Classroom Flipping and other Innovative Technologies at CBA

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Many adults can still remember what the world was like before the Internet.  The traditional ways of teaching dominated most classrooms, where students would have their paper, pencils, and books ready for scribbling down all of the information given to them by their teachers. Had a question? Ask your teacher or look it up in a book.

Here at CBA, and we want our classrooms to be a far cry from the traditional classroom mentioned above.  With the information available to students via the Internet, their fingers are on fire to use these tech resources to help them achieve success as a student.  Our teachers are itching to incorporate new tools that will allow them to create more effective, engaging lessons.  Most importantly, we at CBA want to use technology to diversify our teaching to meet the diversified learning styles that we see in our classrooms every day.

Remember carrying large textbooks around during the school day?  At CBA, students can breathe a little sigh of relief from hauling around such a heavy load of information.  In the Upper School, e-books have replaced the traditional heavy textbook and with the availability of the Kindle app for tablets, students are able to access to all of their school books at any time, minus the back aches.  E-books also offer text-to-speech, easing reading difficulties and helping students maintain alertness during independent reading assignments.

High school students might be learning about the Bronze Age in their history class, but teachers are aware that they are teaching those living in the “Facebook Age”. Keeping the attention of our young “Facebook” crowd can pose quite a challenge! Luckily, we in the Upper School at CBA have embraced Edmodo – education’s answer to teaching in a world of social networking. With an interface similar to Facebook, teachers are able to communicate important information and alerts among students, both individually and collectively as a class. Students having trouble keeping up with a ton of papers?  Edmodo has students covered, as teachers are able to go “paperless” – placing electronic copies of notes in a student’s virtual backpack.  The student can access their class notes via Edmodo on their computers at home, or even through the Edmodo app on their smartphones and tablets.  Parents are also included in Edmodo.  Parents are able to view every interaction that occurs between their child and their teachers and classmates, such as completed assignments and feedback comments.  

Edmodo has also allowed Upper School teachers to reach students by a growing trend in education – “flipping” the classroom.  Teachers are able to record lessons and post them as a video on the class Edmodo page; from there, students are able to watch the lessons at their pace, as many times as they need, at home.  Having left lecture to be done for homework, teachers have more class time to provide exercises that would normally be reserved for homework.  Students can work through the challenges of the exercises with the teacher immediately available to answer questions.  Students can even post questions to the Edmodo class page for the teacher or other students to answer.

The Upper School at CBA is excited to implement innovative educational technology.  The opportunities of educational social networking extend beyond the classroom and create a closer community of teachers and students who are ready to learn.