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If you have read my previous post you know today I am at home for the fourth snow day of the winter. In some areas of Romania homes are buried in 3 meters of snow! We were asked by the school administration to use Moodle to post lessons for students so hopefully we will not have to make up the snow days at the end of the year.
At the start of the school year I received a Fujitsu Q550 tablet from the school and I have been using it to write up lesson plans, enter grades and annotate student work digitally. I was also going to use it to record a screencast of how to solve a Math Studies problem but then I realized the AAAA pen battery died yesterday and the school did not have a replacement.
Luckily I had previously bought a Livescribe Eco Digital Pen from Amazon UK (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Livescribe-APA-00009-ECHO-Smartpen-2GB/dp/B0050AFFWI/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_t_3) The Echo pen records what you write and say digitally on the pen in a Pencast file. The pen can then be connected to a computer and the Pencast file can be uploaded to the Livescribe site so students can view the pen cast. You can see the pen cast for my Math Studies Cumulative Frequency graph lesson here: http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=4B7rlb7rwnHK
The interesting part will be to see how many of the math studies students actually watch the pencast and complete the practice problems I posted on Moodle. The success of flipping classroom instruction digitally clearly depends on the maturity and responsibility of the students. Many of my math studies students fail to even attempt to solve the homework problems even when I have taught them face to face because “they forgot to do it” At least in the physical classroom I can observe which students are off task and remind them (not always gently!) that in the end they are responsible for their own learning. In an entirely online class I could imagine irresponsible students getting so far behind before the instructor notices that it would be impossible for the student to catch up to complete all of the required course work.
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