SOPHIA Hosts Nation's Largest-ever Flipped Classroom Event at Mall of America

MINNEAPOLIS, Feb. 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- SOPHIA, an online social education platform, is celebrating the culmination of its "Get Schooled with Bill Nye" campaign with the nation's largest flipped classroom demonstration with teachers, students and parents. Flipped classrooms are a growing approach to integrating technology into education, and use a blended form of learning that provides instruction both in and out of the classroom to enhance individual student learning. Event participants are invited to review a tutorial from Bill Nye in advance of the event, and then join Bill Nye at the Mall of America for a review of the lesson and take a quiz that demonstrates the bridge between learning in and out of the classroom.

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"Students learn in different ways and at different paces. Providing teachers with educational resources to individualize learning for students is critical, and will become even more so as Common Core and Next Generation standards are adopted," said Allison Gage, president of SOPHIA. "At SOPHIA, our mission is to support teachers and give them tools - such as flipped classroom tutorials - to transform the way they teach and help students be successful now and in the future."

To deliver on that mission, SOPHIA has rolled out a series of new tools and resources to support teachers in providing individualized learning and help students with college-readiness in addition to their existing 38,000 tutorials. The first of these new tools was Sophia Pathways for College Credit (SPCC), a self-paced program that offers online courses for college credits at a significant savings over traditional college classes. Additionally, the organization introduced two new learning pathways - a series of resources and tutorials designed to provide a comprehensive understanding of a topic - for Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These sequenced pathways allow teachers to easily start adding aligned tutorials to their classrooms for free. The pathways also feature SOPHIA's Many Ways to Learn, an innovative approach that uses multiple teachers and teaching styles to help students grasp the content however they learn best, so they can stay on track and on task.

"As a teacher, I have used the tutorials on Sophia.org to provide lectures outside of my classroom so that I can provide more one-on-one help to my students inside the classroom," said Stacey Roshan, a high school calculus teacher at Bullis School in Potomac, Md. "It has created a more personal learning environment for everyone, and I can see my students excelling in new ways."

About the Mall of America Event

The Mall of America event, taking place on Feb. 23, 2014, at 1p.m., will feature the live flipped classroom demonstration along with science demonstrations by Hamline University and Bill Nye. Nye will be assisted by Donna Grace Moleta, a high school senior from Preston High School in Bronx, NY, and winner of SOPHIA's "Get Schooled" contest. The "Get Schooled" campaign allowed high school students to get a jumpstart on college by taking a free college-level course on Sophia.org.

For more information about the day's events, visit the SOPHIA Facebook page.  

About SOPHIA

Sophia.org is a social education platform that provides free tools and resources to teachers, including 38,000 academic tutorials on a variety of subjects and professional development opportunities. The site also offers students free college readiness resources that include ACT test prep; College Prep Pathways in algebra, statistics and biology; Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards resources; as well as College Success Skills to help students navigate the college experience. In addition, SOPHIA offers an affordable path to a college degree with Sophia Pathways for College Credit - online courses for college credit priced at $329 per course. SOPHIA is a subsidiary of Capella Education Company. For more information, visit Sophia.org. You can also find us on Facebook at facebook.com/Sophia.org or Twitter @sophia.

SOURCE SOPHIA