Here is why I love a modified flipped lesson, I can let students work semi-independently on some of the prior knowledge that I think they need before we get to the really meaty content. The 2nd grade is doing a plant based PBL unit. The students will be designing experiments and testing the amount of light & water needed and what that means for our food production in drought or flood years. We assume that kids have some background knowledge about the life cycle and parts of a plant. We don't have time to spend days on this prior knowledge, but we must ensure they have it. The flipped model worked great for this. I created a flipped lesson quickly introducing the topic. I included an Edpuzzle video with questions and some video links to explore. Here is the lesson plan with viewing guides and assessments. I think this lesson will quickly introduce and/or review the basic knowledge of plants and vocabulary that is needed before moving on to the bulk of the PBL instruction. Here is why I hate the flipped model, I really don't enjoy recording myself or my voice. I find I am too critical and spend waayyyy too much time redoing each recording. I am sure with practice, I will get used to the sound of my own voice. In order to create this lesson I explored lots of webcasting tools. Here is what I found: Jing- great for screen shots. In fact, it is my favorite screen shot tool. It is not so great for video. Cumbersome, and you have to store your video on screencast.com and I couldn't always save it in a format that I liked. Screencast-o-matic: Very basic, but very easy to use. The voice quality is not professional, but I didn't have a mic. I am sure you could pay a bit more and get more bells and whistles, but for free, I love it. Edpuzzle: Amazing! I love this tool. I don't have my own classroom, so I haven't shared these with students and had students answer the questions. I have used them with adult learners and projected the discussion questions. I will get a lot of use out of this tool. Vibby: I created an account, but I don't really see the difference between this and EDpuzzle. It does not seem as user-friendly and I thought much of the content on vibby was not appropriate for elementary students. I don't think I would use this much. Edcreations: I love this interactive whiteboard. It was easy to use, although I wish you could type text on it. I liked that you could easily save and embed the video into another video or powerpoint. Dipity: I was really excited about this website. I really need an animated timeline tool. However, I could never get to the site. I could find examples of students using Dipity, but the actual website did not ever work. I am wondering if someone bought it? It just says, "the site can not be reached" :( Adobe Spark: I had used Adobe Spark slide deck, or as they call it...Glide Show. That feature is amazing. It looks very professional. There are great photos and icons to use. It is my favorite presentation tool to use, and it is Free! However, I am using the video application for another class....grrrrrrrr. It is making me a bit crazy. It has some beautiful templates, but they are very limiting. You can only use 30 seconds of video at a time. You can not change the font, or color or size. The real problem for me is that all of the text is centered. This is a Baggio no-no. I want the text left justified, especially when you are typing a list or bullets. The end product will probably look great, but I am finding myself using a lot of work-arounds, cutting, pasting etc. to get the video to look the way I want. I am sure that some of the Freemium site can do a million amazing things, but I want to explore tools that the kids can use. I am finding that there are lots of good free tools for students to use. I think the simplicity of the free tools is probably an advantage for elementary kids. The fancy sites with lots of bells and whistles would be overwhelming for younger kids.
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Becky AlbertazziAcademic Specialist Archives |