "I hate this flipped class, online thing." She was actually saying,"I'm not organized enough to keep up with my work and that frustrates me." Her and I had a short conversation about her organizational methods. I plan to follow up this week. Just one more benefit to the flipped class!