The Hilliard City School District is taking some innovative approaches to reach students, including flipping the classroom.

In a traditional classroom, a teacher gives the lesson and assigns homework to be done outside of class. But in a flipped classroom, the student watches a video of the teacher giving the lesson at his or her convenience. The next day in class, students work together in groups on the homework, and the teacher answers any questions.

“It’s something we started this year,” said Darby High School principal Ryan McClure at a school board meeting Nov. 28. “Sometimes in math, students won’t do their homework or finish it because they get stuck, so we thought about flipping the classroom.”

McClure said the flipping concept is associated with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Khan Academy, which produces free instructional videos.

Wayne Tsai, a math teacher at Darby, likes to digitally record his own lessons that students can watch through the district’s eCampus website.

“We’re cutting a 35-minute lecture down to about 15 minutes, because that’s the attention span of kids these days,” Tsai said. “They do them outside of the classroom, at home, on the computer in the library or even a smart device. You can take notes, pause, rewind, replay any concepts they’ve missed, they can go back with the click of a button.”

The online materials also allow a student to practice any topic in math.

“If you get 10 in a row (correct), it tells you to move on. You’ve mastered it,” Tsai said.

Caitlin Busic, a junior, said of the flipped math class, “It’s helped me a lot because I got more personalized attention. I can work independently to learn it.”

Another class, Spanish, is also being transformed by technology. Darby Spanish teacher Brian Linn said that on his eCampus site, he has his own digital avatar (a cartoon figure that represents him), and has students use animated characters to speak in Spanish on their assignments.

“Whatever hooks them in,” Linn said.

The students also use Quizlet.com, a site that provides flash cards that can be accessed on smart phones and tablets. Linn said teachers can quickly generate tests by using Quizlet, too.

In one class, Linn used Google Earth “to take kids on a virtual trip to Spain.”

Sophomore Alex Keller said his trip was to the city of Valencia. He plotted the trip on Google Earth, uploaded pictures and gave his itinerary in Spanish. He said that despite some trouble saving his work, he enjoyed the assignment.

“It opened the real world of Spanish,” Keller said. “You can see that these places exist. It helped me to connect to what I was learning.”

Following the presentations, school board members Lisa Whiting and Paul Lambert said they wished they had classes like these when they were in school.

“These aren’t the only two classes where we’re doing things like this,” McClure said afterwards. “It’s pretty widespread throughout the building. The classroom has really changed just in the last five to six years from what it was.”

McClure said his teachers frequently discuss new apps that are available for devices and how they can be applied to project-based, 21st century learning.

“There’s no reason to memorize anything, you can find everything so quickly (online),” McClure said. “They really deal in concepts and applications so much differently. The technology part is what the kids can do, and how quickly they can do it is really pretty neat.”

Another thing you won’t see in some classrooms is paper, McClure said.

“To pay for a lot of the technology and to put it in the kids’ hands, each of the last three years we have made very significant cuts in department budgets for paper, and it’s a much better experience for the kids.”

What about students who don’t own a home computer, smart phone or iPad?

“Our media center has computers available all day long,” McClure said. “We have a lot of kids that go to the public library, work together, stop at mom and dad’s work place and use the computer. The vast majority of our kids have access. They’re finding a way.”