It occurred to me that I should really start to change my approach to lesson delivery. And never has that thought been more prominent than in my lesson on Tuesday. The kids were more interested in off task chat than an overview of what will be on Thursday's reading test. (Fair enough, but they did need to know what to expect).
With all the talk of iPads and the flipped classroom, it was worth a look.
However, it is hard enough to get my remedial class to do work with me standing over them, much less hope of them ever completing any sort of homework on their own. But there was still something quite appealing about providing a bit of one-to-one instruction via the iPad while I dealt with technical (hardware,app) and behavioral issues that seem to consistently arise in every lesson -especially for those students who are ready to get on with it, and who suffer with the endless attempts of others who derail and delay the lesson.
So with that, I set out to record my first Explain Everything lesson. The content was fairly dry and certainly the production value could have been improved, but I was in a very calm and encouraging mental state and my voice reflected that. It occurred to me later that the stress of these classes can put an edge to your voice that you may not realize, but certainly the kids pick up on it.
Another interesting point is the insight it gives you into the way that you explain things. I certainly could be more succinct.
Once I had the presentation recorded, the challenge was to export it- and figure out the best way to get it to them. I exported to Dropbox, but the student iPads were not equipped with Dropbox and their Cloud-On app had some buggy firewall issue. The final option was to upload it to YouTube, which was fairly straightforward and I posted a link to it on Moodle. Sweet!
But alas, YouTube was also blocked on student iPads. Hours of recording, compression and uploading only to have to show it on the data projector! Primal scream!
Still, the calming effect, combined with the decreased frustration of interruptions was worth the effort. I could give the derailers the attention they sought, without interruption (the lesson kept going on the overhead), and those interested could listen and look through the parts of the test I wanted them to. Magic!
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