Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Video Lesson Stategies

For our flipped class, we are using video lessons to deliver the content.  We have come up with a few options on how we make the lessons.

Last year, I made a lesson that mirrored what I would do in the classroom.  For Precalculus, the lessons ranged from 10 minutes to 25 minutes.  These are very long, however, this is a class that I used to teach for the entire 52 minute class period.  How do I compress the content?

Ideas-

#1  Create many videos per lesson.  We could make 2 to 5 videos that are each 5 minutes long.  I don't quite understand why this would be any better.  Students would just have to click on many different links rather than just one.

#2  Create a short concise lesson that does not have any examples.  Then, create multiple lessons that "fishbone" off of the main lessons.  These will have many examples for students to gain understanding.  It will be more like a choose your own adventure lesson.  I like this idea, but I wonder if students will just watch the main lesson, even if they need more practice.  Are students good at assessing whether they need more practice?  I would like to think so, but I'm not sure.

Let me know what you think of these ideas.

3 comments:

  1. I have experimented with a little of both as well. I like giving the concise lesson and having supplementary videos the best. However, I do include a few examples in my concise lesson. Students can pause and try those examples on their own if they get it, and then just fast forward to my answer to make sure they got it. Then, in a "part 2" there are extra examples worked out.

    From my experience, a lot of students are pretty good at self-evaluating - far from perfect, but I have a lot of my students telling me they watched Part 2. I also like it because it doesn't bore the top learners as much by requiring them to watch examples they don't need.

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  2. I think the lessons will evolve as we get solid feedback.
    Having a bit too much and allowing kids to help us pare it down makes sense to me the first year. We could include a summary slide that shows the times where examples are.
    It's almost like option 2 could get things going, then option 1 would develop as needed.

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  3. slightly off-topic:
    I would like to have a pre and post test so kids can recognize how the learning process happens. They look at problems before instruction and can't get their head around it. 15 minutes later it makes sense. That is a powerful discovery. I work with my own children in recognizing frustration as an early stage of learning.

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