Tip #7-Flipping the Classroom

The concept of flipping the classroom is a hot topic in education at the time this blog post is being written.  Largely pioneered by a website called "The Khan Academy," to "flip" the classroom means to record and store lessons online, to assign students to view them before the next class, and to spend class time helping the students apply what they've learned.  It's called "flipped" because it takes the traditional model of teaching a topic in class and sending the kids home to work on it, and reverses it.

The theory is that instead of sending kids home to grapple alone with what you've taught them, teach them "at home" and then work with them in school to develop their skills.  Below is my first stab at trying this technique.  It is a PowerPoint of background information about Macbeth with narration that I converted to a movie and uploaded to Google Docs, as well as posting it on the blog below.  To share it with the students, I will email them a link from the Google Docs share function:

Full disclosure:  The PowerPoint/video above was made using Microsoft Office 2010 because Office 2007 does not have the ability to save files to video (unless you purchase a third party add on).  Keynote, for Mac, does support saving presentations as video files and has for quite awhile.