Flipped Learning: Creating content

 

Still deciding if Flipped Learning is for your students?

Flipped learning is a strategy many teachers across Aotearoa are exploring or have launched into.

• TKI has a comprehensive collection of research, links, advice, and examples about Flipped Learning. 
• What is Flipped Learning? - see here
• Why Flip Learning? - Benefits and Challenges - Research and Readings 
• Examples of Flipped Learning in Aotearoa

This blog aims not to replace it, but to supplement the content on TKI, particularly in the area of creating content for your students. 

Disclaimer: the apps and software listed in this blog are not an exhaustive list, nor am I endorsing these. They are just examples of apps and software that you may find useful plus some tips in between.

This blog

So, you've read about Flipped Learning and weighed all the pros and cons of the effect of a Flipped Learning model for your students that you have in your class, but you might still have these questions in your mind.....

• How do I create the content?
• Where do I store it?
• How do I create a coherent presentation of the content for my students?

Another question that might help you make the decisions about these questions is....

What apps, systems, and resources does my school already have?

Once you've discovered what your school already has available, deciding amongst the choices for the next 3 questions is easier...

1. How do I create content?

Devices you might use to make videos:

• Action camera - e.g. Go Pro. Has advantages when you're videoing something practical with your hands that you want to show your students because you can strap the camera to your head and can point it where you look. Examples: a science demonstration, or how to measure and cut fabric, or how to complete a technique in sculpture.
• Smart phone - propping up the phone or balancing it above a desk top is often a struggle. It is worth spending the effort to create a structure that suspends the phone well and you might consider investing in a small desk-mounted tri-pod that is capable of holding your phone steady. This then opens up videos of you completing paper-based or whiteboard based activities. Examples are: paper-based tasks for maths, showing an artistic skill or style, or using mini-whiteboards.
• Digital camera - This definitely will need either mounting to a tripod if you're recording solo or enlisting a camera-person. These cameras are bulkier than smart phones and so more difficult to steady. 
• Laptop camera(s) - some laptops have both front and back cameras. Sometimes front and back cameras have different qualities in their specifications. 

Software and apps you might use to screen cast:

Screen casting is a video that captures what you do on your laptop screen in real time, has an audio component where you can explain what you're doing as you go, and often has the option of putting a thumbnail video of you talking in the corner. Rather than using a device like a cell phone to capture what you do on the screen, screen casting it uses the app to capture it.

• PowerPoint - free - How to screen record with PowerPoint
• Screencastify - free but limited, $ for unlimited - Has a free Chrome extension which is limited to 5 min videos. This isn't a bad thing, you want your videos to be 6 minutes or less. This limit might encourage good flipping practice. Read all about it here.
• Flipgrid - free - Lots of information about it here. It is able to embed in apps like Teams and OneNote. Flipgrid can also be set up as a class collection and your students can also use it to make videos about their learning process.
• Camtasia - $ - The download for Camtasia is here and it also contains some information about the features the software comes with. 
• Screencast-o-matic - free - Features and registration information here
• Windows Game Bar - free - Found on the standard windows keyboard attached to your laptop and it can be used to screen capture any kind of activity on your screen, not just gaming. Here is how to activate the Game Bar and use it to record.

Whiteboarding apps that you can either video or screen cast:

• Explain Everything - $ - The Explain Everything website has a considerable amount of information about pricing and features.
• Jamboard - free - This is one of the Google Suite of apps. Google has some information about how to use Jamboard. You might also find these websites useful [1] [2].
• Whiteboard - free - This is one of the Office 365 Suite of apps. This website has a comprehensive collection of 'how to' information.

Editing videos you've made:

• Video editor - free - Windows 10 is an operating system and is now on most PC laptops in NZ schools and it has Video Editor for free already available on the laptop.
• iMovie - free - By Apple and works on iOS and macOS. It comes free with each Mac, but if you don't have it, you can download iMovie here and this is a 'how to' video.
• Camtasia - $ - Camtasia is both a screen casting app and a video editing app. The download for Camtasia is here and it also contains some information about the features the software comes with.
• Screencastify - free but limited, $ for unlimited - Screenastify is both screen casting app and a video editing app. Here is the Screencastify website for all their useful information.

The power of digital ink:

Digital Ink is a transforming tool in the e-learning kete. It enables us to use a stylus pen to write in our natural handwriting on the screen of your laptop. This feature is not purchased in any after sales digital store, but a built in feature of the laptop. These days, laptops with digital ink capabilities are becoming more common, even within the range of laptops in the school-teacher laptop scheme. Digital ink really comes into its own when using it to teach any symbols rich subject, e.g. maths, music, chemistry, physics, economic, and art. It increases our ability to create video content for these subjects where keyboard text just doesn't do justice to the subject and takes a very long time to format all those symbols in relation to each other. For more information about digital ink see [1] [2].

2. Where do I store the content?

 

You want to store your growing video collection somewhere easy for you to access and somewhere that has the capacity to store it; videos are large files and you'll be creating many of them. Your storage system also needs to be easy to organise and search to quickly retrieve the videos you want. Utilising the cloud for storage is a great option. It gives you easy access both at home and at school and there are great, secure, cloud options these days. Your school may already have cloud storage options in place.

Getting videos off devices:

This is a challenge, you can't simply email a video off your smart phone to yourself because videos files are big.

Cable - The USB charging cable that comes with the recording device can be plugged into your laptop USB port and it you can access the file structure of the device. You can use your laptop file management system to copy the video over to your laptop. Delete the video off the recording device file to keep the space for new videos.

AirDrop - iOS and macOS (Apple) has AirDrop. It allows two Apple devices to share files. While it will share the video files from Apple phone to Mac laptop, transferring large of multiple files can take time. It may be more time efficient to use another way of transferring the files to save time. 

Uploading to cloud storage from video device - You can download an app to your smart phone that will connect you to your preferred cloud storage system (See below for those details) e.g. GDrive, OneDrive, Dropbox, You Tube, Stream, Flipgrid. Then you can save the video directly to the cloud storage which makes it accessible from any device you log into.

SD card - These days, laptops are becoming thinner and this is at the expense of a variety of drives no longer appearing in laptops and DVD drives are one example of this. If your laptop doesn't have an SD card reader, then you might have to buy an SD card dongle to plug into your USB port when you want to get your video files off the SD card. 

Created directly on your laptop via screen casting - These are the easiest to store because they are already on your laptop. Once you've finished editing your video you do need to store it somewhere, not on your 'desktop' and you can easily do that through your file management system on your laptop.

Storage possibilities:

You Tube - free - You Tube is by Google  and used to have the ability to create private video channels but this feature is no longer available. The videos are publicly available by default. Here is a work around that makes your videos private or only seen by those you share with.

Stream - free - Stream by Microsoft, specifically designed to store and share video content. For more information about Stream, see here. Videos stored in Stream are private by default and only you need to actively share them. Stream will also automatically transcribe your video to provide a text record of the video making it more accessible to your students. You may have to edit the transcription if you've used any te reo Māori in it, as the translation artificial intelligence for te reo is still in its infancy. 

OneDrive - free - OneDrive is part of the Office 365 suite of apps and you can see how to get started here. It has a folder system you can create to organise all your videos or you can use Delve to find them and others accessible within your organisation.

GDrive - free - is by Google and is part of the Google suite of app. It is very similar to OneDrive. You can see how to get started in GDrive here.

NOTE: Regardless of whether your school uses a Google or Office 365 - both are free to all schools in New Zealand through the licensing agreements that the Ministry of Education has with both Google and Microsoft plus other software companies: Apple, Adobe, Novell, Sketch-up Pro, and Symantec-antivirus. There are some different licensing rules for state and independent schools in some software licenses. See here for all the details.

3. How do I create a coherent presentation of the content for my students?

The whole point of flipping the learning is to increase time in class for learning conversations with the teacher and peers, and activities the use the information covered in the videos. Creating a coherent presentation of the content puts all those resources in one place, helping students get into the routine of flipped learning, and directly links the correct video with the activities surrounding the learning of the concept.

Websites - free - e.g Weebly, Wix. What is the difference between a Weebly and a Wix website?  Both these platforms sit outside any school apps suite you might have available to you.

Sites - free - is by Google and one way of creating a website-like environment where you can display your learning content for your students. See here for a 'how to' instruction.

SharePoint - free - is an Office 365 app and is another way of creating a website-like environment where you can display your learning content for your students. SharePoint is shareable with people inside your organisation and you can invite guests outside your organisation by following these instructions add a guest from outside your organisation. Microsoft recently retired their old SharePoint platform and started fresh, and so it current has the quaint labelling of 'classic' and 'modern' SharePoint. I advise to go 'modern', so much more intuitive to build the website.

Google Classroom - free - You can get started with Google Classroom here with these instructions. It's a great place to manage classroom content for each of your classes, including video content for flipped classrooms.

Sway - free - This is an online app that creates a website-like environment that can hold video, text, files, web-links all in one place. It uses an easy drag-and-drop method for content creation and can even take your old PowerPoints or Word documents as starting places. See here for getting started.

Teams - free - Teams is one way of creating an online environment of collaboration, communication, sharing, and more. What is Teams?   Here is a webpage about Getting started with Teams. 

OneNote - free - OneNote is like having an old-school folder on the shelf in your office, with dividers in it and pages of A4 paper inside each divider. Instead of being on paper, it is digital and so opens up possibilities of including video, audio, diagram, and weblink information as well as text.

NOTE: Embedding vs Linking - Embedding a video puts a copy of the video in the app you're using. For example, you can embed a video into OneNote and the video file will attach to the OneNote file. This can make the presentation of the learning content by a OneNote file a very BIG file and sometimes students can have trouble syncing the new content when they open it. You might find it easier to provide a link to the video. This decision really depends on the tool you choose to provide a coherent presentation of the learning documents, the age of your students, and self-regulatory and digital fluency capabilities of your students in an online environment.

Have fun with your videos. They don't have to be perfect, they just have to share ideas and information. The more of your natural classroom personality you put into the videos, the more the students will relate to them.