Technology in the classroom:
One application I am suddenly using extensively in the English classroom is iMovie.

I am not entirely new to iMovie. My students use iMovie as a presentation tool from time to time. It is often an option, whether in response to a creative assignment or as a way of reporting their collaborative work during a group project. Once, three years ago, my honors American literature students used it extensively as they made "candidate biography" videos that presented faculty members in our school as presidential candidates. This assignment, while difficult for a variety of reasons, was also among the most interesting and satisfying (for me and for the kids in my classes) in my 15-odd years of teaching. Still, I was not actually making a movie myself in that instance -- we used YouTube to access the candidate videos from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

In the last two weeks, though, I have undertaken an extensive experiment in 'flipping' our English 9 grammar curriculum. The concept behind a flipped curriculum, for those who are unfamiliar with this relatively new term, is that instead of lecture/discussion in class and "homework" or practice at home, the students watch an informative video (or videos) at home, perhaps do a little work to reinforce the concepts it presents, and then do the bulk of what would normally be considered homework in the classroom, whether in small groups or alone. The advantages, in theory, are great: when the student has questions or struggles, the teacher is immediately available to help; students can work at their own rates; students can help one another or work together in a supervised setting that prevents simple copying. The list goes on and on.

While I've been intrigued by the concept of flipping, I myself do very little lecturing or plainly informational presenting in class. The homework is often reading or writing, not exercises. My classroom model is generally semi-Socratic: I ask questions, the students lead the discussion or articulate ideas as they will, but at the same time I do have information that I want to convey and sometimes I redirect or intervene with a short explanation or 'lecture' amid a larger discussion. The kind of teaching that a flipped curriculum inverts is not the type I do.

In grammar instruction, though, there are more exercises, there is more explaining to be done, and the conversation feels more dry in content and lecture-like in format. Furthermore, the work that students do at home much more closely resembles an "exercise" (a form of homework more often seen in mathematics, science, or foreign language) than the work we do in response to literature. In fact, grammar learning -- the thinking it requires, the pattern recognition, the understanding of how parts relate to one another -- correlates closely to mathematics, and students who thrive or struggle in one often find themselves thriving or struggling in the other. The gap between those who "get it" and those who don't is often cavernous.

Thus, my teaching partner and I have been planning for months to apply for a curriculum grant that would facilitate flipping our English 9 grammar instruction. At my school, these grants encourage and reward curricular innovation by giving teachers some monetary support both to fund and to compensate for extra efforts, efforts that often take place in the summer or that are otherwise above and beyond the norm (redesigning a multi-week unit or even a whole course).

The deadline for these grant applications is this spring, but in the meantime, we teach grammar periodically this year; thus far, we have done so in the usual way, explaining, assigning homework from our text -- Sadlier-Oxford's Grammar for Writing, Level Orange -- and checking and explaining as best we could.

As we prepared to resume our grammar work a few weeks ago, I decided to give flipping a dry run, so to speak. Since then, I have made 28 iMovie projects (and counting). Our school makes wiki/blogs available for classes, and my teaching partner and I use ours daily to post homework assignments, share documents, and, at times, to support online discussion. Our 9th graders all have iPads, provided by the school, and next year all of our students grades 6-12 will have iPads, so accessibility is less problematic than it might be. I have been posting the videos to the wiki as homework assignments. The filming is incredibly low budget and simple. I write the information I am going to discuss on the board, I prop my laptop up on a podium and open iMovie, and I record myself talking to the computer and marking the board as I go. This wiki can only support about 6 minutes of video per embedded item, so often I have to split a 9-10 minute explanation into 2 videos. I edit the videos as I do so, taking out the worst of my verbal filler and typing important defining information as running captions so that students can see it clearly even if the image on the whiteboard is faint. At the end of a given explanation, I add additional screens with homework tasks, usually a brief writing task or a set of 8-10 sentences I have written that the students have to label or revise in specific ways. Once the kids return to class, they work in groups, writing these sentences on the board and then explaining their answers to me as a group. Another model we are trying is having the kids do their work out of the Sadlier-Oxford book (once upon a time their homework) in class, alone or with a partner, and I come around both to check their homework carefully and to intervene if they need help or reassurance in their work out of the book.

So far, the system has been an almost unqualified success. The kids generally like it. We are entertained, or perhaps I am entertained and hopefully they are entertained, by more interesting and comical sentences than those we find in our published grammar book. Just ask me about Humperdink and Ethel's thriving romance or Jacinda's humiliating public experience with Taylor Lautner or the various kinds of pets and foods that have graced our sentences thus far -- you get my drift. Moreover and more importantly, the weaker grammarians and more challenged listeners among us have said to me, individually and in class, that they learn better when they are alone, just listening and taking notes, able to stop or replay as needed. These are the very kids who needed the classroom discussion but had trouble accessing the information provided in class for a variety of reasons. The stronger grammar students are uninjured by the process and learning at least as effectively...and if they want to skip to the end of a video, I won't know the difference as long as their work is sound. I'm completely comfortable with that arrangement.

There is a downside: These videos are taking up almost all my work time at school, and I have a considerable amount and am working pretty efficiently at this point. Thus, once the experiment is over after we're done with this chapter and the next one, we'll probably hold off until the summer. Also, I'm in the videos. That's fine but not necessary or ideal, honestly. Over the summer we will probably explore other software, something like Voice Thread, that takes out my actual physical presence (and by this summer, my teaching partner's -- for now, I've just invited her along for the crazy ride in exchange for lots of photocopying help and the occasional Diet Coke) but leaves the voice.

All in all, though, it's going very, very well.