So many questions, so little time. I am not necessarily against the Flipped classroom, but have lots of concerns. If I spend my summer creating these videos for use with students, post them on a district website because that is where we are supposed to put stuff for parents to access because they complain about having to go to too many places to look for “stuff”. Who owns my videos? In this day and age of districts taking more and more from us as teachers and giving us less back, then I would like compensation of some sort for creating quality classroom materials used by others. What about those teachers that don’t want to create videos, but still want to do something else that seems “flipped”, though at this moment, I don’t know what that looks like.
I know I am supposed to be a teacher that cares only about students and their progress, and believe me I do. But, in my state, I took a 1.9% paycut this year, which is about $300 a month. The district still wants me to come in before school, stay after school and work with middle school kids on my lunch, all for free. For that $3,600 loss, I got two, 2 ½ hour furlough days. Somehow this just didn’t seem fair.
If I am going to spend hours creating videos, what prevents the district from eventually using them in an Internet Academy format and then finding they really don’t need me anymore since students can just watch the videos and take some canned test someone in a district office or curriculum writing company puts together. As teachers we want to believe that won’t happen to us, but it does time and again. No, we can never fully be replaced, but I think we need to be cognizant of what could happen down the road.