You see, my biggest issue with implementing the flipped classroom concept at my school is that, while students are watching videos, they might be missing out on developing some critical reading skills. I'm all for presenting information in visual form (because you do tend to remember the images, not the words), but having my students exclusively view videos would mean handicapping their reading skills more than they already are when they enter our high school.
In short, I have to teach them how to read critically for information, because they can't sift through dense informational text at present. The best they can do at the moment is find answers to knowledge-acquisition quadrant A questions, and that's only if the answers are listed out for them in the reading. I have to get them to quadrant D. I can't do that by having them exclusively watch videos (or trusting them to watch the videos on their own time; we have a huge homework completion issue at our school. And doing anything different than assigning bookwork or worksheets is often seen by students as not "real homework," so they don't do it.)
But what I can do is mix it up by combining informational reading with videos and interactives, with checks for understanding along the way. And that's what Juno has allowed me to do. I took a stab at writing a lesson for our cell chemistry objectives in Biology; you can preview it by clicking here and then clicking on the "Preview" button. It's not pretty, but it's all mine--and tailored to the learning needs of my students. Just be aware that I was testing the limits of this tool, so it's not as "uniform" as I would like it to be between sections at the moment.
When you're setting this up in Juno, it's really like writing an assessment, only you can insert slides with text, pictures, links to videos (or upload your own videos), links to other websites (I prefer linking to other interactive activities on the web), or any other educational goodness you desire, along with questions to assess student knowledge along the way. It's this "inserting questions between parts of the reading" part that I like the best--you can have students stop and process what they just read. Also, questions can be assigned a point value of zero so there will be no points assigned if the lesson you construct is considered practice.
From a record-keeping standpoint, this will be a (Roman) godsend for me. I usually distribute these readings and questions you see as a Google Doc, and the only way I could make sure that every student was doing what they needed to do was to sift through 90-100+ multiple-page documents. (Great teacher fun!) However, by putting these questions into a Juno lesson, their answers are recorded and can be viewed in the Item Analysis section of your teacher account. If you add the objectives that are being assessed, it will even break down how students are doing per objective (after you score any questions that require scoring such as short/long answer questions), so you can intervene as students progress through the lesson. Students can also have the option (if you give it to them) of redoing any lesson until they get 100%.
I see this as having the potential to be a very powerful tool in my classroom. Like I said, this is my first attempt, so I would love some feedback on this. Feel free to comment on this post or email me at mrsebiology@gmail.com.