Flipping Classroom

            In the first video "Let's use video to reinvent education", Salman Khan has introduced specifically about the advantages of free teaching videos. To begin with, he narrated about his experience with his cousins. After posting some videos on Youtube to tutor his cousins, he received some comments that he did better on video than in real life. Additionally, they don't feel that they are wasting the time of Salman Khan because they can watch the videos again and again even when they need to review the information that they was taught few years ago. That is the first advantage of teaching video, it allows the learners to study with their own pace at their own time. It is impossible in traditional classrooms, just like the author of the article "The TransformationPotential of Flipped Classrooms" said, either the teacher wants or not, she must keep the pace of the lecture for the whole class although it is too slow for some students and too fast for the others. Everyone has different schedule and ability to obtain information, so the one-for-all syllabus is definitely not appropriate with the whole students in the class. Secondly, Khan has also gotten large amount of comments on Youtube when he declared his videos. They said that the videos bring the positive attitude for the learners. For instance, someone said "First time I smile doing derivative". From my own experience, math is boring, every time, and only thing I can do when doing math is just focusing on the problem, thinking how to solve it. However, Khan's video can bring the inspiration to the learners, and it has great impact on studying process. The most impressive example is the one about the boy that has autism. He had problem with math, could not achieve the expected result although his parent tried everything. Fortunately, the videos from Khan suddenly help that boy to get over that problem. He made it. Honestly, the teaching video method has changed that one's life. From that example, we can conclude the next advantage of this method, it has great potential to change the education. Khan got some letters from teachers and schools, they stated that those teaching videos can be applied into the classroom because they recognized the potential of this method. It not only help the children to learn on their own pace but also help teachers to track the learning process of the students. The number and result from Los Altos provided us the conclusion that the method is working really well. By tracking students' learning process, the teacher is now able to know which knowledge that students need to be improved, which information that they already obtain completely. Then, from those data, the teacher can ask the students who understand the concept clearly to tutor other students. From some aspects, peer-to-peer tutoring is better than teacher-student communication. They can use the easiest and familiar language to each other. However, the learners still need the instruction from the teacher because only teacher understands the concept completely and has deep, academic knowledge. In traditional classroom, the teacher only use 5% of their time sitting next to the students and work with them. But teaching videos created flipped classroom, where teacher can spend their whole time on class with their students directly. Come back to the article "The Transformation Potential of Flipped Classrooms", the flipped classroom will create time for students to engage directly to their learning process, they are able to practice problems with guidance from teacher, discuss issues with classmates, and work on specific projects. From my point of view, I would allow my students to learn the concepts from Khan Academy at home. With the diverse and huge database, covering almost all basic subjects, I believe the learners can find any information from Khan Academy. I, the teacher, don't need to worry about the financial problem because the supply from teaching videos is free. I also don't have to "host" the database because of the availability of cloud computing. All of the information is stored on the cloud and the students is allowed to access at anytime. In addition, I don't have to touch the hardware physically. Instead, I can manage everything about the information and details through my personal computer. "You can stop worrying about your hardware, you can work on building your business instead. Using cloud hosting will save your time, and money. And it's there for you to use instantly" (Cloud Computing Explained video). After, the students in my class can take some online quizzes to check their own learning process to see if they obtain enough knowledge or not. Finally, when they attend the flipped classroom at school, they are allowed to discuss the problem they had, how they resolve it, share the ideas and collaborate to work on specific projects. Although teaching videos and cloud computing are useful tools to support education, there are still some weaknesses and disadvantages of those technologies. I believe in next few years, these problems can be solved gradually, it depends not only on the development of technology but also on the way we utilize and apply them.