Wednesday, May 22, 2013

How do I use iPads to flip my classroom?


Have you always wanted to try flipping your classroom? The flipped classroom phenomena means removing some of the lecture-based lessons from your classroom and giving students the ability to learn that content in their own time at their own pace. Advantages to flipping your classroom includes eliminating the guesswork of whether or not your students understood the information you delivered. In addition, you have an opportunity to create an enhanced differentiated learning environment and attend to the specific needs of most of your students during face-to-face class time. This is sometimes done through recording video-based lectures either live or prior to delivery.

There are several online web tools that can be used to record lessons or screencasting your computer desktop to deliver content information to your students through digital formats.These include, TechSmith’s Jing, Screencast-o-matic and Youtube. Youtube even has the Youtube Annotations feature now that allows you to add interactive commentary to your videos.

iPad apps have jumped on the flipped classroom bandwagon with offering simple and easy to use recording, screencasting, and interactive whiteboard apps available for free or minimal cost. Many apps like Explain Everything, Show Me, and Screen Chomp lets you annotate, animate, and narrate explanations and presentations. You can create dynamic interactive lessons, activities, assessments, and tutorials using the ipad as an interactive whiteboard and record your voice and movements on the screen as you go. They also have the capability to upload your lessons to their respective web sites building a gallery of lessons developed and shared by teachers. Educreations has a similar concept but also offers animation capabilities to your illustrations which make for an amazing learning experience. Doodlecast Pro saves videos to the camera roll making it easy to import them into popular video editors or presentation tools such as iMovie, Keynote, or iBooks Author. One of the highlights of Knowmia Teach is the option to use your iPad’s camera to record yourself while drawing on the whiteboard. You will appear in the corner of the screen so that your students can see you while you’re talking them through the lesson. Students can use Ask3 to ask questions about the video, mark the video with drawing tools, and create their own audio comments about the video.

In addition to specific apps available to record lessons and facilitate flipping your classroom, TED ed is committed to creating “lessons worth sharing”. It’s an extension of TED’s mission of spreading great ideas and encouraging “flip teaching.” Because every learners' needs are different, TED-Ed videos come equipped with optional supplementary materials. When you "flip" a video you get to decide which of those materials you keep, and whether to create your own. This will allow you to relate the resulting lesson to your class, to an individual learner, or to a wider group.

You can also use Itunes U to develop and store a series of recordings and/or podcasts associated with your classroom or subject matter eventually authoring your own course. iTunes U gives educators an easy way to design complete courses with audio, video, and other content and distribute them through the free iTunes U app. In addition, iTunes U integrates with iBooks and other apps to make it easy for students to keep up with your course. Documents, notes, highlights, and bookmarks taken in iBooks are consolidated for easy reviewing in the iTunes U app along with the course recordings.

There are so many available resources to begin flipping your classroom, try one and see what your students think? You may even want to test it out on your colleagues first as a professional development activity. You should stay focused but have fun with it and you may find that it will enhance your students overall learning experience.

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