One of the advantages of Jewish Interactive being based on a school campus is that we can participate in meetings that would otherwise be inaccessible to us! Today was one such meeting. World ORT (#ICTWO12) is holding their Naomi Prawer Kadar International Seminar for Digital Technology in Jewish Education this week on the King David Linksfield campus in Johannesburg, and we have been able to participate in some of the sessions.
I sat in on the lecture about “The Flipped Classroom” by Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky (@TechRav), and learned so much about Jewish resources available for use in a flipped classroom. A flipped classroom in one where students are assigned homework of watching a video or other digital medium in order to prepare themselves for class and then the usual homework is done in a classroom situation with facilitated learning and peer collaboration. Rabbi Pittinsky’s Prezi can be found at http://prezi.com/howrvzdvjgja/flipping-out/
In a sense, the flipped classroom humanizes the classroom. Teachers can use the time for facilitated and active learning instead of frontal teaching.
An interesting idea is crowd sourcing. The Online Video Mishna Project invites people to contribute towards the creation of a directory of online video Mishna lessons. This link will take you directly to that directory. You can add you own lessons to the spreadsheet.
A useful site is TORAHskills.org, which allows teachers to place homework online, create quizzes, message boards, and many other resources for your students. Students can then complete homework online, and parents can monitor their children’s progress and online activities.
Tools to “flip your classroom”
Some recommended tools to use for creating your own videos to place online as homework for a flipped classroom are screenr and screencast-o-matic. Once you have made your video, you can upload it to YouTube.
Use Google Docs to make sure that your students have watched the video. Create a Google Form with questions about the video, including multiple choice questions as well as one short essay question. You can then use Flubaroo to automatically grade the Google Form.
Useful Video Collections
Take a look at these collections to find videos that you could assign as homework for your flipped classrooms:
http://www.youtube.com/user/pittinsky
http://ramaztorah.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/VideoTorah
Rabbi Pittinsky emphasized how important it is to share any resources that you create online so that other Jewish Studies teachers can use your material. Jewish Interactive is building up an Educator Network, and so belonging to our network, and letting us know of any resources you are sharing, would contribute to building our worldwide Jewish Educator Network. Please join our network now!
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