Marzano Research: Enhancing the Art & Science of Teaching With Technology

I have been reading Robert Marzano's book, Enhancing the Art & Science of Teaching With Technology.  He talks about the Flippped Classroom.  Here's an excerpt:

“One classroom-level example of the power of technology to restructure the old paradigm is the flipped classroom. A flipped classroom is one in which students listen to online lectures at home at night and then use that content at school the next day. Table 1.1 compares a traditional classroom to a flipped classroom.

In the flipped model, students listen to a short lecture (ten to fifteen minutes) and take notes as homework the evening before they cover the information in class. As shown in table 1.1, this frees up class time that would traditionally be spent introducing new content and resolving student confusion about the previous day’s homework. Therefore, students in the flipped model still complete the same amount of independent practice work as students in a traditional model, but they do it during class instead of as homework. Rather than complete assignments without teacher guidance at home, students complete them in school, where teachers are there to offer help or answer questions.” 

Excerpt From: Sonny Magana & Robert J. Marzano. “Enhancing the Art & Science of Teaching With Technology.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/SuDCU.l

Creating a Screencast Using Quicktime Player

Quicktime Player is already installed on our MLTI Macbook Air laptops and is super easy to use.  Learn how to create your own video screencasts for your students with this helpful video tutorial.

Twitter's New App: Vine - How Can It Benefit Edu?

Twitter has just released (January 24, 2013) a new app that is perfect for sharing on such "to the point" social networks like Twitter.  It's called Vine.

If you are familiar with the format of tweets and how Twitter works, you know that it is short, sweet and to the point.  Twitter allows you to easily scan through a lot of information, quickly find what you need and get the content.  It is no different with their new app, Vine, as an addition.

Vine allows you to create 6 sec video recordings and share them on Twitter or Facebook.  6 seconds certainly does not sound like a lot of meaningful time; then again, neither did 160 characters.  It is amazing how creative you can get when you are limited within certain parameters.

Basically, this is how it works:  The app records when you touch the screen, so you can start and stop as often as needed (view demo below); showing only what you want; recording multiple locations and multiple time-frames.

The thing that makes this an exciting new media concept is that for schools that utilize social networking in their classrooms, like Twitter, can now improve that dialog.  Teachers can post small snippets of video demonstrating math concepts, displaying examples of work, or a simple video message to their class.  What a great way for a Flipped Classroom.  Students could, in turn, share their work and offer suggestions through small video.

Check out Vine's blog for the latest updates and to see some samples of what they do.

I put together a quick vid on what it looks like while in the Twitter feed:

Here is a nice demo of the app: