Thing 8: Hearing is believing

I have been thinking about experimenting with some "flipped classroom' approaches for a couple of years now, but with limited time to work on alternative approaches, I have not made much progress yet.  However, this fall I have an extra reason to give it a try - I will be missing three days of class in September in order to travel to Acadia National Park for an educator's conference.  I made a similar trip 2 years ago, to Glacier National Park.  Not wanting my students to get behind, I assigned them a project that in other years I have used as a semester-ending "capstone", and asked them to read/study the appropriate chapter from the text on their own time.  This year, I wanted to try something different, so last spring I recorded several segments of my lectures on biodiversity with Camtasia.  The recordings do not contain much in the way of editing - they consist mostly of me narrating the slides and graphics, explaining the concepts as if I were teaching the material "live".  I have uploaded these presentations to Screencast, and plan to assign the students to watch them while I am gone.  I have divided the material from the chapter into several smaller segments, so that each lecture is 15-20 minutes long.

Depending on how well the recorded lecture works, I might try it again later in the school year.  There are many labs and activities that I would like to try in my classes but have a hard time fitting them in do to time constraints.  Using a flipped approach might make it possible.

Below is a screenshot from the lecture I linked to.