TCC 2013 is the first online conference I have attended. It is a wonderful experience and worthwhile.  In this post, I will talk about The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture by Jackie Gerstein, an active and attractive presentation that attracted more than one hundred attendees from around the globe. The speaker believed in active learning and practiced it during her presentation.

Dr. Gerstein provided the audience with resources and links and asked them to check them during the presentation. She shared her experiences and brought examples from her class. She utilized the Adobe Connect tools professionally to make the session more active. Her practice of calling the audience members by name made the audience feel the long distance short. The audience was engaged in the session’s tasks and shared their experiences, too.

The resources and the presenter’s experiences were informative, which made this session really worth attending. The session highlighted many important principles in education in general and the flipped classroom in particular. For example:

• education should be learning by doing
• lectures should support learning
• learning should authentic, engaging and relevant
• learning should tap into and engage the learner’s intellect, emotions, social connections, and  the body whenever possible
• learning should include critical and reflective thinking
• the role of the teacher is to mentor and coach not to lecture and test
• classrooms should include experiential learning activities
• the ideal goal is to hook and motivate the learners to learn more about the topics
• teachers are no longer the gatekeepers to information and expertise.
• the expert content “lecture video” is only part of the learning experience.

I think that at the end of the presentation the audience came to the conclusion that flipped classroom inverts traditional teaching methods, delivering instruction online outside of class and moving “homework” into the classroom.

For more information about the session and the presenter:

The session recording:
http://squirrel.adobeconnect.com/p7e8kt9wa94/

Twitter:
@jackiegerstein

Presenter’s Blog:
http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/