Today’s lesson is all about the flipped classroom and 3D printing. A flipped classroom is a pretty new concept to me intellectually but in practice it seems like a lot of my online classes have moved to this way of teaching whether they realize it or not. All the asynchronous work that we are doing in prep for class sets us up to have a flipped classroom where we have time to talk about the stuff we were working on. It is hard to me to distinguish between homework and a flipped model of learning. I think there was an assumption (at least in my high school experience) that homework was punitive-if you couldn’t get your work done in class you had to take it home. So, to me a flipped classroom kind of seems like just a lot of homework-and all the negative associations I have been conditioned to have. BUT, being in this program and having first hand experience with the new online learning that we are doing, I can see how helpful a model it is. I can see threads of this method in my university seminar classes, i.e. we do the readings and then class time is a discussion. I really liked that style and it gave me a chance to delve deeper into ideas. One downside is that if you don’t do your prep-work you can get lost pretty easily. All this to say-I have mixed feelings on the flipped classroom. I wouldn’t want to use it for every lesson but I think that you can use it strategically and with a group of kids that will put in the effort before class.
How does this all tie into 3D printing? Well, our flipped classroom today is about 3D printing. This has prompted me to think a lot about how we can use this tech in a social studies class. Usually, my mind glosses over any tech applications for a SS class that aren’t instructional tools for me as a teacher, but 3D printing has gotten me excited to introduce some tech. I think it would be really interesting to use it to build models of things from the past. For example we could try to make 3D printed versions of a guillotine, a trebuchets, or inside of an Egyptian pyramid. Having something tactile to use when teaching about ephemeral concepts like the past would be highly impactful. The act of making this would also give them insight into how much knowledge of math and physics these ancient people’s would have had to have.
