It's A Brave New World

This is year 3 of the flipped math class and I am starting to incorporate more flipped aspects to my history classes.

I love google forms.  One of the things I have struggled with is how to make sure that the students watch the videos.  Google forms is the answer to that question.  It takes a bit of time to set up a Google form for each video but it is going to be worth it.  I added a section to my website entitled Tonight's Video.  Now when students go to my website there will hopefully be no confusion over what video to watch.  After watching the video there is a form directly below it for the students to fill out.

My students are getting used to using the Google form and need to make sure to hit the submit button at the end.  I had 16 of 18 of my math students submit the form through correctly after showing them how to do access it in class.  It seems like they really will follow through more consistently with the form feedback coming to me.

In my World History and Non-Western Culture classes I decided to have the students preview the chapter before they start to read it.  I have included the PowerPoint video summary of the topic for the students to watch.  They then will again fill out the form at the bottom.  The form a a bit more generic than the math one and asks the following:  what were three things you learned,  what were two things you found that were interesting, and what is one question that you have on the top.

I can't wait for the feedback from the kids.  Hopefully it will really help them preview the info even before they need to start doing the reading.  

Over 16000 views and still picking up speed

The year is over half done and I have not updated yet.  Strange but true.  I have been having a lot of success with my math class in the second year run through.  I think that the students in the other math class that has another teacher is a bit jealous of the amount of homework.  Most of the views that I have are still from math and I have not made extra math videos this year.  Thankfully math does no change all that much in a year although I am wondering about how the Common Core standards are going to affect what things I need to teach.

I have put all of my PowerPoints for World History on YouTube.  It was hard to find the images and some of them are pretty basic summaries of the chapters.  However,  some of the kids are using them now.  With most of the chapters from the book now done,  I have about 30 World History videos up and running. 

I have doen some with my Non-Western Culture class but not enough.  I did more with a site called WallWisher to have the students post what they know and what they want to know about the different topics.  Shockingly many of them want to eat food from different countries.

In both of these classes I am just starting to use Google Forms to give the students practice tests to prepare them for the real thing.  So far the students seem to like it and appreciate the extra practice. 

I am greatly looking forward to starting up the kid directed wiki this semester.  We just upgraded our bandwidth and now it should be much easier to have the students all working on the different parts of the wiki with video, links, and images than it was before.