Flipped Learning – A Practical Toolkit

What is Flipped Learning?

If you’re still not sure what a flipped classroom looks like, or if you want to confirm what you think you know, take a few minutes to read my guest post for the Senior Leaders site – ‘The Future of Learning’.

Creating your own content

To create my own flipped learning videos, I use the Explain Everything app for ipad which is brilliant. For £1.99 you really can’t go wrong with this app. The following guide shows how I create my video’s using this app:

1) Either create a presentation in Powerpoint, or use an existing presentation.

2) Save the presentation as individual images – click save as, use the drop down menu and choose the jpeg option, this will save all the slides as individual images.

3) Upload all your image slides into Dropbox

4) Connect your Explain Everything app to Dropbox and then import your slides. Note – you can import your whole presentation without saving each slide as in individual image, but some of the fonts will not be picked up on the ipad. By saving the slides as images, they will be exactly as you want them when you use them on the ipad.

5) Record your presentation. You can use your voice or a video of you to narrate through the slides. Tools such as arrows, text and highlighters can also be used to help annotate the slides, drawing the attention of the students to exactly where you want it.

6) Export your final video to either your camera roll or direct to Youtube.

Here is an example of a flipped learning video that I created using this method

Other software that is popular to flipped educators – Screenr (free), Snagit, Camtasia (the best, but the most expensive) & CrazyTalk (great for animations, here is a flipped learning example)

Video Length

Remember the attention span of our students. Try to keep the videos under 10 minutes per topic/lesson.

Note-Taking

Taking effective notes on the videos at home is a must if your students want to really fly. By doing this they will not only retain a lot more information in the short term, but it will also be significantly more beneficial during revision time. Having researched this, a universally popular method is the Cornell Note-Taking method.

Here is a video that I created for my students on how to take effective notes during flipped learning using the Cornell method

And here is an example of student notes using this method from the example video on fitness testing that I included further up the page:

In the lesson

Tell your students to bring their mobile devices into your lesson along with their earphones. If they need to consult your lesson video again, they can, without disturbing the rest of the class. This is superb for the students taking ownership of their learning, providing independent support where necessary. Advice on how to structure the learning inside of the classroom can be found in my ‘Future of Learning?‘ post.

Help Desk

Inevitably some students will either have not watched the video, or they will still require further help. In trying to promote independent learning within this method, it is great to set up a ‘help desk’. The help desk should include text books, revision guides and any further reading that you see fit. Students should use that facility, before asking for help.

Be Creative

This week I delivered the content via my flipped learning fitness testing video out of the lesson for homework. During the lesson we had a live Skype call with a performance analyst from the Aspire Sports Academy in Qatar. This enabled the students to put their new learning on fitness testing into a real life context and ask their own questions to an expert on the other side of the world.