Chloe McCune (no direct link)
I am an AP student who is living through this “experiment” and I have yet to encounter one of my peers who actually likes this system. While they may tout wonderful ideas like doing “learning activities” in reality its just busywork. Few times are we ever given lecture videos and when they are given they rarely help us understand the information. Students cant ask the teacher questions and we never have chat rooms with our peers or teachers for help. We are left reading everything from outdated and poorly written textbooks, teachimg ourselves the material and finding that when the test comes around we know nothing about the topic. Watch out Bergman and Sams… you made thousands of teengagers rather unhappy.
October 7, 2013 at 1:11am
Although too late for [David Nielsen’s] article I do regret that we never had the chance to discuss the “flipped classroom.”
I agree with all of your issues with the flipped classroom so I will add a few that I hope are not too repetitive. I’ll use your method clusters. I have just two: watching and classroom.
I’ll use your method clusters. I have just two: watching and classroom.
Watching:
- As you said, watching a powerpoint presentation online, by yourself, is awful and poses a few issues.
- You mentioned attention–I never watched a powerpoint straight through, full screen. Typically I’d start that way with good intentions. Then take out my phone and text. Pause the video to do something else. Or most often I would let it play in the background while I was on Facebook (so I didn’t actually see any of the slides).
- The most troubling perhaps is that I often didn’t watch them when I was supposed to. I’m not sure if there is a method or technology for enforcing viewership on the high school level, but more often than not I simply did not watch any of the lectures until the midterm or the final. I then crammed by not actually listening to the videos and only reading the slides and fast forwarding to the next slide. So for many “lectures” I never actually listened to a lesson.
In class:
- The next question I have is what do you actually do as a professor or teacher with that “extra” class time. I find group work grossly inefficient. One person does it and everyone copies. Or you finish early and wait for other groups. Or everyone just takes their time and talks about other things. Any way it is spanned it isn’t really efficient. So I think a lot more thought has to be put into what actual activities are going to be done in class.
- If the answer to that is that students will have more time to ask questions like you said, then I will say that no student asks questions a day or days after watching a lecture. Maybe in the moment you had a question while watching, but you’ve either forgotten it or just don’t feel like asking once you get to class.
I hope that helps in some way. I certainly didn’t have a good experience with the flipped classroom and I think I had a professor who was well intentioned and actually executed the technical parts fantastically and it still was not good. That is another question in itself (I had a lot of teachers in high school who couldn’t work the television in the classroom or put on a presentation in class, so is there the skill to actually prepare what are essentially movies?)
AND SEE:
• Tweets from high school students in flipped classrooms
• Buying technology – business v. schools
• Response to administrator technology memo
• John D on flipped classrooms and board policy
• Wrong track
• “Our goal”
• The digital natives are restless
• Flipped classrooms (and more) in IUFSD
• Email from an NYU student on his experience in a flipped classroom
AND SEE:
• Buying technology – business v. schools
• Response to administrator technology memo
• John D on flipped classrooms and board policy
• Wrong track
• “Our goal”
• The digital natives are restless
• Flipped classrooms (and more) in IUFSD
• Email from an NYU student on his experience in a flipped classroom
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