Flipped for Home-School

We never intended to homeschool, but here we are, and our lives were flipped in the best possible way because of this decision.  

Sadly, I think we hoped our sweet squiggly-peg daughter would fit in the square-peg of a traditional school setting. It took us 3 ½ years to realize that the best place for our daughter to learn was at home, so we took her out of the “safe haven” of a private school, and our homeschooling journey began.

Little did we know that within a few years I would advocate to homeschool all of our children. 

Our daughter is now in the fourth grade and excelling. She is still challenged by certain academic subjects and skills, but she reads Moby Dick and Charlotte’s Web, takes art class, and plays the piano. 

Our son is in the second grade, and he unknowingly motivates his older sister to challenge herself. Our 4-year old begs to do school every day, and our 1-year old garbles out historical timeline facts hoping to be like her siblings. 

A dear friend said to me, “Lauren, your children are growing up in a home where education takes place at the kitchen table, and they live where they learn.” I could have cried. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to spend 12 years with my children teaching and learning with them at home. 

Millions of families have flipped from traditional schooling to homeschooling and have proven this is a viable and successful educational alternative on all levels. We are living proof!

And I have actually returned to the workplace, but I work from home, and teach composition courses online for 4 different universities. I love my flipped life!

Disclaimer: I am not one who believes that homeschooling is the only way to educate children. Each family is unique. Our daughter has epilepsy, a sensory integration disorder, and an auditory processing disorder. We believe home-schooling has given her confidence and a safe place to be “different.”

I felt the need to prove to my husband that if we homeschooled our children, they could still go to Ivy League schools, so I sent him these articles when I wanted to homeschool all of our children:

Foster, C. (2000, Dec.) In a class by themselves. Stanford Magazine. Retrieved from 

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=39384

NPR. (2010, July 21). Cab-Schooled student earns ticket to Harvard. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128674314&

Sheehy, K. (2012). Home-Schooled teens ripe for college: Myths about unsocialized home-schoolers are false, and most are well prepped for college, experts say. Retrieved from http://www.usnews.com/education/high-schools/articles/2012/06/01/home-schooled-teens-ripe-for-college

I recently found this online journal:

Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives "aims to become a focal point for the cumulative development of knowledge, understanding, and scholarship on educational alternatives worldwide, and aims to contribute to the visibility and quality of scholarship on educational alternatives."

http://www.othereducation.stir.ac.uk/index.php/OE/index

Flipped?

We chose the name fliptmoms for this blog because we are both teaching in flipped environments and realized that the concepts associated with flipped learning might also be used to describe our work-life balancing act. Our lifestyles as work-from-home moms have been flipped by technology just as much as learning trends have.

In preparing to write this post about why we use the term "flipped," I started with a basic approach- straight to the OED. This was a fun exercise because even the fairly recent edition I have from the late 20th century had not taken into account the meaning of "flip" as we use it here. However, the original definition does highlight the influence of a change agent that causes the flipping motion of an object: "to put into motion; to give a flip."

In the conversation about flipped learning these days, technology seems to be the most frequently mentioned change agent. And this is true for much of our flipped lifestyles as work-from-home moms as well, but we'd also like to explore what other influences we find in modern life that have put new work-life balance challenges and benefits into motion.

In an earlier post in this blog- Stay at Home or Work from Home, we offered resources on considering the flipped lifestyles of the fliptmom. Here we offer a few resources on flipped learning:

Strayer, Jeremy F. The effects of the classroom flip on the learning environment: a comparison of learning activity in a traditional classroom and a flip classroom that used an intelligent tutoring system. Diss. The Ohio State University, 2007.

http://etd.ohiolink.edu/view.cgi/Strayer%20Jeremy.pdf?osu1189523914

Bergmann, Jonathan, and Aaron Sams. "How the flipped classroom was born." The Daily Riff Online (2011).

Tucker, Bill. "The flipped classroom." Education Next 12.1 (2012): 82-83.

http://hdexplorations.eportalnow.net/uploads/7/1/0/0/7100009/ednext_20121_btucker.pdf

Bergmann, Jonathan. "Flip Your Classroom: Talk To Every Student In Every Class Every Day Author: Jonathan Bergmann, Aaron Sams, Publisher: Inte." (2012): 100.

http://www.openisbn.org/download/1564843157.pdf

Koller, Daphne. "Death knell for the lecture: Technology as a passport to personalized education." New York Times 5 (2011).

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/about-seas/overseers/pdf/DaphneKoller_TechnologyasaPassporttoPersonalizedEducation_NYTimes.pdf

 We'd like to hear from you about your flipped learning and flipped lifestyle experiences. Find us on twitter @fliptmoms. Or use the links on the right to check us out on other networks.

Endless Alphabet

For the last week, my mother-in-law has been telling me that my two year old son only wants to play one ABC game everyday after school with her. Last night I got a chance to sit down with them and check it out.

Wow! Endless Alphabet is a very well-designed learning app. The quirky characters are engaging. The letters sound themselves out as the user moves them... ingenious. 

Check out my two year old son, learning, sharing & having fun:

My 8 year old daughter even enjoyed it with him, and since I hear the developers plan to add new words, perhaps it will be a learning tool for both of them:

My social media addiction

After resisting a cell phone until well into 2006, then acquiescing to a smartphone in 2008, I now find myself to be a full-blown smartphone, social media addict. I recognized the problem last summer during the 2012 Olympics when I failed at my attempt to stay uninformed until the nightly NBC coverage. I just couldn't stay off my apps! 

My phone app social media cycle includes:
Email
Instagram
Pinterest
Facebook
Linked In
Twitter 
Goodreads
Learnist

I am juggling 4 identities for some of these apps: 1 personal, 1 professional, 1 political and 1 now for this blog.

I may have recognized the problem over 6 months ago, but I still haven't solved it. I still must fight the urge to check my phone obsessively all day long- I'll stop to take a look while preparing dinner, attending my daughter's ice skating lessons, and even going to the restroom! 

I first tried instituting a daily schedule. I would only check my phone while having my morning coffee and lunch, while waiting in the pick up line for my daughter and after bed time. This didn't work- having that much exposure made it more difficult to resist the urge between times.

As my New Year's Resolution this year, I decided to uninstall all of my social media apps from my phone each Sunday night and not re-install them until Friday evening. I only publicly announced this intention about Facebook. 

Week 1- What a novelty. I loved the freedom. All the laundry got done and the family's lunches were packed each night before bed!
Week 2- I popped on to Facebook Friday morning instead of waiting to the evening. This is now the "rule." I replaced Facebook with an obsession for Goodreads on my PC and entered over 500 books I've read in my lifetime and wrote over 150 reviews for those books.
Week 3- I reinstalled Instagram and Pinterest on Thursday to make the wait for Facebook easier.
Week 4- I started sharing things on Facebook through other media, but without visiting the site. 
Week 5- I started peeking at my husband's phone and looking at my profile. I didn't uninstall Goodreads, Instagram or Pinterest during the week and used them frequently. I became a more reliable blogger and Twitter participant for my professional identity.
Week 6- I reinstalled Twitter and started hashtag gaming again- something I'd stopped before the holidays. 
Week 7- I started creating content for this blog we started planning a few months ago. I logged onto Facebook in the name of this blog. I peeked around at my profile and my friend's profiles. I reinstalled the Facebook app on my phone on a Tuesday. I stayed up until midnight looking at political jokes about the SOTU on Twitter. I snuck over to my husband's bedside table to peek at Facebook newsfeed of our circle of friends on his phone. I could barely wake up this morning to  exercise.

So here I am- faced with a true addiction. I must learn to manage it. 

Take your flipped life balance inventory

I've been looking for ways to better balance my time, space and brain waves as a work from home mom, and I thought I'll just do a venn diagram and sort out where I should separate the professional from the personal.

First, I did a listing brainstorm of my Top 3 interests, spaces, routines, web habits, roles, tech uses and goals: 

Next, I made a venn diagram and placed the listed items along the continuum of personal to professional. And found much more overlap than I expected:

With this much overlap, how was I going to sort out what to manage? It's clear in this diagram that I keep mom and teacher roles separate, as well as laundry time and online classroom time. Great. That's a start. But how to sort out the majority of items that overlap? I decided to consider whether each one was more or less challenging because of the overlap. What overlaps felt positive because of synergy? Which ones felt negative because of difficulty managing?

Voila! This helped. I have quite a bit of positive overlap that I could try to optimize and identified the areas where I need to find management strategies for my time, space and brainwaves.

I'll be focusing on these areas in future posts. 

In the meantime, if this felt like a useful exercise to you. Check it out & do it yourself! I made a one page, neater worksheet than my scribbles. Click to download the .pdf:

fliptmoms all rights reserved

Public, Private or Home School

Along side our decisions about how to balance motherhood and career goals, we find ourselves faced with the challenge of nurturing our children now and preparing them for the future. Roxanne has two children, a 2nd grader who is in public school, and a 3 year old in Montessorri school. Lauren has 4 children: she homeschools her oldest daughter with special needs, her 2nd grade son, who was in a private Christian school, is also homeschooled now, and her two youngest are still learning from their siblings at home. In this blog, we plan to include our personal flipped learning experiences as Moms of school-aged children.

Stay-at-home or Work-from-home?

We fliptmoms decided to start this blog because we know our experiences are not unique. Many women of our generation set out on ambitious career paths, obtaining expert credentials and worthwhile work experiences, only to find themselves torn between family duties and career goals. We have both tried to overcome this challenges by piecing together work from home careers in education- and we are not alone. Today's stay-at-home moms have their own home businesses, work online, or continue immersion in their field through professional learning networks.

A couple of enlightening articles on this topic:

The New Stay-at-Home Mom by Charlotte Lavala 

http://www.parenting.com/article/the-new-stay-at-home-mom

Women, Work and Motherhood: A Sampler of Recent Pew Research Findings by Kim Parker

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/04/13/women-work-and-motherhood/

We fliptmoms both teach online at the university level. We have jobs with for-profit institutions as well as traditional public and private universities.  In this blog, we will address issues of flipped classroom management and innovation.