Educational Post #1

Hello and welcome to the very first post on my blog! In this post, I talk about an article that I found on Twitter about a flipped classroom:

Link to tweet

I found it under the hashtag of #educationaltechnology

The article talks about a teacher from Ohio who uses ShowMe, an educational tool to create lessons, to flip her classroom. She has the children watch video lessons that she created, at home, instead of doing homework. Thus, she is able to help the students reinforce the concepts in class instead of spending most of her time teaching.

What exactly is ShowMe? I had the same question. In short, you can create your own videos to upload to your students. Most users choose to manually draw and write out their lessons on the app as shown below, but you can also enter pictures and video clips to talk over.

The website can also be used by students for submitting group assignments and work.

What do I think of ShowMe?

Not knowing anything about its actual effectiveness, it is something I most likely would not try in my classroom. In my opinion, “teacher” is in the name for a reason, and there should be a good majority of teaching done in the classroom while in school, and ShowMe should be used for extra help resources only, or to reinforce the lesson in class. There is something memorable and important about learning face to face, and it is something that technology can’t take away.

That being said, as a preschool teacher myself, I have also seen the value of learning-videos in schools. It can engage children better than regular teaching, especially when it has colorful animations throughout. However, those videos should be used to introduce or reinforce knowledge, not account for the majority of teaching, in my opinion.

However, if it works for this teacher in Ohio, then it must work for others, which is a good thing! It just isn’t for me.