My First TED Lesson & Reflections

Behold! My first Ted Lesson:)
William Shakespeare: Mini Biography

Objectives	Assessments
Students should be able to --Identify some basic facts about Shakespeare: including his personal information, experiences, as well as historical and cultural roles and so on.	In-classroom assessment: --Students answer multiple-choice questions correctly after self-study at home and in-class group discussion; --Each group indicates evidences of their choices in the video, and the teacher goes around the classroom and takes notes on how many correct evidences they can find in the video.
--Name some of his great works and identify in which periods they were finished	In-classroom Assessment: --Students answer the second question correctly in the lesson. After-class Assessment: --Students organize a given list of some of Shakespeare’s great works in a chronicle order, early, middle and later periods.
--Mainly understand how Shakespeare influenced the development of English language and literature	In-classroom Assessment: --Students discuss Shakespeare’s influences on English Language in groups, and the teacher go around the classroom, observe and assess individually. The group comes up with a list of the influences and share with the class. The teacher grades the list for each group. After-class Assessment: --Students post responses to discussion board online. One response should be at least two paragraphs, describing explicitly on one of Shakespeare’s main legacies on English language. The teacher should design a rubric for students to refer to.

Reflections on flipping a class:

1. I was concerned about how to make flipped classes aligned over a period of time. After creating a lesson myself, I changed my mind. I think flipped classes are not to be adopted for a whole semester or a certain period. They can be an integral part of a complete course. For example, in one course, there can be two or three flipped classes involved, with materials echoing the knowledge being taught at that time in a course. If we should try to make the entire course a flipped style, it would be extremely hard for teachers to find materials from the internet which are consistent and sequential in syllabus.

2. I was concerned about the quality of teaching materials for students to work on at home. My concern is solved now, since I have tried TED-Ed and realized that it can be used as a format or a rubric itself to make sure the teaching materials wouldn't fail to meet the demands for effective teaching outcomes. I am not saying that TED-Ed is the ultimate answer, but it is a good start to build up my confidence in solving the problem with the help of technologies.

3. I was concerned about the lack of supervision over students at home. With specific assessments in-classroom and after-class, the concern is gone. We can never supervise our students all the time, right? We should give them credits and give them the power, the power of learning and the power of self-regulating. Online learning is still not popular in China not because families can’t afford computers but because parents don't believe that their kids would use computers to study instead of playing games. If I keep thinking about how to control rather than how to trust, I would never be a good teacher. I was wrong, and I have learned from my own lesson.