Moving along with the flipped class

This week we continued to work on sentences and explored proofreading. We spent most of class time working on constructing complex and compound sentences. I created a couple of exercises including a paragraph with no punctuation in Google Documents that we punctuated in class, and I mashed up an obituary about Steve Jobs and adapted it as a proofreading exercise. These exercises were to alert my students to proofreading for their first out-of-class paragraphs that are due this weekend.

I am going to try the suggestions of Gena R. Bennet in Using Corpora in the Language Learning Classroom to analyze the errors. As I plan to do it, I am saving the student’s paragraphs with the errors tagged. I will use these as a corpora to highlight some of the more common errors, especially run-ons, fragments, verb errors, and subject-verb agreement. Using the information generated from this, I hope to be able to provide targeted practice and classroom work addressing more specifically the errors that occur in this group of students’ writing. I will use TextStat as my concordance program.

I made two videos this week. The first one is on fragments:

And one on sentence combining:

My recent videos have used edited versions of PowerPoint presentations I used in the past. I find I can cover in a five to eight minute video much of what I covered in a 30 to 50 minute classroom lecture though I don’t have the interaction of a lecture. I am still learning how to use Camtasia for the Mac; still, I don’t think my videos are worse than most of the home made educational videos I see on YouTube.

I have run into a frustration with using Google Apps through my school account and trying to use YouTube or my regular GoogleDocs, such as Sites. If I am signed into the school account, I can’t access YouTube or my regular gmail account. One way around this has been to open two browsers and jump between the two.