In terms of the flip, my students seem like great candidates. Most are already very self-motivated and want to achieve. They attend a "tech" school. Many of them are pre-IB candidates.
However, we still lack wifi in our "tech" school. Students who have phones with limitless data are about 6-11 per class. With an average of 40 students and trying to maintain groups of 4, that means that not all groups will have a phone with data to do activities. So I'm really excited about wifi, which was promised last December but will hopefully be in place this December.
Also - there have been quite a few students who say that their Internet is unreliable or unavailable (if I had less students this would be less of an issue). I can make DVD's of any videos and other materials, but that takes time, planning and is expensive. I put my Syllabus up via Explain Everything, and used this info from Crystal Kirch's Welcome Letter. (with her permission).
I gave students 2 days to watch the Alphabet Song I made with Camtasia for Mac and PhotoBooth, but I am discouraged because quite a few could not watch it and thus could not take the quiz to make sure that they had watched it. I've done other videos and things, but this is the only one I quizzed on.
Camtasia has been AMAZING and I've also been having fun with GoAnimate and Voki.
Our first day was pretty awesome - I was really nervous about it, but it went great. I took the advice from "Teach Like a Pirate"'s Dave Burgess and we made Play-doh creations. I like for my student groups to have names of animals, so this is what they created:
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| Murciélago |
They also created bears, sharks, narwhals, turtles, etc.
In terms of classroom management I'm using the Smart Seat app for iPhone for my seating charts, attendance and random "picking" of students. It runs $5.99 but it really has done wonders for me the last year.
I'm also going to go back to using ClassDojo for missing books, good participation, random "picking" and other behavior management.
One of the best things I adopted for the Flip was Sophia.org. However, our school's Internet does not like Sophia, so I am using MyBigCampus, which comes from our district's license. Not as clean looking but it will do the job.
So I'm wishing I had smaller class sizes, because it's easier to manage tech and difficult situations and students who "don't tech" when there are less students. But I will persevere!
