Flipped Lessons

          So I know that normally these blog posts focus on actual technological resources to be used in the classroom, but I wanted to talk about a teaching technology that has become increasingly popular over the years. A normal lesson looks something like the teacher standing at the front of the classroom or leading the class through an activity, followed by an assigned homework to reinforce the lesson at home.
         
          A flipped lesson on the other hand, places the onus of learning the foundations of a lesson on the students by having them complete a "pre-exercise" which requires them to get the main points of what would normally be a lecture through either a pre-recorded lecture online accompanied with slides, a worksheet with instruction built into it, or another form of multimedia. Once students have completed this activity, they come back to class and the lesson is both reinforced and brought to the next level through the addition of more complex instruction and elevation of the content, due to students having already achieved the basics on their own.

          Flipped lessons do an amazing job of accomplishing two different goals: preparing students for collegiate level learning where seeking their own education is a must, and accelerating classroom instruction by forgoing the building blocks in class and allowing the educators to dive deeper into a content area than time would normally allow. Having engaged in a few flipped lessons on both sides of the equation as a student and an educator, flipped lessons are a great piece of teaching technology that all teachers should implement to keep their instruction relevant and fresh.