Since the beginning of the school year is quickly approaching, my principal asked several of the “tech savvy” teachers on campus to come in to work for a meeting. The main focus of the meeting was on using ePub and the Flip Method. The majority of our school’s juniors and seniors will have either an iPod or iPad assigned to them during the year and will have access to ePub documents outside of the classroom.

Everyone who attended the meeting is onboard with this idea. Our discussion quickly changed to how can we get some of the other teachers on campus involved. Our school has two staff development days right before the first day of school, but there is a lot to cover in those two days in addition to a training on ePub that some of us are attending next week. One of the school’s best staff development days last year is when the broadcast teacher had several of his students come in and help teach all of the teachers on campus how to create a podcast.

The students had a great time teaching the teachers, and the teachers enjoyed the one-to-one attention needed to create a podcast. We decided that we could have students learn how to create ePub documents and work with teachers on one of our staff development days. By using reverse mentoring, our school is able to get teachers familiar with a new technology in a one-to-one, hands-on setting instead of trying to learn it by watching a presentation.

I will post further updates on our school’s rollout of ePub and the FlipMethod once the staff goes through the training and starts creating ePub documents.