Getting My Wife to Flip for Me! (Part 3)

My wife has been bitten by the “flipping” bug.  She is already talking about how the new teaching methods associated with Common Core will coexist nicely with the flipped environment.  I am thrilled that she is so onboard with this after being somewhat skeptical, initially.

We are at the end of the first week of flipped videos being assigned to her two fifth grade math classes.  Of course, the inevitable glitches are starting to crop up.  I decided to burn the videos to a DVD for the students who did not have an internet capable computer (or other YouTube access), but own a DVD player.  I thought this part would be a piece of cake--WRONG!

So as to not bore you with techie speak, I am going to keep this part short.  In a nutshell, a Flip Camera video (MP4) must first be converted, before it can be burned on a DVD.  Even then, it may play on a computer but not on a household DVD player.  After a lot of research and trial and error, I stumbled upon a program called E.M. TotalVideo2DVD.  This program converted and burned DVDs flawlessly.  The trial version has a slight watermark (not too distracting) and the paid version has very reasonable purchase price of $35.

Week one of flipped video assignments (two videos) is completed.  Overall the students are reporting that they like watching these videos at home instead of doing traditional homework. However, below is a list of interesting tidbits for the week:

• One student wasn’t allowed to use their family DVD player because it would tie-up the TV.
• A couple of parents were thankful for the videos, because it better enabled them to understand their child’s math work.
• One of the students commented on YouTube by using a common texting acronym that contained profanity.  This provided a great teachable moment on the need for netiquette and a trip to the vice-principal’s office.
• One student emailed the first night expressing a lack of understanding, then emailed back after watching it a second time--informing us that he now “got it”.

Kim and I are both encouraged by our first attempt at “flipping”.  We are going to let this play out over the next couple of weeks and then try to gather some achievement data, which of course is the purpose of making a major instructional change.

Our final report on our “flipped” classroom will be ready in a couple of weeks.