Happy first day, everyone! It’s that time of year, and many college teachers are gearing up for a busy Fall term. If you’re like me, you’ve got plenty to do – multiple courses means plenty of new faces to get to know. I’m teaching a variety of courses from Video Production to Digital Communication to Social Media for Business, to all different age groups too. Add to that some new administrative duties I’m taking on for one of the programs I am teaching in, and top this off with the fact that this is my part time job, and it’s possible to be a little overwhelmed. When I undertook a higher teaching load this Fall, I knew I’d need to be super organized to make it all work. I’ve been busy preparing myself over the past several weeks, and I thought I’d share a few tips on how I’m planning to manage it all. Manage Your Schedule With 12 hours of classroom time per week on my agenda (not including my online courses), I knew it was going to be critical to make sure that I had all of my lesson plans and materials completed in advance, and scheduled out, so that instead of chasing my tail to create or update material each week, I’d just have to look at my calendar to know what I’m supposed to be teaching at any given time. I am using an app called iStudiez Pro, which is actually designed more for students but works well for teachers too. It syncs across my iMac, iPad and iPhone and allows me to poke in schedules, assignment due dates, lessons, lectures and class activities for each class I’m teaching. That way, on any given day, I can simply refer to my iStudiez app from whatever device I’m using, and know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m also syncing this with my Google Calendar so I’m reminded of any critical dates such as assignment due dates. (Note: I just learned that the people at iStudiez are coming out with a teacher app called iTeacherBook – I’m excited!) Schedule everything – in fact, over-schedule – because you can always change things around if you need to. If it’s in your calendar, it’s not floating around in your brain stressing you out and it’s not going to be forgotten. Manage Your Files If you’re like me, you’ve got course materials coming out your ears. Presentations, video tutorials, handouts, assignments and rubrics – all of these things are critical to a successful class. I used to carry everything around with me on the hard drive of my computer, with a USB stick as backup. I can’t tell you how many times I ended up with the wrong version of something, and I was already at campus so couldn’t fix it. (Remember, I’m a part-timer so don’t have an office or computer on campus – I must do all my prep at home then bring it with me to class.) Then I discovered Dropbox and my life changed. Now I keep all my files for each course in it’s own neatly organized folder on Dropbox, and I can access it whenever I need it. Dropbox lets you sync folders across computers anywhere, so that means I can review my presentation on my iPad or iPhone anywhere, anytime, and I can call up whatever I need either on my own laptop or on the school’s computer. If you’re not using Dropbox, set it up today. You get 2GB of space for free which is ample, and you’ll never have the wrong version of your presentation again. Manage Your Students I just did a tally and I will have about 115 students this term across my full time program, online and hybrid courses. I figure that’s pretty average for any teacher with a part time load like me. Still, it’s a lot of people to manage. Each student has individual needs, learning styles and requires a certain amount of my attention. Often, they seem to all want that attention at once, too! Rather than get overwhelmed with an influx of requests for help, I do a lot to set the expectations with my students right from the beginning. I hold virtual office hours every week, in which I’m available online for one on one or group chats. I let students know that if they email me they can expect a reply within 24 hours (that helps them plan ahead too). I let them know that if their question is quick they can reach me on Twitter. And I also tell them to post their question (if it’s course-related and not personal) to the class Facebook group or our Discussion Forum Q and A section, so that others can benefit from the response (and in some cases other students are even able to answer the question before I get to it.) When school is in session, I start every day by catching up on any messages, emails, forum posts etc. that I need to deal with right away. Then I move on to other tasks such as checking student blog posts and interacting in the online community. I usually take about an hour every morning, 5 days a week for that. When it comes to marking assignments, which often takes longer than an hour, I schedule it in my calendar well in advance, blocking off ample focused time to complete the task. Most importantly, I make myself available before and after class so that students can approach me in person if they have questions or concerns. I deal with each student and issue one at a time, and put all my focus on helping one person (or group) before moving on to the next. Ultimately, managing the administrative and organizational tasks behind teaching a course will help you to be less stressed and able to focus better on your students and what they are learning. That’s my goal this year, anyway.

Back to school we go! I love this time of year. Planning my courses, getting things organized, starting to meet the students; the anticipation of a fun new term is upon us, and I can’t wait to get back into the classroom. I’m incorporating a lot of technology into my courses this term, not only for the teaching part but for my own professional development too. I thought I’d share a bit of what I’m up to with you, in the hopes that it’s helpful. Set up a Facebook Group I want to start with Facebook, because there are so many misconceptions about using Facebook in the classroom. Many teachers don’t want anything to do with the tool, because they think it jeopardizes their privacy if they become “friends” with their students. Well, the thing of it is, you absolutely don’t have to become friends with your students to use Facebook with them. Simply set up a Closed Group, and send out the link to your class. They click the link, and they will see a button to request permission to join the group. You let them in, and they can see what everyone is posting in the group, but if they click on your name, they won’t see your profile (provided you have it locked down). So, you can connect and share with your students on the platform they use the most, and you don’t have to worry they will see conversations you’re having with your friends in your main Facebook stream. Record Your Lectures One of the most frustrating things for me as a teacher is catching students up when they’ve been absent. I do not like to have to repeat myself time and again, as it wastes the time of the other students. But absences happen, and will continue to happen. But since I’ve started recording all my lectures, it’s become much less of an issue. I post my recordings to the BlackBoard LMS that my college uses, but you can post them to your own web site too or to a site like SoundCloud or Libsyn (note: both are paid options but really reasonably priced). Some institutions even share their lectures to iTunesU either publicly or privately, so their students can subscribe. There are plenty of tools out there for recording your lectures. You can audio record using a tool like Audacity (provided you have a microphone), but I’ve had just as much success with using the built in Audio recorder on my smart phone. My college now uses Camtasia Relay, which lets me record my audio along with my computer screen as a video that can be shared with students. Check with your college to see if they are using Camtasia too – it’s a wonderful thing. With my lectures recorded, my students don’t have to worry if they miss a class, because they can catch up easily. Additionally, students can go and re-listen to lectures at any time if they want to review material. It helps them to be more successful and saves me the time and effort of having to explain things over and over again. Flipping the Classroom I think the biggest shift I’m making this year is I’m flipping my classroom. I’ve written a series of posts on it (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), if you’re interested in how I’m going about it. Suffice it to say, this wouldn’t be possible without technology. By creating a series of training videos on YouTube, and linking that to a WordPress web site that students will review as their homework, my class time is now all about applying learning and working on real, creative projects. I’m really excited about what this means for the classroom experience and the overall success of my students. They will have the opportunity to learn new skills at their own pace and have the satisfaction of being able to create and collaborate in the classroom. It’s a very good thing. Professional Development I think a lot of teachers are still fearful of technology. After all, we’ve done it a certain way for so long – making photocopied handouts, using class time for step-by-step training and lectures, and spending too much time re-explaining things to students who are absent. That’s why I think it’s vitally important for teachers to do what they can to educate themselves on technology. The more you know, the less fear inducing is, right? There are some terrific resources out there that I use to learn about technology in the classroom – what works, what doesn’t and things I can try. I follow the #edchat and #flipclass hashtags on Twitter, because there are amazing conversations going on all the time. I learn a ton. You can follow too, just by going to http://twitter.com/search and typing in the hashtag (with the “#”). You don’t even need a Twitter account to do this! I also subscribe to Edutopia, which is an amazing resource for educators. It has a ton of case studies, strategies, videos and blogs for educators and a great community to boot. Finally, keep tabs on what’s going on at your own school in terms of professional development. Take advantage of the training being offered, it’s often free or at least very low cost if you’re faculty. Schools will often give you the tools – but it’s up to you to really take charge of learning how they can work in your class. These are just a few ways I’m using tech in the classroom. Does it all work perfectly, all the time? Well, no, but that’s part of the learning. But I do know that my experience as a teacher and most importantly, my students’ learning experience is being greatly enhanced by what I’m doing with technology. Give some of these things a try, and share your thoughts in the comments! [photo credit: Jeremy Wilburn]

This is part 3 in a series of posts on Flipping the Classroom. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2. I’m having some great discussions with other teachers around flipping the classroom, on Google + and Twitter, as well as on our Yammer network at Algonquin College. One of the common themes of these discussions is around risks. Of course, any new undertaking comes with its own special set of risk factors. I’ve thought a lot about some of these risks as I’ve worked on developing my flipped video production course for this Fall. I’d like to share some of the risks that have popped up in the past few weeks, and the approach I’m taking to help mitigate them. What if students don’t hold up their end of the deal? Flipping the classroom means that the students are required to show up to class prepared. They must have reviewed the course material in advance and come ready to get to work. Of course, that’s not always going to happen. Like all teachers, at the beginning of the term, I set out pretty clear guidelines for students in terms of what’s expected of them. But I take a bit of a different approach with it. I remember some of my teachers would start the first class by telling the students what’s expected of them – if you don’t show up to class, hand in your assignments on time, and surf Facebook in class instead of paying attention, you will FAIL. Instead of focusing on telling students how they might fail the course, I tell them what they need to do to succeed. I make a few deals with them right off the bat. I tell them that success in my class is easy, provided they make these deals with me: Deal #1: You and I will both show up to class on time. Deal #2: Neither of us will text or chat on the phone during class. Deal #3: You keep your eyes to the front of the class when I ask (i.e. no surfing, Facebooking etc.) and I’ll make sure there’s always something interesting going on. Deal #4: You do the assigned homework and complete your assignments on time, and I’ll be there to help you when you need it. Notice how it’s a two-way street. I’m not off the hook here. I ask them to agree to these four things, and I agree to hold up my end of the bargain too. We make a deal that will help to ensure everyone’s success. I show them that we’re in this together. The consequences of not holding up their end of the deal are all on them. If they don’t show up to class on time, they’ll miss stuff (and I don’t repeat myself). If they text in class, they won’t catch everything, and they’ll miss stuff (and I don’t repeat myself). They don’t pay attention, they’ll miss stuff (and…well you know). They don’t do the work (i.e. watching the videos of the course material so they’ll be ready to work in the lab), they’ll have to do it during the lab time itself, meaning they’ll fall behind, potentially run out of time, and I’ll be less able to help them. On the other hand, if they do all these things? They won’t miss a beat (and my end of the deal is to make sure that they get it and have support). If they do these things, they won’t have any other choice but to succeed. Does it work 100% of the time? No. There’s always going to be a few who buck the trend. But more often, people are ready and willing to be successful. People are more likely to follow the path to success than the road to failure – as long as you show it to them. Isn’t it a lot more work? Yes, it’s a pile more work. I’ve spent several days in the past few weeks restructuring my entire course, recording and editing bunch of videos, posting them to YouTube, setting up a blog, scheduling the posts, tweaking my presentations, and integrating everything to the BlackBoard LMS. But now that’s all done, and ready to go. The day before the course starts, everything will come online automagically, we’ll be ready to go. It will be more work in class too. It’s actually easier just to stand up in front of a class for three hours and drone on over Powerpoint slides. It’s easier to get the students doing an exercise or quiz, and then bask in the beauty of a quiet classroom while they all work away. It’s a lot harder to be on your toes for three hours, roaming through the lab and engaging with the students, working alongside them instead of in front of them. But I am anticipating the rewards will far outweigh the amount of work it’s taking. I am anticipating that the experience will be much, much richer for both my students and myself. After 12 weeks in this environment, they will not just be familiar with the concepts. They will have created and achieved things that they can be proud of. And to me, that’s worth every second of extra work. Trying anything new is risky. Will this flipped classroom thing work? Well, I don’t really know for sure yet, but I’m very optimistic. Will I learn a lot? You bet I will. And I hope everyone else does too. What about you? What do you see as some of the inherent risks of flipping a classroom and how are you overcoming them? photo by epSOS.de

This is part 2 of a series of posts on flipping the classroom. You can read part 1 here. When I made the decision earlier this year to flip my video production course, I knew it was going to take some serious re-design. I’ve been teaching in the straight lecture format, reserving class time for lectures, teaching the software, and some group activities. Assignments are to be completed on the students’ own time, for the most part (there is some in-class lab time for assignments but it is not as frequent as I’d like). Now, class time is going to be 90% lab work and 10% me blathering at the front of the class. Since the students are going to be learning the course material on their own time, I have to make some big changes to the way that material is structured. First, I went through the existing course and extract everything that I considered “new material” – stuff that the students need to know before we can move to the next step. I listed everything out on paper, and then figured out whether this material needed to be in the form of a video, a presentation, or a blog post. Once I had the media figured out for each section, I got to work on creating. I started with the videos as I knew they’d take the longest. Video toolkit My tools for producing the videos are pretty simple. I am using Screenflow to record screencasts of my Adobe Premiere tutorials and of any process related tutorials I need (such as how the students will upload their finished video assignments to YouTube, and then attach the link in BlackBoard for marking). I tried to keep the videos to no longer than 6 minutes, and if it was going to go longer I’d break it into multiple parts. Note that Screenflow is a Mac-only product, but there are other cross platform products out there such as Jing and Camtasia Relay that are equally good and will give you the results you want. All you need is the software and a decent quality microphone (I use this Sennheiser USB headset). Now, some of you may ask why I chose to create all new videos instead of just Googling up some Premiere tutorials on YouTube. There’s a few reasons. First, I wanted to make sure that the material related to exactly what I need the students to be working on, and that it is in context of their specific assignments. That way, it’s crystal clear to them. The first rule of a healthy classroom is to remove ambiguity. Second, as much as there are plenty of great videos online that do walk throughs of various types of tools and concepts, there’s boatloads of crappy ones too. I want to make sure that the students are being taught the right things as they pertain to the course outline, and I also want to make sure that there is consistency – having a bunch of videos all made by different people seems disjointed to me. Third, and this one is really important – I want to make sure that there’s a connection between what’s going on in the classroom and what’s going on outside it – and what better way to do this than to have me teaching them on both sides? That personal connection between student and teacher is vitally important. It makes it feel more that I am there with them, every step of the way. Organizing and recording 10 videos, doing minor edits, uploading them to YouTube and then embedding them in the web site, took me about 2 solid days of work. But now they are good to go, and until the software version changes or I need to add new information, I can use them till the cows come home. Web Site At Algonquin College, we use the BlackBoard Learning Management System (LMS). This is a pretty common tool across post-secondary institutions, and it has its up sides and down sides. One thing that it does well is lets you embed other web pages into the LMS interface. One thing it doesn’t do well is blog-style updates (Announcements don’t quite cut it). So, knowing this, I set about building a site in WordPress that is just hosted off my personal domain. Right now there’s just an introductory page up there, but what you don’t see is that I’ve scheduled all the posts for the entire course in the background. One day before the course starts, all the content will come online for the students to see. I’ve grouped and categorized the tutorials to make it easy for them to find things. It’s all going to be there in one place, that they can access directly from BlackBoard. The WordPress site took me about 2 hours to post and configure. I’m just using a standard template because it doesn’t need to be fancy – it’s all about delivering the content in a clear, concise way. This will not only be a space where students can get the new materials they need for their homework, but where I’ll be able to post updates, interesting links etc. that pertain to the course. Students will also be able to comment, ask questions, and contact me right  through this site. So, using a combination of a WordPress site and a YouTube channel, I’ve been able to get all of the course material online in a format that the students will be able to use effectively and efficiently. At the end of each class, they’ll get their homework assignment to be completed before the next class. And they will show up armed with knowledge and be ready to apply it in class. photo credit: hVargas

I’m pretty much a typical adult educator. Like many college profs and corporate trainers in the 21st century, I teach myriad formats of courses to many different kinds of students. In the full-time Interactive Multimedia Developer program at Algonquin College, I’m teaching students who are also taking a pile of other web development and design courses. This group tends to be younger – millennials and GenY, though there are sometimes some who are GenX like me, and even some young Boomers too. I have two entirely online courses, and they comprise just about every age group. I also have a hybrid course (half online and half in class) which tends to attract people in and around my own age group and older. Top that off with the corporate training done through my company, which is typically a room of professional working types, and you can see that I’m dealing with a wide base of subject matter, but most importantly, a very wide base of learners and learning styles. This presents a big challenge, especially when teaching things like computer skills and software. On the one hand, there are the millennials, who were practically born with computers in their hands. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the people in their 40’s and 50’s, to whom computers are sometimes still a fairly foreign concept. Of course, there are exceptions all along the way – I’ve taught plenty of younger folks who haven’t had a lot of experience with computers, and plenty of 55 year olds who could walk circles around your average 18 year old when it comes to tech. But generation gaps aside, my classrooms are extremely diverse. In a class of 40 students, some have never touched a digital video editor before, and some have been using tools like this since the 9th grade. And then there’s everyone in between. Teaching in the old model of lecturing, demonstrating (hands-on), and then sending the students off to apply what they’ve learned as their homework outside of class, does not meet the needs of everyone in the class. It simply can’t, because in a 3 hour class, there isn’t enough time to cater to everyone’s individual learning needs. As a result, I end up with a group who doesn’t get it at all, and struggles a lot in the application, a group who is totally bored to the point where they stop showing up to class altogether, and then everyone in the middle who end up sort of familiar with the concepts but not really. In other words, the old model (lecture, demonstrate (hands-on), apply on your own) doesn’t work. So I’m flipping it. I was first inspired to flip my classroom by the Khan Academy. They have been doing amazing work, providing video tutorials for students in a bunch of different subjects (many around Math and Science). Classroom time is not spent on learning new concepts at all – new material is learned as homework. Students can work through the videos at their own pace, pausing, rewinding, and repeating until they get it. They show up to class armed with their new knowledge, and are ready to apply what they’ve learned. The classroom is now a working lab. Class time is entirely spent on applying the concepts students have learned. The teacher is there to serve as facilitator, coach, idea bouncer-offer, and support. Instead of professors pontificating from the front of a classroom for hours, the profs are in the trenches with the students, working on problems and helping them apply their knowledge. Suddenly, the classroom is an experience. The big up side of this is that it levels the playing field for learners. Now that everyone can learn at their own pace (instead of my pace as lecturer), it’s automatically more comfortable for everyone. Being able to pause, stop, rewind and review the material is an essential step to getting things down. The old model put the students in a position of familiarity – there was only ever enough time for them to get familiar with the concepts, because their homework time was limited to what they could balance with everything else going on. Now, their homework time is somewhat more finite – just enough time to go through and learn the concepts – and their classroom time is devoted to mastering the concepts through application. There’s more than familiarity. There’s the potential for mastery. How’s it all going to work? Well, first know that I’m starting small. I’m just taking one course, my video production course – and flipping that, starting in September. I’ve done lots of research, but essentially, I’m just giving it a try and rolling with it. Over the next few posts, I’ll share some of the ways I’m doing it, from the nuts and bolts of creating the videos to integrating them to my curriculum. Do you have experience with the flipped classroom model, as either a student or a teacher? I’d love to hear your thoughts. [photo by zac]