So far in my three-year teaching career, I have used video only as a third party user, something to show my students to illustrate curriculum in a passive manner. For example, whenever I teach exponents, I show a parody video of Super Base by Nicki Minaj made by Westerville South High School in Westerville, Ohio. Sometimes my students ask me to play a YouTube video for them at the end of class.
Thus ends my use of video in the classroom.
Then there is flipped learning, wherein teachers record a lesson for students to watch at home before the work for that lesson is given. I have not implemented it because, I told myself, my school is a “no homework” school. What could flip? My students don’t have internet access at home. I always dismissed the idea of making videos for students because of the “no homework” policy, but then I heard that a teacher I admire in the district was flipping her AP Calculus classes, and I reconsidered.
Then I read “Flipping the Script in K12” by Ed Finkel on District Administration.com (2012), and I had to realize that flipping is possible for me. He tells the story of Aaron Sams, a teacher at an at-risk school just like mine, and they just work around obstacles. They put videos on DVD’s, for example, for students who do not have internet access at home.
This got me thinking about how I structure and spend my class time now. It’s true, I spend it, as The Horizon Report says, “dispensing information” (p. 7), then I give students individual work to do. How can I flip this without assigning homework?
Some of the benefits I see in my own classroom are:
- Everyone will be happier that I am not standing in front of the room teaching every single day.
- Students who learn quickly can zip through the video, get his or her work done, and get on with other things.
- Students who struggle can hit pause or rewatch the video over and over again. According to Ed Finkel in “Flipping the Script”, this is a big deal in Special Ed circles.
- The 2014 Horizon Report points out, however, that work during class time “could take the form of collaborating with their peers in online communities, curating online content, watching video lectures, listening to podcasts, and more” (p. 7).
- A greater opportunity for scaffolding, as students can truly learn at their own pace.
- Responsibility is placed on the student for learning rather than the teacher because it is not up to the student to ensure he or she understands the lesson before class begins. Finkel quotes science teacher Brian Bennett from South Bend, IN: “I’m not flipping the time when things happen; I’m flipping the responsibility and the leadership” (“Flipping the Script in K12).
My First Flip
I am going to “flip” my classroom within a class period. We have four 80 minute block classes a day, which is plenty of time for students to watch a short video at the beginning of class, then spend the greater part of the class period working on projects, asking for help or helping others.
I made my first video on zero and negative exponent rules. It was iteration #1. I spent way too much time on it, trying to make it fancy and fun. I quickly got frustrated and abandoned the idea. See for yourself how far my attempt went. Please keep in mind that I abandonded editing after about 2 minutes in because I realized the err of my ways.
Then an instructor suggested not putting a lot of time and effort into flipping videos because the software changes so quickly that videos can become obsolete virtually overnight. I found this relieving and motivating. I tried again.
My Second Flip
Here is my first every flipping video that I will actually use! 
I will use it in a peer teaching activity that I do about once a week. I ask for 4 volunteers to teach the class that day. During the warm up I teach those 4 the lesson for the day and give them problems to work on for the remainder of the warm up. Their problems are the ones they will be teaching to the class. After warm up, they break into four groups and spend about 8 minutes with each “teacher”. All four teachers have problems that are variations on the main topic for the day.
This video will replace me teaching during the warm up, freeing me to help students who are struggling, managing behavior and attending to the beginning of class housecleaning things.
A few of the things I learned while making these two videos which might be handy for others wanting to begin using video in their classroom:
- Do not get attached to the video. Mistakes have got to be okay, or else hours could be spent recording and re-recording.
- Keep it simple. One basic idea at a time is a good place to start.
- Keep it simple. My first attempt had lots of editing and pictures and text and I burned out working on it after about 30 minutes. In order for anything new to work in the classroom, it has to be easy to implement.
References
Finkel, E. (2012). Flipping the script in K-12. District Administration. Retrieved from http://www.districtadministration.com/article/flipping-script-k12
Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., and Freeman, A. (2014). NMC Horizon Report: 2014 K-12 Edition.
joy donathan 