Posts

Showing posts from February, 2012

IB Bio HL ... flipping the class

Image
One of the presentations for the K-12 Online Conference was based on Amaral's flipped classroom experience in the IB Bio HL class. The presentation can be watched here (20 minutes video):  Technology as an Ally in the IB Science Class .  In this presentation, Amaral talks about  the  use of a Google Doc to prompt student learning prior to the formal introduction of a new Unit in class. Then we can see snippets of class dynamics after the use of this Google Doc and the feedback from three students on how this approach affected their learning. Sample pages from a Google Doc used for this purpose are shown on this page. You can see that each student picked a different color to respond to the questions given by the teacher. So each student had to answer at least one question by doing independent research. In  this  way, students arrived in class with some knowledge of the new topic and questions about it. This was  the  flipped class approach prior to class that provided students with

IB Science and History of the Americas .... Formative Assessment with Poll Everywhere

Image
The theme for teacher workshops this week was Formative Assessment with Technology  , which was based on an experience using Poll Everywhere in the IB Bio HL class. Amaral was looking for a technology tool to help with pre-assessment and I happened to be looking at Poll Everywhere for a while and also taking an ASB online course on formative assessment. We decided to go for Poll Everywhere, which has a free online version and seemed to provide the quick whole class feedback that was expected. The experience with Poll Everywhere went very well and I was happy to see that after the workshop, Caitlin decided to use it as a review tool with students on the next day. Her students really liked Poll Everywhere and asked for more.  Her feedback on its use was positive as she felt more able to target review to the class needs shown on the poll results. Just to give you a more detailed idea of how Poll Everwhere was used in Amaral's class, here is the account of the context for this quick &q