Since 2010, in classes for welders at the Industrial and Trade School Slavonski Brod for the subject Welding Technology most of the teaching process was carried out using the principle of the flipped classroom.
The teacher opened a closed group on Facebook in which the members were the teacher as the administrator and all the students belonging to that class.
The Facebook group was used for:
\1. Exchange of educational materials:
- teaching materials (teacher)
- task processing, essays (students)
\2. Preparation for classroom instruction
\3. Communication
- Teacher - students (thematic discussions, resolving ambiguities, administrative issues)
- Students - students (discussions on the given topic)
\4. Examination and evaluation
- The teacher asks a question, and the students answer the question in the comments section.
In the classroom the topic is discussed, or essays/seminar papers are written on the topic and presented to the whole class
Number of participants: 10
Duration: 45 minutes
Objective: To enable students to work in a closed Facebook group.
How to conduct it:
\1. Open a closed and secret Facebook group for all students and teachers.
\2. Demonstrate all the possibilities of working in a group: communication, transfer of documents, adjust settings with a high level of security
\3. Show examples of evaluation and testing of students.
Closing remarks:
If we compare frontal work in the classroom with work in the Facebook group using the Flipped classroom, it can be concluded that working in the Facebook group improved the contact between teachers and students and among the students themselves. It also expanded the teaching content and classroom to the daily life of students (24/7). What is perhaps most important is that the level of participation of all students in the teaching has increased significantly, which indicates that their motivation for such a teaching process is at an extremely high level.
Figure 1. Example of assigning a teaching topic and administrative announcement
Figure 2. Example of testing