The Information Professional

 joycevalenza:

[...] "flipping as a serious sweet spot for the talents of librarians:

 

1. Who better to introduce the concept of flipping to the school?  

2. Who better to help educators select and curate the best possible bounty of educational content available? Flipping takes advantage of the new wealth of shared educational content and open education resources.  Finding and evaluating resources to support content area learning is already our business.  Knowing the curriculum and the needs of our teachers, we can scan the content of  TED-ed with its new archive of beautifully animation-enhanced and personally flippable TED talks as well the wealth of content on sites like the OER Commons, Curriki, Khan Academy, SolveforX and MIT Open Courseware. There’s so much more. Check out our guides to open educational resources and documentary and nonfiction film.

In our excitement about OER, it may be easy to forget that flipping can also exploit more traditional library content. Flipped teachers should take full advantage of the fabulous content we have in subscription databases containing content in all media flavors–video, print, newsfeeds, ebooks, journals, and more.

3. Who better to provide the professional development for the large number of teachers who need support before they are up to full flipping capability themselves? 

Here’s a list of just a few of the slidecasting/screensharing tools available, and my wiki for our teachers and our guide to copyright-friendly media.

4. And speaking of instruction, collaborating with classroom teachers, who better to guide and work with students to create content to contribute to the instructional archive? Take a look at the work of Mr. Marcos and his students on Mathtrain.com.  Take a look at the grammar lessons produced by the library and our video classes archived together with the more professional material available.  

5. And finally, what better to flip than the library?  Library instruction is ripe for flipping too. In fact, many of us already maintain a comprehensive virtual library.  And many of those virtual libraries curate learning material from our video channels, poster archives, slide archives, guides to projects and lessons and tools. We share our professional development, lessons, and tutorials in effective questioning, searching, documentation, thesis building, research strategies and more.

Perhaps, as a profession, we could be sharing this instruction more effectively. Frankly, I’d like to see an archive like the Cooperative Library Instruction Project (CLIP) for the k12 practitioners.  (Hmmm . . .  I think I see a new crowdsourcing platform on the horizon.)

And physically, if more research happens at home, should the library function even more heavily as making space?

 

I know from our stats that students use the resources of our virtual library heavily when they are not in the library–when they are in classes or at home or on the bench at sports.  I want to make sure that that platform supports instruction, learning and creativity more solidly, including its mobile version.

 

And when they are in the library, I want to make sure that learners have opportunities to collaborate and create well beyond the mere availability of those resources.

So why not flip this post? 

 

Here’s a learning playlist on flipping."