Flipping Progress

I thought I'd take a few minutes and reflect a little on the progress made in "flipping" my classroom. I began by following the advice of a fellow Michigan educator, John Sowash. In a presentation he created he suggested by starting with something simple and small -- a lesson you already have materials for. I thought this was good advice and I started organizing my lesson on "Consequences of Industrialization".

My first step past this was to create an introductory video that explained the process, purpose, and expectations. I thought it would be enough to post these videos to my class website, Mr. Bruce's History. However, it became obvious to me that the easiest way to manage these videos would be to upload them and manage them through a blog. So, knowing how functional, simple, and manageable Posterous is, I created a space and called it mrbruceshistory.posterous.com (what else!?). 

Today I assigned the first true Vodcast, "Consequences of Industrialization" and I believe I got all my talking out in it. Students saw the blog for the first time today and found downloading the videos to be crazy easy, and students helped each other out, showing each other how to save them to iTunes and put them on iPods. They seem to to be generally welcoming to the idea of me not talking in class.