Wednesday, June 6, 2012

This is an idea I found at  http://www.greatmathsteachingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Proportional-formulae-concept-card-sort.pdf
This is something that we could use to have students synthesize math concepts.  I would use this during the second half of my flipped pre calculus class.

It would be great to create cards like this for every unit and have students organize the cards into particular groups.  In Geometry, I could have many pictures of quadrilaterals and ask students to find all of the cards where the quadrilaterals have diagonals that bisect each other.  This is a method for getting students to use higher order thinking on Bloom's Taxonomy.

Let me know if you have any great ideas for using these or have created some yourself.

What we used to call "Homework"

In a traditional classroom, the teacher teaches during the hour and gives homework for students to practice the skills.  In a flipped classroom, how will students practice their skills.  The precalculus teachers came up with an idea of "Mastery Problems" instead of homework.  These problems will be given to students in class.  The problems will be divided into 3 levels of difficulty.  Level 1 will have low level questions to get students ready to answer the questions that involve a little more thought.  Level 2 and 3 homework will involve higher level thinking.  Students will be told that the chapter tests will mostly have questions in level 2 with a small percentage of questions coming from level 1 and 3.  Students will choose which problems to do, but all students must be working during classtime.

This is our idea.  Let me know how you assign practice in a flipped classroom.  Also, let me know if you have any other ideas.

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.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Quizzes for a Flipped Classroom

On great advantage of a flipped classroom is the amount of extra time that is created by the video lessons.  As teachers, we need to figure out what to do to increase learning.  I believe that regular quizzes should be part of this.  As we are developing a flipped classroom for next year, there was some disagreement on how to quiz.

Current Method
Every other day, students take a 5 point quiz that usually takes about 10 minutes.  When I hand back the quizzes, students should work in small groups to fix all of the questions that were incorrect and write a couple of sentences about what they did wrong and what they will do in the future to not make those mistakes.  I intend to use these as a formative assessments so I give them an opportunity earn back their poor quiz grades.  On the chapter test, students that score:
 90-100 get all quiz grades moved up to 5s,
 80-89   get all quiz grades moved up to 4s,
70-79   get all quiz grades moved up to 3s,

I believe that they should be rewarded for grades below 70.  I also do not lower students' quiz grades because of a poor test grade.

Other teachers' ideas
One teacher proposed having a daily quiz that is 3 questions(5 min) at the beginning of class.  These would be would not be worth points in the grade book, but will determine what the class will study for the rest of the period.  He also prefer one quiz per chapter that is graded that takes up 30 minutes.

Some teachers didn't like my quiz plan where students can gain their points back with a good final exam.  They believe that it encourages cramming.  Also, they believe that students should be rewarded for preparing for each quiz.

We also talked about using online quizzes to assess students such as google forms, naiku, mastery manager and the many other apps/websites that allow this function.  Does anyone have experience with these?

How do you quiz with a flipped classroom?  How effective was it?