Wow.  I seriously underestimated the video-making process for my flipped classroom library.

I know I’m a newbie at the video recording anyway, but I am still trying to figure out how Camtasia works.  I did a PowerPoint on adjectives, then used the Camtasia to narrate through it.  That alone was an eye-opener for me.  I can’t tell you how many “takes” I did because my script was off from the PowerPoint at the time.  When it was finally finished, I went back to edit it.  There were a lot of long pauses that were unnecessary and I wanted to clip those out.  Ha.

It didn’t go down as smoothly as I’d hoped.  Regardless, I published what I had and had my students watch it and complete their SSS packets simultaneously.  I’m still trying to figure out how to save the videos to the flash drives.  I’ll have to tinker with that tonight.

A student filling out his Adjectives SSS packet while listening to my video. 🙂

One thing I was successfully able to do, however, was update our class Leaderboard.  If you’ve followed my earlier posts, you’ll know that I’m trying to gamify my classroom.  The students start at zero points and earn their way to the top level (or, an A in the gradebook).  The kids made up their own player name and earn privileges for leveling up.  Today, one of my students earned some free time on the laptop.  Now that the students are seeing this in action with the leaderboard and badges, I’m hoping it’ll light a fire under them to keep working.

Our leaderboard. 🙂

Last thing I wanted to bring up was our quiz review last Friday.  The kids were going to be quizzed on Math vocabulary.  I had created a Quizlet to help them study and posted it on my student Facebook study group page.  The morning of, I decided to post a question on the ELMO and gave my students the possible word choices.  They all wrote down their answers on their whiteboards and when I counted to three, they all raised their whiteboards.  I tried to study with them as much as I could before the quiz, offering little mnemonic devices to help them remember.  As I stated before, sometimes, just using the stuff in my room works just as well as the technology.  🙂

“One, two, three…show me the money!” 🙂

P.S.-All but one student aced their vocab quiz.  🙂