Flipped Calculus Lessons

Well, I dove in from day 1 and started flipping my lessons. Thanks to the nice gentleman that discussed how "exploring" fits in here, and I think I found something that worked. In my previous thinking it seemed to be all or nothing: ALL of class was spent on practice, and NOTHING else. Hah! There's nothing that says you can't break it up and do some exploring and some practice and such .... even a quiz.

After my APSI workshop, I decided to do what the presenter recommended, and part of their grade is based on daily quizzes for things they need to know down pat. I call them IR quizzes (immediate recall), and there are about 15 every grading period (every day quizzes), and I drop the lowest 3 grades.

Here's how the first 2 days went.

Day 1:
intro, syllabus, bla bla bla.
Start immediately with showing them the zoomed in graph of y = sin x. And we bound off from there talking about local linearity (ala my summer workshop). Then they each got a special number to explore on y=x^2 to zoom in so much to make it look linear. We gathered everyone's information and plotted on my calculator. Then class was over.

So. Now it was time for me to flip. Lots of starts and stops. Computer at home didn't accept the new webcam. Made video at school the next day. SchoolTube never successfully loaded video. Neither did YouTube. Then I tried my weebly account. Eh. Then my nice teacher friend made a suggestion, and voila, I uploaded them to my google docs and sent the links to the kids.

Day 2:
On that flipped lesson, they were supposed to start their ISNs and then explore y=x^3, y=x^4, y= sin x. So in class: IR quiz. Then after a brief prep, they just practiced finding secant slopes and tangent slopes ala 2.1 Stewart. Simultaneously, I passed around my calculator and they entered their hwk information of slopes at their points. Meanwhile, I graded the quizzes (sine and cosine 10 problems 1st 2 quadrants). I handed back the quizzes. Then I stopped them working and we looked at the results on the calculator of their hwk and saw patterns (y=x^3 ..... slopes form y=3x^2....). Then class ended.

The flipped lesson I recorded for their new homework is just summarizing all this information. I love the format.

No longer do I have to wait for them to draw the graphs I'm drawing (they can just pause the video). My tonight's videos were about 16mins and 8 minutes (?). Send me e-mail if you want a sample of me babbling through the discussion, and I'll send you the link.

I also like the Interactive Student Notebook: my stuff on the right, their stuff on the left. I'm doing it on the videos as a guide.