Flipped Dinosaurs
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Traditional ways of teaching focus on teachers’ effective lecturing about knowledge. All students have to do is sit in the class quietly and copy down everything the teacher has to write on the blackboard. Most of the time in class is spent on the delivery of content, and higher-order skills, like discussion and production, are usually ignored.
Flipped Classroom, on the other hand, brings students’ learning to the spotlight. By watching videos at home, students can learn at their own pace and come to class more prepared. They can pause, rewind and rewatch the videos as many times as they need to. The teacher then can spend most of the class time on application of content, walking between groups to offer guidance so that students can have more opportunities to apply what they learned.
Take this class for example, students have to watch two videos about dinosaurs, paleontologists and fossils at home first. The teacher begins his class by asking questions regarding the videos to check their understanding. Following that, students work in groups to finish the worksheets together by looking for information online with their tablets. Next, with the help with KWL Chart, students can reflect on their own learning and come up with ideas for further exploration. Last but not least, students take a quiz to demonstrate they've achieved goals set by the teacher.
Throughout the whole class, the teacher is no longer the only center of the class. Instead, the students take on a much more active role by working together to both discuss important ideas and organize their thoughts in order to practice doing a simple presentation in English. After all, the ultimate goal of learning a language should be all about communication. As for tablets, they can come in handy when teachers want to create their own videos, get students to research online, monitor learning performance, devising learning materials, even improve student behavior, to name just a few.
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