Welcome back!
Once more, as I have last year, I teamed up with some friends to create a flipped classroom plan. Working this time with my friends Bilge, Nisa and Yağmur, we created a presentation video and a small activity for the students to do as practice before the class. Before I tell you the process of how all this happened, let me tell you about why I love the flipped classroom strategy so, so much. If you would like to view our work before reading the rest of the blog, you can do so here.
Flipped classroom is a fairly recent strategy that is becoming more popular each year. It's main purpose is to allow for more efficient use of class time by letting all the lecturing and explaining to happen at home (occupying roughly the same amount of time it would take a student to do homework) and using the time in the classroom for deeper and more involved activities.
To me, the biggest advantage for such an approach is how it allows the teacher to assume a more effective teaching role. Especially in classes that have a great deal of theory to go over, spending the class time with a plain lecture doesn't allow the teacher to properly interact, guide, and help students. In other words, a flipped classroom structure allow the teacher to demonstrate and utilize their actual teaching skills much more than a traditional lesson.
All those points, of course, assume an ideal scenario where the lesson itself is perfectly compatible with a flipped classroom. As big of a fan I am of flipped classrooms, I would be doing a poor job if I didn't point out some of the potential issues that come with this approach. One such issue being that since the lecturing is done away from class, the students don't have access to immediate feedback. Should they have questions about the material, it is up to them to either do their own research or hold on to the question until the next class. Another, very unfortunate drawback is that if even a single student in the class lacks a proper device or access to the internet, the whole idea becomes impossible immediately. If they don't have the means the participate in a flipped classroom, it becomes completely unreasonable to try to do it, unless the students can somehow be provided with whatever it is that they lack.
On to how we flipped a classroom, we decided to tackle the subject of tag questions. Admittedly, it was an expansive topic for a 5-ish minute video, but we (somehow) managed to pull through. After deciding on our topic, we created the accompanying presentation that would become the main visual in the video material. We then divided the presentation amongst each other, with Nisa and Yağmur handling the topic explanation portion, while Bilge and I did the work on guiding the viewer through some exercises. Once everyone had their part of the presentation recorded along with their audio, it was a simple matter of putting them all together with some nice music in the background. Everything was designed in Canva and put together in the editing software Shotcut. Finally, I personally used OBS Studio to capture my screen and record the audio.
Overall, in the right circumstance, I consider the flipped classroom strategy to be revolutionary. As I said in my "final" post last year, this assignment was my favorite from the whole course and I can easily see the same happening this year.
Thank you very much for reading my blog. Once again, you can check out our work right here. Have a wonderful day and keep spreading the good word of flipped classroom. See you on the next one!
