This morning I read an interesting article in this morning’s Halifax’s Chronicle Herald. In an article called, “Digital video makes impact in classrooms” Joanna Sanders Bobiash is being highlighted for her efforts to incorporate mixed media into her teaching style.
Forgive me for taking the stance that it is common knowledge that technology should (possibly even MUST ?) be used to teach the current generation and those to come. Some will disagree, but I suspect that the YA librarians out there who give at least two hoots have all used various types of media in their programming for youth (and younger) patrons. So, I’m not here to proselytize, but to point out one specific concept that Joanne learned at Google Teacher Academy that I think would be a great concept for Librarians to use as well. This is the concept of “flip teaching”.
This is how the article describes flip teaching, 
It’s when teachers film themselves explaining a concept, or assign an educational video and have the student watch it for homework so they’re actively thinking about the subject before it’s explored in class the following day.
This is the way I see flip teaching being used in a library setting: Have the librarian(s), library technician(s), teen volunteer(s), or whoever is going to be running a new program produce a short video, 2-5min sounds reasonable. Try and get participants to sign-up for a program and provide an e-mail address for contact, or alternately put out an e-mail sign-up sheet at the next teen drop-in session and tell people it’s just so the library can send them videos of upcoming programs and events they might be interested in.
If done properly a video introduction to the potential participants of a program will be interesting enough to avoid falling into the spam category of their minds and can be a good way to start building a good relationship between programmers and participants.
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