About
- Six years ago, I came across a TED talk by Salman Khan who suggested that teachers “flip” their classrooms. This idea excited me more than anything I had come across in education in years.
- I teach writing to university students, and I want to spend more class time interacting with my students as they work on their essays. The students don’t always come to my office when they need to, so I hope that class time will work better. I would also like them to do more collaboration in their writing. Small group discussions of topics and more peer-editing should be helpful.
- By providing clear instruction and examples of my own writing, I also hope that the students will have a better idea of what I expect of them. I’m hoping that I can find a way to lay everything out so that the students can easily find lectures, explanations, and examples.
- Many of my students don’t speak English as a first language. My hope is that, by recording my lectures and making them available online, the students can listen to the lectures as many times as them need to and pause and repeat if necessary.
- I know for a fact that, no matter how many times I explained how to do running heads in class, only half the students ever seem to get it. When I made a two and a half minute video describing how to do running heads and made it available online, 39 out of 40 students got it right.
- One unexpected benefit for me has been that I’m thinking much more about what I’m actually saying to my students and what I’m showing them on PowerPoint.
- I am using Camtasia 8 and will start to use Articulate Storyline to create material. I’m sure that I will add, modify, and remove material as I learn what works best. At first, I will probably just have lecture and textual explanations, but I’m hoping that Storyline will allow me to add more interactive material.