I flipped out - and there's no going back...

Our Information and Digital Literacy department - of which I'm a member - decided this year that we were going to award marks to a variety of projects and exercises - usually open-book - over the year that would appear on the students' reports. (I have another blog post to write on this process...)

So I set an exercise for my Grade 8s on how to check the reliability of a website by selecting a page on a particular topic, and on how to write a reference for that site. I revised the work in class, and set the exercise for their homework. It was done on a digital worksheet that had to be saved in a particular folder - which they have to do for most subjects.

Well, it took me two weeks to track down all these worksheets, which managed to find themselves in all sorts of weird places on our system! As a result, I wasn't able to go over the exercise with the class, as my lessons with them had come to an end (I only have three), and there were several poor results that needed attention. (I ended up running a workshop after school to deal with these.)

So my two issues were:

• Difficulties in getting the students to hand their work in electronically.
• Not enough time to go over the exercise once it had been marked.

Then I read an article on flipping in the library - you can read it here - and even though it was talking about a much younger grade where all the work still had to be completed in the library, it gave me an idea. My next three classes were with my Grade 9s and their exercise was similar to the Grade 8s. This time, I was ready:

• For lesson one, I introduced the work and we did some fun exercises together, like Google search challenges and looking at hoax websites. 
• Instead of using my slides in class, I reworked them so the end of each section had an online Google quiz that would help the girls review the work. 
• They had to go through the slides and complete the quizzes for homework. 
• I used Flubaroo to mark the quizzes so that they were emailed their results before the next class. 
• At the beginning of lesson two, they had to look at their results, I answered any questions, and then they had to compete their written revision exercise - in class. This meant I was on hand to guide them (and help two students who had been absent previously), and could ensure that all the exercises were saved in the correct place before the bell rang!
• For our final lesson, I had time to go through the results with them, focus on areas of concern, and get them all to do a last practice on writing a bibliography. 

While I did the groundwork for this course during the classes, I basically handed over one of the lessons to them to do for homework, so they would be prepared for their revision exercise in class. The quick online quizzes meant that I knew they had completed the work. And after their revision exercise,I had a whole lesson to go over their marked work. 

As a result, I'm reviewing all my lesson plans for all the grades, and seeing when there are opportunities to flip out!

Have you tried flipping your lessons? Please comment below or send a mail to philippacameron@gmail.com - I'd love to hear from you!