Flipped Professional Development
Collaborative Green Newspaper

Abby Brown is no stranger to innovative practices. Her latest foray challenges students in her classroom to create online collaborative newspaper editions and publish the archives in an ebook.

She has an “energetic” group of sixth graders this year at Marine elementary school. Unleashing this energy is a higher priority for Abby Brown than containing this energy.  When we proposed to this class a project where they would become both authors and editors of a digitally published newspaper, they pounced eagerly on the idea.

We referred to this as a “green newspaper” because we created it without using paper.  We began by asking the class what categories they wanted in their newspaper  and recorded their ideas on a flip chart using the handwriting recognition tool. Once the categories were selected, the students selected an interest area among these categories, checked out a laptop computer, opened a Google Doc, shared the document with their teacher, and began writing.

Although we emphasized the importance of writing with this project, we encouraged the students to consider the inclusion of other media such as images or audio interviews.  Because every student in the class had an assignment which was unique and distinct from other members of the class, there was an immediate and noticeable investment of energy in individual products. The number of documents that were created was surprising for the first day.  Later in the evening I checked the progress of these documents and noticed that many students continued to work on them at home even though it was not a prescribed assignment.


We decided from the onset to teach principles of digital citizenship as well as principles of publication. We emphasized the importance of privacy by having all students use pseudonyms. We emphasized the importance of quality by encouraging students to share their documents with others and encourage evaluation and cross editing by peers. We emphasized the importance of responsibility by designating specific roles, citing sources, and practicing ethical behavior.

Three students who were especially eager for challenge and responsibility were given an additional assignment. We taught them how to create and manage a Google site that contained the content from all of the documents created by their peers. We placed all of the documents in a single collection, then gave these three students viewing privileges. With these viewing privileges they were able to copy and paste the content into the Google site in appropriate pages.



After Abby Brown reviews all of the content, the first issue of this “green newspaper” will be published.  Two weeks is a reasonable time for this first edition. Once this edition is published, all editing rights will be removed from students so that the content cannot be changed. The students will then brainstorm topics for the second edition, select roles, and begin the creation process anew for the second edition.

As each new edition of the newspaper is completed, the source files will be assembled into an ebook. Each chapter of this ebook will archive one edition of the newspaper. The ebook will contain all of the source files, including text, images, audio and movies. When published, this ebook will be an archive of the project from beginning to end and document important events at Marine elementary school through the eyes of the students.

In addition, this project will be the focus for instructional movies that will be created that document the process and show others how to re-create this process. These instruction movies will be used in future Flipped PD sessions for teachers who wish to replicate the project.

This week, the Flipped Blog features individual teachers working with Flipped PD.

Monday (Day 54) --- an interview with first year teacher Amber Mueller

Tuesday (Day 55) --- Sixth grade teacher Abby Brown challenges her students to create online collaborative newspaper editions and archive them into an ebook.

Wednesday (Day 56) --- Wendy Schmalz and Dusty Lange (4th/5th grade teachers) combine digital citizenship, presentation techniques, collaboration, creativity, and media literacy in a single technology integration project.