Have I mentioned before that
Edmodo is a wonderful social platform for flipping your class? And I don't mean just for communicating with students and parents, for posting assignments, grades, quizzes, videos and what have you. NO, I am constantly finding it to be a powerful site for professional development! Just yesterday I read a post from Mrs. Kennedy. She posted a link to
Learn Zillion, a site that has videos based on the common core standards for grades 3-5. Just about every standard has videos that can be easily used if you are flipping your classroom. Did I say it has videos? I mean really good videos!
Even though Learn Zillion has wonderful videos (and I do mean wonderful) I still want to make my own. But do I even need to make my own videos? In
Why It Has to Be Me Katie Gimbar gives the following reasons teachers should invest the time and energy to create videos for their students: there is a level of trust between the students and teacher, there is accountability that is not there when you outsource your videos, videos can be personalized for your students, and creating your own videos empowers you, the teacher, to effectively make a shift in the way you teach. So . . . I will continue to work on my videos but while I am perfecting my technological skills, I can still use videos like the ones on Learn Zillion. . . can't I?
By the way, I realized that my video in the previous post
will play - it just takes forever to load. I also had better luck posting a video I made for Sneak-A-Peek to School Tube. One that I had been trying to embed on my class website since school started. I almost gave up since it has been about 4 weeks but I have had 2 new students join our class and the video was a good way to introduce their family to our class. I don't know why it finally decided to work but I'm glad it did.
"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn" ~John Cotton Dana
