Flipped Classrooms and Class Size

The flipped classroom (Amazon link to cited book) doesn't depend on the Khan Academy. I note a New York Times op-ed on Turning Education Upside Down

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates....
Like everything disruptive, online education is highly controversial. But the flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on. ... many people are holding it up as a potential model of how to use technology to humanize the classroom.

It is a strategy to maximize human contact by teachers. Interestingly, once we learn to use it effectively, there is really no such thing as "class size". Teachers spend their time interacting with small groups and individuals, no matter whether there are 20 students per grade or 2000.

Augmented Reality & Education

The Most Powerful App for Education

Bill Shribman is a photographer and a Senior Executive Producer at WGBH Public Television where he and his team create websites, games and apps for popular kids shows such as Arthur, Martha Speaks and Curious George. .... Take a tour of gesture-based games, augmented reality apps, and an app that helps kids with autism infer emotions through photos, and you may agree with Shribman that the most powerful app for education may be the camera.

The station is WGBH-TV and they blog their apps at Apps | WGBH Kids Interactive Group; I don't know that I'd say that the app is the camera, but I would say that apps using cameras (and today's tilt/acceleration/location/etc sensors along with tomorrow's everything-we-know-how-to-sense sensors) can become part of reality in a way that apps stuck with pre-defined data never could have done, and not only for the smaller kids.


Or then again, maybe not.

Smartphone education

Alex Tabarrok, co-creator of online Marginal Revolution University, reports on something that offline courses might consider using. New Teaching Tools

Instead of prohibiting smart phones in class, we require them …We then automatically deliver to their device a difficult conceptual question. We then give students a few minutes without discussion to reflect on the question and to indicate their answer on their device.
…Next, our system automatically puts students into groups of 2–5 [the system tells the students which other students to talk with and where to move in the classroom to find their group...

It's easy to think of lots of variations on the idea, but this is a version that does seem to be working. It appeals to me in part because it works via using new tech to facilitate a very very old tech: the study group, and I suspect that this is crucial; the teach-yourself books and teaching machines of decades past might have done much better if they hadn't focused so much on the (already) independent learner.
Or then again, maybe not.