Flipping the Classroom

What really is innovative teaching?

There is a lot of myth about innovative new teaching approaches in innovative classroom spaces using innovative technology. As you may have gathered, the overuse of the word innovative in the previous sentence is suggestive of a degree of ‘fun-poking’ at anyone proclaiming to have an innovative teaching approach just because they use technology or a physical space that looks more like the bridge of the starship Enterprise than a lecture room. (That includes poking fun at the author of this blog by the way who has always rather fancied being a starship Captain as it happens).

For a start in terms of conceptual goals for a teacher, for teaching – not that much has really changed despite all the ‘innovative’ hype. The goals of teaching, of learning, that many lecturers had in 1980 or before are pretty much the same goals that we have now. The pressure to deliver those goals, mostly external, are of course greater. Life is not made easier when a Secretary of State refers to the ‘lamentable state of teaching in universities’ before the inevitable publication of another paper that’s supposed to be green but looked very white to me when I printed it off.

Of course, some of the tools (the props a teacher uses) to achieve the goals should be different today and they certainly provide new and exciting ways to present, collect and make use of information and to support harnessing the collective knowledge of a group. They also provide new options for engaging both small and large groups with information, ideas and concepts.

So much of the innovation is really about dwhat different tools might now be used in a classroom to help deliver the goals teachers have had for a long time. I am not sure there are very many new innovative teaching methods as such, are you?

Why it can be hard to stop lecturing so much

So the current demands on university teaching are a pretty all order. What makes it such a tall order to move to new, allegedly innovative ways of teaching that avoid @chalk and talk overkill’?

For a start, classes are large, students often don’t want to be that active or engage (it is less effort to just sit and listen, or browse the web or whatsApp), many of us are familiar with a lecture (during which I’ll throw out questions that no one wants to answer) + tutorial (rearrange yourselves to work in groups, “oh Lord I have to move and talk to other people, this is a pain”….) approach, because that is what we experienced when we learned at the feet of our university sage.

Then, you have the louder student voices, that can have a disproportionate impact, who will proclaim that being made to work in groups and not be lectured to is being cheated out of real teaching. (They need help). Students also complain a lot about assessment of course – here they may have a point, we’ll see.

Does that all sound a bit gloomy?

Mentimeter

I saw this tool being used during a presentation for the first time last week. It is basically a polling tool, a little like Polleverywhere, however I saw it being used in a slightly different way to how I have seen Polleverywhere used.

As participants entered single words in response to a question from the presenter, a Wordle representing the audience’s collective opinion was generated dynamically on the room presentation screen.

Fund out about Mentimeter here.

Kahoot

And I always thought that Kahoot was a game to play at Christmas. Well actually it is now a great free online gaming system with their students. Kahoot!’s learning games (“kahoots”) can be created easily, for any subject. As Kahoot! may be played using any device, desktop or laptop with a web browser, it is perfect in class in combination with mobile devices.

Find out how Kahoot works

Watch the video ‘a 5 minute guide to Kahoot’

In Class Polling

I am old enough to remember the large suitcases full of little devices that were handed out to students who could then use them to vote in class in response to questions posed by the lecturer taking the class. The cumulative class responses could be magically displayed at the front on the big screen.

These days there are handy web based systems like Polleverywhere that can be used in place of the clickers. relying on the student’s own smart devices, polls authored in polleverywhere can be downloaded as aPowerpoint slide for use in class. Alternatively the poll can be delivered fully online hosted by Polleverywhere. A third more recently developed way to use Polleverywhere is to wrap it up with the use of Twitter. The poll can be tweeted to a twitter stream and respondents can answer by tweeting.

And, to top it all, Polleverywhere is free to use for class sizes up to 30.

In class voting can be an integral component of a SMART teaching strategy. Find out more at polleverywhere.com

Teaching in class with a mobile device

For so long now, whether we are about to speak to a classroom full of students or give a presentation at a conference or a meeting, we have gone armed with our slides on a memory stick or maybe on our laptop, so that they can be projected onto a room display screen.

If like me, you are a tablet user for most of the working day, wouldn’t it be easier, nicer even, to be able to walk in to a room with whatever you want to show – slides, video, web page etc – accessible on your tablet (or indeed phone) and just send whatever is on the screen of that to the main room display?

Well it would be easier for me, for a variety of reasons. For one thing I wouldn’t have to lug around my laptop, which I don’t very often now anyway. Also using the tablet just seems that much more spontaneous and opens up for use to me a range of presentation options that go beyond Powerpoint or Keynote. Check out Educreations for a neat way to create presentations on your iPAD that you can then deliver in a quite interactive way, provided of course that you can push the tablet display to the main screen in the room.

So, what’s stopping me from doing this all the time? Generally it’s the lack of any simple way of mirroring the display on my devices with the main room display. I can do it easily at home on my TV with both Apple and android devices but not currently in most lecture halls, seminar rooms or meeting venues.

However, things might just be about to change with a neat software solution called Reflector 2 that facilitates the mirroring of mobile devices to main display screens via any computer linked to the room data projector. Reflector has been around a while but universities seem to have been a bit slow to exploit it. However there are no major security or network barriers to its use. So, if you would like to mirror the screen on your mobile device to a classroom display, go nag your network and security team for help. It is possible to do and not at all expensive. And the icing on the cake is that your students can also, with your approval, mirror the contents of their tablet screen to the classroom display as well.

Flipping the classroom is a relatively new phrase, it is not a new concept. The idea centres on reversing a traditional approach to teaching where students attend class to ‘receive information and get understanding’ and then do homework or coursework. In a flipped classroom, the information is provided before a class, these days often in the form of a video. Then the class focuses on students engaging with that information and working with it, typically in groups to discuss the topic concerned, collaborate and solve problems.

As indicated ‘flipping‘ is not a new concept and some teachers have been using technology for sometime to change markedly the nature of classroom sessions so that students engage in activities around some pre-presented information or knowledge (see for example Turning the Classroom Upside Down). In general the approach, whether referred to as flipping or turning the classroom upside down, supported the ideal of student centred, active learning.