Individualize Instruction

One of the great advantages of a Flipped Classroom is the ability to individualize instruction. With my Programming 2 students, they came from four different Programming 1 teachers. Each teacher had a different style and skill set that makes teaching "down the middle" very difficult. Mix in a few students from AP and others who this is what they do at home versus a hobby and it is by definition a hot mess. 

So, I have tackled down the realm of individualized instruction to try and give all the students what I can to benefit them. This has taken me back to content creation overload to try and meet every student where they are at. 

Schoology allows you the ability to go in and set each assignment individually. This is a great feature but there still is the question on how you give students what they need and a schedule. For that, I have built a (very ugly) spreadsheet that falls into a rather nice Word document mail merger. From there, they receive their schedule for the week along with expectations, goals and due dates. 

From my own sanity perspective, I have not found the most efficient way to grade these yet. The time spent grading is up for sure. Also, the urgency of grading quickly is up to provide as efficient feedback as possible. 

With programming, it is nice at this point that a lot of concepts are tying together nicely, which reduces the amount of work needed. This week, it only took me about 2 hours to prepare everything for the week for the students. (May have taken less without the head cold, let's be honest). 

So, Schoology, Word mail merger, an Excel Spreadsheet and a local Starbucks to complete your work on a cold and gray Chicago morning. That's all you need to be successful in creating an Individualized Instruction Environment. 

It's Been Awhile

It's been awhile since I last published to this blog, which means one thing: The flipped classroom is indeed the time consumer that it was advertised to be. I would like to recap some of the highlights of the experience to date:

• I quickly gave up running three preps with it because of the time demands. I reduced it to two which became relatively manageable.
• On average, it took about 6 hours AFTER the recording to prepare a week. The syntax followed:
• At home:
• Student would watch a video
• Take a checking for understanding quiz (hopefully).
• In class:
• Brief 5 minute review about the material.
• Work with the material in class.
• Making sure teacher is readily available during work period.
• So do the math:
• 2 courses
• 18 weeks a semester
• 6 hours of additional content preparation.
• 6 * 18 * 2 = 216 additional hours of preparation and content creation
• 216 hours/24 hours = 9 full days of times per semester of additional preparation.
• So at this point, I would like to thank my forgiving and understanding fiance for being understanding and supportive.

Some conclusions:

• You can't go back: Long after the students were used to the flipped classroom model, one day I tried a half hour lecture and it failed miserably. The students got used to the flipped style and the lecture ended up producing the worst retention of the year.
• Your A's will not increase, your B's and C's will though: Through this model, I only had 4 total students get F's. Compare the stats below for my Visual Basic course:

Grade:	2013-14 (Not flipped)	2014015 (Flipped)
A	14 (24.1%)	21 (36.2%)
B	7 (12.1%)	26 (44.8%)
C	6 (10.3%)	8 (13.8%)
D	3 (5.1%)	2 (3.4%)
F	4 (6.9%)	1 (1.7%)
Population:	34	58

The AP Course had one additional F. No previous statistics to show for this. Out of 18, 1 F. The rest had C's or above.

So all in all, while the initial work is a tremendous effort, there is proof that the results do make significant gains in the class. I am currently in the process of flipping two more classrooms and want to continue to encourage everyone out there trying it that the results are highly worth it!

Challenges of Flipped Classroom

This is the first opportunity I've had since school started to write to this blog. I'm halfway through the 2nd week of school. That shows the time commitment doing a flipped classroom can demand initially. 

Some of the challenges that I read about have come to fruition:

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Students without internet at home: With a district facing nearly 60% free and reduced lunch, I anticipaated that this would be a challenge. What I did not anticipate is how to respond to it. When students came in saying that they could not access the videos, my reaction was "No problem. I'll just burn a DVD of all the lessons for the quarter for you." The problem was I had no recorded that far ahead. I sat down on a Sunday morning after 8AM mass to begin. I figured it would take me till about noon. It was 4 pm before I began the massive upload session to Youtube and burning DVDs. 

I think the lesson with that is to dedicate whole days to recordings when you can and work ahead. As a result of this demand, now I have most of the content I need for a quarter. But what I have to do is finish assemblying it.

--

The true assembly process has also proven time consuming. In working towards having a given lesson meet as many of Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory criteria as possible, I also add written descriptions to each lesson and take multiple snippets of the examples in the video to have pictures available. This also can take a few nights.

In addition, after each main lesson, there are Checking for Understanding quizzes the students have to pass. I vary on deciding if the student should score a perfect or be allowed to miss one. I let it depend on how much questions are asked. The student must meet the expectation before being able to access the next day's content. These have mixed results on immediate success so far.

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I gave my first test yesterday. It is hard to tell right now the impact. I would argue that the first set of test scores are about the same as they would be. For all of these students, it is their first time working in a flipped environment. I do think general retention of information and skills are up though. Long term speaking, I anticipate scores to be higher along with skill retention. Programming is unique that it is an entire new concept. I anticipate that true understanding does not come for a couple of weeks at best unless the student has done this a lot on their own. So I'm encouraged that scores are about the same. 

The biggest alteration I have made moving forward is making the tests after the independent projects. I think giving the students more time to work with it than just one sample together project will help improve test results.

May you learn from my errors :-)

The Need for Parent Training in Computers

With our society relying so much on computers to move forward with progress, those who grew up without technology have almost fallen under the "learn it or life will be harder" kind of mentality. From my history classes, I cannot recall a moment in our world's history where this mentality around an innovation has been so impactful. Many parents of students struggle to utilize all the computer is capable of. They can check email and use about 5-10% of its true functionality. They learn how to text when their kids stop talking to them. It is done out of necessity to keep up. It reminds me of how the caveman must have felt trying to survive.

If school districts are looking for a way to improve their relations to the community, offering computer classes to parents at a low to free rate would be a tremendous approach to take. This is something that has been discussed at our school that I fully support. This gives parents the ability to come in and learn what they can do to use technology for its purpose, making life easier.

Whoever teaches the course needs to have a diverse knowledge of various devices and be comfortable with whatever the user works with at home not being the most up-to-date. I can't tell you how many tech guys who are smart as can be have a harder time instructing people on older machines because their brains can't fathom it. So what if the user still has a hotmail addreess? So what if you love Google and they don't? When I switched my mother to Gmail some years back, the first month or so was a struggle because she was not used to the set-up Gmail uses. Keep it simple.

Also, offer free stuff, like OpenOffice or train on purely Google because its all free pretty much.. Be willing to have people bring in computers so you can help them with their machine. Lots of great ideas.

Options are also key. Do not have your trainers pick up on one concept and run with it. Again, everyone's home computer and technology usage is different. You got to have options. If you are going to teach email, be prepared for all the big email clients out there. (Google, Hotmail, etc). Don't just throw up Outlook and assume that everyone will transfer knowledge. Trust me, they won't.

Basic course ideas include:

• Email
• Internet Navigation
• Social Networking
• Using phones
• Texting
• Word Processing

Advanced Ideas:

• Excel
• Web Design
• Video Editing
• Smart Searching
• Etc

Feel free to comment with additional ideas.

What This Blog Is About

This is all about my adventures in teaching technology, differentiating instruction with it, using flipped classrooms and other opinions on how to better the world with technology. Enjoy.