The double-flipped classroom

Flipped classroom (from Wikipedia)

Flipped classroom is an instructional strategy and a type of blended learning that reverses the traditional educational arrangement by delivering instructional content, often online, outside of the classroom and moves activities, including those that may have traditionally been considered homework, into the classroom. In a flipped classroom model, students watch online lectures, collaborate in online discussions, or carry out research at home and engage in concepts in the classroom with the guidance of the instructor.

I am not a great fan of flipped learning. I have created many video tutorials on my youtube channel and I have trialed ‘flipping’ some lessons in the past but I don’t feel it suits my style of teaching and the way I like to do things. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to see my students learning with my own two eyes. I also like to ask them questions to further their understanding and increase their level of curiosity. I enjoy class discussions and feel that taking this out of the classroom doesn’t work well for me (and therefore my students). The other downsides to flipped learning are:

• Some students are passive when watching the videos.
• If they aren’t great at taking notes, it is easy to switch off from the videos completely.
• There is no way of capturing if they are learning.
• There is no interaction.
• The follow up lessons can get messy as there is no way of knowing how many watched/understood the content in advance.

Having said this, I know that it does work well for many teachers and they have managed to overcome some of the obstacles above. I have been using flipped revision successfully for a number of years, particularly this year with my year 11 class (see this post). I feel that getting students to watch videos on topics they have already had the classroom experience of works well. This could be as a revision exercise or prerequisite knowledge for an upcoming lesson.

So the point of this post.. I came across @EDpuzzle on twitter today and started to explore their fantastic website. What they have created is a way of turning youtube videos into actual lessons, complete with interactivity and the opportunity for teachers to communicate using their own voice during the videos. You are able to register your classes, see how many of them have watched vidoes you have set and view data on how they have performed on any questions you have asked during the video. This means you can monitor and track their learning and plan your feedback in follow up lessons. You are able to achieve so much more with the videos created in this way so rather than ‘flipping’, you are kinda ‘double-flipping’ (this works well in my head!)

Anyhoo, here is an example of a revision activity I created earlier for my year 10 class. I used a video taken from RawMaths to create this.

I really feel that this could be a game-changer as far as flipped learning is concerned and I am excited about trying this out with my classes over the next few weeks.. I will write about how I get on.

Below is an introduction from the Edpuzzle website and click here for their iOS app:

If you have any comments, thoughts or ideas, please share below. Also, if you haven’t done so already, make sure you subscribe below.

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photo credit: PaKino via flickr cc