Final Reflections Post

My project goal was to create a lot of videos of lecture content to begin flipping my classroom.  While I created some videos, I didn't make as many as I thought I could.  This was mostly because it is time consuming and I needed to create an entire interactive Chemistry course.  I spent a lot of my 80% time trying to figure out how I wanted to teach Chemistry and how I would integrate technology and PBL.  Now, I'm finally getting to the "nuts and bolts".  Either way, my work this summer involved improving my learning environments for students by integrating technology and student project opportunities.  While I didn't achieve all of my goals, it's an ongoing process and I will continue to develop content throughout the semester.  I am determined to have a mostly flipped classroom for Chemistry and A&P by 2nd semester.  I would like the courses to be very interactive online for a variety of reasons. 

I was influenced through a variety of ways.  Hearing about flipped classrooms from our math department motivated my change.  Additionally, watching Bozeman science videos, I realized that I could create my own content that way.  He's more interesting, but I'm sure I'll get there.  I didn't really receive any feedback from peers, but it's probably because I couldn't attend classes and was a little late in the game.  Overall, I'm excited about my project and its continuation.  Learning how to make the screencasts and sitting down with the Showme app made me feel a lot more confident about creating these videos.  That was my major setback, but it was easy to overcome.

I'm hoping to hear feedback from students about their learning.  A lot of students gave positive feedback about math teachers that flipped their classroom.  I hope students are motivated to learn this way and actually watch the videos.  I plan to give Quia quizzes (which I mostly copied from other teachers using similar content...so helpful!) after video topics.  I won't count them as quizzes, but more as warmups for class.  I will also be creating pre and post assessments for every subunit. 

If I were to start over, I would get going sooner.  However, I took so many classes this summer that I simply didn't have time to start the Summer Institute work sooner.  Also, the classes I was taking were shaping my own class content, flow, and presentation.

I won't really know if what they are learning now is better than before.  I know it is different and will be new, but I don't have any way to compare considering I wasn't teaching Chemistry last year.  For A&P, I can compare last year and 1st semester to 2nd semester.  My changes will really need to unfold during the year, because my main concern was getting Chemistry solid.  Here is a link to the Chemistry wiki that I have invested most of my time into.  You can also look at my other wikis on the left hand side.