ONLINE TEACHER EDUCATION: USING BEST PRACTICES TO FLIP THE CLASS

The notion of flipping the class is rapidly becoming a current buzzword in education with the rise of such sites as Sophia.org and the Khan Academy plus the interest in increasing technology integration in our classrooms. At face value, flipping the class involves the use of videos and materials studied by students prior to their class time. Content is learned before class. During class time, students engage in hands-on activities and discussions and educators can work more closely with students and personalize feedback and guidance. In order to best guide this practice, teachers can benefit from experiencing the flipped learning approach themselves during their own learning. Online teacher education programs are ideally situated to provide this flipped immersion and Best Practices in online learning include working with the material prior to interacting with the faculty and peers in the Learning Management System (LMS). This paper will outline how online courses can use software and the LMS to best facilitate flipping the class. It will showcase various learning experiences such as how students (in this paper the focus is on teacher educators) take videos of themselves teaching and then bring these to the course for feedback and discussion, digital classroom creation software with related assignments, and virtual classrooms of children and teachers that are used to gain experience and knowledge. A description will be given as to how working with these multiple forms of technology prior to joining the larger course group and engaging in discussion with the faculty member and their peers, helps to move the learning to a higher level of collaborativist thought. Teacher educators are able to spend their interactive time processing the knowledge more robustly, which is why online learning that is done well utilizing Best Practices is so neatly in sync with flipping learning. And finally, thoughts will be shared for moving this further forward to increase flipping and give teacher educators strong tools and experiences that they will be able to utilize in their own classrooms, in developmentally appropriate ways for students of all ages.