So I got an exciting opportunity recently.  I made contact through Edmodo (in the Project Based Learning community) with an Australian English teacher, Bianca Hewes, who runs this blog.  Like me, she's been teaching for eight years.  Also like me, she's having her students use technology in meaningful, real-world ways. 

For their unit on Catcher in the Rye, she is having them think about the theme of resilience.  She had them make a video in response to some questions about resiliency and how teens become resilient. 

Here's the video her students made:

My students were really excited about making a response video.  The first class to be filmed was 5th period.  Here is their response video (edited through YouTube's video editor).  The sound isn't great, but I did put in a subtitle track to help you when the volume was really bad.  It doesn't work that well for the part where it's really needed, but if you listen with headphones on full volume, you can JUST ABOUT make out what is being said.

Anyway, check it out:

Here is the video first period made:

Here is the video that same class made to explain some of the slang

Here is the 6th period video

I'm pretty proud of them for what they've done thus far.

I have two more classes to compile before we can do the next step, but this part was so much fun that it makes me wonder why I haven't had students make video before.  I mean, with my iPhone and iPad, taking the video was super easy, and then uploading it to YouTube was literally only a click away.

I can't wait to start the next part!  Ms. Hewes has agreed to have her students make another video in response to ours this week.  Then we'll be writing short stories and essays about resilience and our students will edit/review each others' work.  This takes project-based learning to a new level and it is one of the coolest things I've ever done in my career.

You can follow the project on Twitter at #resilience12, or you can read about it here or on Bianca Hewes' blog.

On Monday nights, there is a really exciting event on Twitter: the weekly #flipclass chat.  I heard about it just after it finished two weeks ago, so this week I was determined to catch it.  And catch it I did.  I'm still new to Twitter, but the teachers in the #flipclass community are pretty awesome.  The ideas I took away from the chat:

--There really aren't many of us flipping English or History.  But there's some really innovative teachers out there, and the average English class isn't nearly as far away from being flipped as the average math or science class.  And if you are reading this and are flipping English or History, especially in high school, I'd really like to hear from you!  Leave a comment or contact me through the contact form.  Please?

--Twitter is a really powerful tool to build your Personal Learning Network.  Professional development is necessary for all teachers, but I've found so much value in what happens through the interwebs rather than what happens in the few PD days we have left after all the budget cuts.

--The summer is a great opportunity to make it possible to start the first day flipped.  There was a lot of discussion on whether to jump into flipping the first day, or whether to work up to it.  I think I'm somewhere in the middle.  I will start by showing some of the videos in class, but the expectation is that students will be doing their own video watching within the first few weeks.

I'm sure I'll think of more later, but that's all I can remember at this moment.  I'm super exciting for the #flipclass chat next Monday night!  If you're on the Twitter, it happens from 5 PM (PST) - 6 PM.  This coming week, I will be participating while travelling to the KQED Do Now Advisory Board for using Twitter!  They invited me to participate and learn how to better incorporate Twitter into my classroom.  I'm humbled to have been chosen and excited to see what I can learn as a result!

As far as my classes are concerned, there have been some exciting developments.  I've started to have them work on compiling quotes for each theme in Night.  Across the periods, they are adding to the same list.  If students post the same quote, that's fine because it will immediately show which quotes are most important.   Students are choosing great quotes - I'm shocked by how much better they are at it this year than in any previous year.

I also had them look at the literary devices they posted and see if they could find any patterns.  I had a few in mind (there's a lot of language about wind/breath as well as about violence), but they came up with some amazing stuff.  They said that the language went from personal to universal then back to personal when Elie was talking.  They said that the natural images went from peaceful to violent.  They said that he personified words and speaking a lot (words choked me, my voice was paralysed, etc.).  They noticed that there was a lot of language around the heavens and the sky.

I was so impressed with them.  My kids rock.  I took pictures of the day on my phone, so the next post will just be pictures of them hard at work.

Over the weekend, I was twitter-surfing (is that a thing?  If I made it up, then I guess it's a thing now) and happened across an idea of how to use Today's Meet to frontload concepts in a novel to prepare students to discuss the next day in class.  That gave me an idea.

I created two rooms for the first two chapters of Night - one for literary devices, and one for theme.  I gave them an example of each and posted instructions in each room.   Then I divided up the class and had them either search in the text for examples of literary devices or quotes that showed theme.  In the literary device room, they had to post the quote, then someone else named it (so if one student posted "awkward as a clown" another student would have to identify that it was a simile).

With the exception of a few off-task comments at the start of the period (including one that gave me the opportunity to remind them of the rules regarding using your real name and not using hate language!), they were engaged and focused the whole time.  It was pretty cool to look around and see them digging into the text and rushing to post so no one else "stole" their quote.  I let them self-select into the two groups, and once they got the assignment, they split it up quickly and easily and got to work.  Even though they were technically "competing" to find quotes, they were replying to and questioning each other cooperatively. 

I don't know this for sure, but I think if I had given them a piece of paper with the exact guidelines (find quotes and identify the LD/theme) they wouldn't have been nearly so engaged.  Also, when they go to write their essay on theme, they can really easily look back and find lots of quotes that will work for their theme. 

For everyone who says that flipping is more the domain of math and science, I would point to today as a counter-argument.  Yes, it requires more creativity and there are fewer pre-made resources, but getting students to fight over who gets to post their illustration of a metaphor first is totally worth it.

Teachers work WAY too hard and don't take nearly enough time to slow down and reflect. Reflection is such an integral part of our job, but it's the easiest thing to forget about when there are endless attendance reports, grades due, student needs, and curriculum to develop.

So today I stopped for a while. I took a hike to the top of Point Richmond, and took some time to think about how far I've come and how much I've learned this year. I never expected to practically start over in my eighth year, but now I can't imagine going back to the time before the flip. Seeing in real time during class that my students are engaged and interested in class...hearing their higher order questions about the text...seeing them post about what they did pr learned in class on twitter...none of those things would have happened before the flip.

Speaking of Twitter, I've been invited to be on the KQED (public radio) Twitter Teacher Advisory Board! It's a pilot program that integrates twitter into the high school classroom. I don't know much more about it yet, but I am excited to learn more about the educational uses of the twitter.

I am looking forward to it, but also to a restful weekend!

Here are some photos from my hike today.

Everyone who has taught for any length of time and is at least moderately reflective has felt like what they are doing isn't "good enough" and that other teachers are doing it better.  It's easy to look at your colleagues and believe that they are doing a better job than you are (even though they would probably disagree with that assessment). But without any side-by-side comparison like team teaching, shared students, or recording devices embedded in their classroom, there's no way to know.

So when I offer up my classroom as an example, the doubts start to creep in...is what I'm doing that interesting?  Is it going to be worse than a "normal" classroom?  Is she silently judging me as she sits there, filming my every word?  How bad does this video make me look?

However, the kids were (as always) awesome.  Their discussion is here: www.todaysmeet.com/nightchapter2

We started by watching a video made by Yad Vashem about an album they found that documented the deportation and transport to Auschewitz of Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944 (which is the same time/place as Wiesel's own deportation).  After that, we read 22 pages in an hour (!), using the Night videos I made (they're in the resources tab if you want to see them).  The kids were awesome.  But about half-way through, I started wondering if what we were doing was really that good.

I mean, sure, they were engaged.  They were responding to each other.  They were interacting with the book and video.  But was it really that special?  Was she getting anything useful on film?

So I tentatively asked afterward what she thought, preparing for her to be lukewarm about it.

But she thought it was great.  The kids, she said, were engaged.  They obviously knew how to use the technology and showed a lot of enthusiasm for it.  They were on-task and had zero behaviour problems, even when the technology wasn't working correctly.  She was really impressed with them and how different my class was from the last time she visited in January.

It reminds me that because of how isolated teaching can become, we just naturally start assuming we're not doing a good job.  But flipping is bringing lots of other people into my classroom - both virtually and physically - and I'm now starting to see that what's happening in my room isn't bad.  In fact, it's pretty awesome.  Kids are learning, and no one is being left behind.  In fact, many kids who previously had sat silently in class, tweeting secretly under their desk, now make up some of the most engaged, active participants.

So traffic and road construction shut down the filming attempt yesterday.  Today is the redux edition.

It's with my 2nd period, a class I don't normally get to teach because they are with my student teacher.  Today they're going to be reading Night with a backchannel for the first time (usually, they're non-flipped because it's just too much for my ST to handle all at once), and simultaneously be filmed.

But we're going to make up some ground AND show that flipped teaching is something everyone can do.  I'll try to post the video here when I finish it.

Woke up this morning with my head not quite in the place it needs to be.  After a morning of state testing, my 5th period class is being filmed to show what flipped learning looks like in my district.  The video will be part of the board presentation about technology in a few weeks.

But I'm flagging.  The thing about flipped learning is that it takes a lot of energy to run class. 

The results are worth it though.  I'm sure the kids will be great, as always.