I’ve been spending some time with an awesome team of math teachers lately. Ok, all of my school’s math teachers rock, but there are four I’ve been spending some extra time with this summer to help them prep for flipping their classrooms in the 2011-12 school year. Chris Collins, one of the math flipping math teachers, was inspired by a presentation she’d heard at the MAIS Conference this past winter.  Since then, she piloted some flipping techniques in her classes, and now a team of teachers from across the grades is working together to examine the curriculum and determine where they can best implement the flipping concept.

As a result of these examinations and group discussions, we’ve realized that:

1. Flipping will be a natural fit in some areas of the curriculum but would clearly be inappropriate for others.  Some concepts can easily be taught via teacher-created video clips while others need different techniques.
2. Although some lessons aren’t akin to being flipped, video recording lessons would be really helpful for

• guiding kids who are absent get caught up on what’s been missed,
• review with kids who have learning differences and struggle with taking notes,
• any student who is working independently and would like to review a concept, and
• showing teachers new to our school see how teachers are teaching a specific method of problem solving.

As a 1:1 laptop school, all of our kids have access to their computers and are using OneNote and their tabletpcs in place of paper for most of our middle school math classes.  To distribute the videos, teachers will have a folder on the network for students to download individual videos.  We considered OneNote, but as some of the videos are large, we were concerned that embedding the videos in OneNote might slow notebook loading.  We decided to upload videos to YouTube as well, for situations when students forget to download the videos or don’t have computers available.  We agreed that, because so many of our parents don’t permit their kids to use Internet on their school laptops at home, we needed to make sure kids could download the entire videos for home access.

We researched a number of different techniques for creating the teacher-created screen recordings – Jing, Camtasia, Microsoft Encoder, QuickTime Pro – and settled on Screencast-O-Matic.  Screencast-O-Matic is a java-based screen recording tool which works well in both Windows (XP and Win 7) and Mac OS.  The free version is web-based and branded, but the Pro version ($12 per year) doesn’t have any branding, is not time-limited, can run without Internet connection, and has built-in editing capability.

Once teachers have figured out when and where to flip and have the videos created, they’ll have more flexibility in their use of classtime.  Teachers will have more capacity for individualizing instruction and integrated project-based instruction.  To start, videos with supporting notes and basic practice will be flipped into homework so that students can have teacher support during classtime for more challenging applications.  For a middle school with block scheduling, this makes sense.

In the process of our discussions, we’ve also got three more free resources for the teacher tool-kit:

1. Microsoft Math – “Microsoft Mathematics includes a full-featured graphing calculator that’s designed to work just like a handheld calculator. Additional math tools help you evaluate triangles, convert from one system of units to another, and solve systems of equations.”  In the past, teachers have used Nu-Calc, but this seems to have more capability.
2. Microsoft Math Add-in for Word – “With the Microsoft Mathematics Add-in for Word and OneNote, you can perform mathematical calculations and plot graphs in your Word documents and OneNote notebooks. The add-in also provides an extensive collection of mathematical symbols and structures to display clearly formatted mathematical expressions. You can also quickly insert commonly used expressions and math structures by using the Equation gallery.”  I expect this to be used more with 6th and 7th grade math classes; 8th grade classes will likely continue to use MathType or use both tools together as they both function within Word.
3. Microsoft Worksheet Generator - Teachers can use this to create customized worksheets for students who need more practice with specific types of problems.

There’s also been discussion of having kids use the free version of Screencast-O-Matic to record their own problem-solving process.  Chris has done this in the past with really cool, insightful results.

For more info about the Flipped Classroom concept, here are some resources and articles I’ve bookmarked.