Sunday, July 28, 2013

Flipping the Classroom

I've had a fabulous summer! It is surprising to me that there are only 3 more weeks left!
This next school year has already been on my mind as to where I want to go as a teacher this year.  A teaching colleague of mine suggested I read the book Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams since she knew I was interested in flipping my classroom.

Last year I had all intentions of starting this endeavor during the second semester with my math curriculum. I quickly felt overwhelmed and not sure where to go.
Fortunately, the same colleague that suggested the book is also a teammate. Armed with our own desire to improve our teaching and the classroom for our students, assistance from an expert mathematician (a.k.a. Ricky Mikelman), a flip camera and tripod we set to work.
Our beginning seemed slow--not sure which videos to record first, being camera shy, technical difficulty, etc, but quickly we began to gain confidence with each video. (Huh, it's good for a teacher to suddenly remember what it is like for a student when presented with something that is new and possibly intimidating.)

We now have a great start to our videos for this year that will be starting in a only a short month away! This will be a learning process for me as a flipped teacher this year, but I already know it will be well worth the days of summer I've spent video taping. Here is a little glimpse into some of the fun that we had while video taping this week.
Thank you to Theresa for the snapping the pictures for us! Go visit her blog!

Friday, July 26, 2013

Welcome to Tech Snapshots

This blog was originally used for an online class I did for staff development with my school. I thought about scratching the post and beginning fresh and new. However, while thinking about what I wanted to do with this blog I realized that the previous posts might actually be helpful to others.
Since my purpose for this blog is to have a place to post teaching ideas, connect with other teachers, to post resources for my flipped classroom experience and other classroom technology ideas, I decided keeping the past postings would be beneficial to anyone wanting integrate technology into their classroom and teaching.  Please feel free to look through the previous posts. I hope you can get a few ideas.

This year I will be flipping my math instruction. What does that mean? It means that students will watch videos of lessons for homework and then do activities in class that would usually be sent home as homework. The "usual" classroom but FLIPPED!  I hope you will join me on my journey this year. This will be a learning experience for me that I'm sure will bring a lot of new challenges. I look forward to blogging about the successes and of course any mishaps. I hope that blogging about what I find works and doesn't work will help anyone that is interested in flipping their own classroom.
I will do my best to blog each week about how it went--lessons, class activities, videos, etc.
I welcome any questions you might have, but please remember I'm just beginner in flipped classrooms.
I look forward to a great year of learning--flipped learning that is :)