Making the boring bearable

Creating a Flipped and differentiated lesson for students at a senior school level.  

explore the actual lesson here

Having taught in various subjects at VCE (final year high school) level for 10 years, I can understand just how packed the curriculum is. So I started to explore the idea of giving students the content to learn at home. This in itself is not a new concept - flipped learning is become common place in many classrooms as teachers use things like iTunes U, Edmodo blogs and other solutions to get this happening. But often I found teachers working harder and not smarter, creating resources that already exist and reinventing the wheel.  So in comes ted.ed. A site that allows you to use an existing video to build a lesson around. 

How did I select the topic?
To be honest I picked what the students needed to know (essential concepts) that were boring or difficult.  Why? By providing students with access to tricky content and a way they can engage with it prior to coming to class made sense when it came to maximising face to face contact time. In Ted.ed I could also set up a question/inquiry space so I knew what students were curious about prior to them coming to class. They could watch it numerous times, check their understanding using the quiz and know where we were going with the content. 

Why ted.ed?
To be honest I use a range of content delivery options. I have wikis, Schoology/Edmodo groups, Google sites and iBooks and iTunes U course to name a few for a variety of purposes. Ted.ed is another option for teachers to get their curriculum to the learners. In this case I picked it because;

• The students can watch a video, answer some questions and get instant feedback, think deeper and link to further resources on the topic and add their thoughts/questions in the one space for this particular topic 
• I can see who has accessed and watched the video, completed the questions and I can check their responses 
• There is a level of self direction, choice and accessibility implicit in the lesson where students who want to know more can dig deeper - a concept I encourage in learners and inquirers 
• The multi choice questions prompt the students with a time point in the video the answer is if they get a  question incorrect to support their discovery of the correct answer