I am always looking for ways to present material to my students visually. I teach American Literature and Critical Media Studies, and I find that visual literacy is increasingly urgent for my students. They need to be able to read the images that they are exposed to in order to be literate critical consumers of media.
For this lesson, my goal is to introduce students to the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s and 1960s. Using ThingLink, I took this iconic photograph and added links to videos and audio of the writers, along with a few salacious news items. Before students peruse the links, I will engage them in a discussion where we break down the image in order to make inferences about the men in the picture, their relationships to each other, and the setting that they are in.
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I have been skeptical about flipped classrooms. I worried about a Vonnegut-esque future where teachers were replaced by computer screens and YouTube instructional videos. I worried about having to spend more time monitoring and less time engaging with kids. I worried about losing my creative autonomy and becoming part of a hive mind.
But from the small experiences I've had with flipped learning, all of those fears were baseless. Good instruction is good instruction, and it will always require personal interaction and engagement, and a healthy dose of creativity. In fact, flipping a classroom actually engages my creativity more than preparing a traditional lesson. And that, to me, is empowering. The flipped lessons free up time in class to do the fun, creative stuff. Instead of spending 20 minutes providing direct instruction on grammar lessons, that direct instruction can happen at home. In class, we can focus more on reading, writing, responding, creating, debating...DOING. For the kids, flipped lessons give them extended access to the lessons. Instead of hearing my lesson once in class, they can watch it again and again until they understand. They can return to it to study before a test. They can pause and rewind. They can control the speed of their learning. Below I'm attaching two of my flipped lessons. One is a reading lesson which provides practice with identifying important details while introducing 11th grade students to the Declaration of Independence. The second lesson is a traditional grammar lesson about conjunctive adverbs and relationships which has been flipped to prepare students for an upcoming quiz. I look forward to building my library of flipped lessons for next year! |
An Online PortfolioThis blog details my adventures through the Future Ready Teacher Leadership certification process offered by the EdTechTeam. ArchivesCategories
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