Flipped Learning: Tips for Effective Implementation

Flipped Learning: Tips for Effective Implementation Here are some tips to help make the implementation of flipped learning more effective:
Strategies to increase student engagement
	Students not completing homework has always been a challenge. The following strategies can help ensure students complete their assignments, including watching the videos, at home or in class: Set Expectations: Clearly communicate your expectations for students to watch the videos. Remember that students may be unfamiliar with this model of learning and need to be taught how to succeed. Consistently reinforce expectations. Accountability: Communicate the learning objectives for the video assignment. Provide opportunities for a quick, formative assessment that provides students feedback on their learning and holds them accountable to their assignment. Assign a grade and/or require students to watch the video in-class if not done before class. Do not bail students out if they do not meet set expectations. Recruit Parental Support: Share with parents the rationale for flipped learning and garner their support. Call home if their child isn’t watching the videos. Relationships Matter: Connect individually with students who don’t watch the videos to discuss importance of completing assignments and to identify any potential barriers for the student. Design Strong Lessons: Strong, relevant and engaging lessons have always been the best form of classroom management. The same is true in the flipped learning model. Select and/or create concise and engaging videos (see video for tips). Connect the learning from the video back to in-class learning experiences. Design the in-class learning so that it is relevant, highly engaging and fosters higher order thinking, including the 4 Cs (creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication).  The in-class learning should include active learning with peers and opportunities for students to connect with you too. Fostering relationships is key! Note:  If the in-class activity is highly engaging, students won’t want to miss out by having to sit and watch the video first. They will quickly learn to complete video assignments in order to engage in the fun learning with their peers.
Teach students how to watch flipped videos
WSQ = Watch + Summarize + Question	“Watching an instructional video is different than watching a video for entertainment.” It is essential to teach students the skills for watching videos for learning. The WSQ strategy can help engage students as well as help them process their new learning: Watch: Require students to take guided notes while watching the video. Encourage students to use the pause/rewind buttons. Summarize: After watching the video, have students write a summary of what they learned. This helps retention and academic language development. Provide guiding questions, sentence starters or sentence frames as needed. Question: Encourage student curiosity. Require students to ask a relevant, higher order thinking question that they have about the content. Use these questions during in-class or online discussions.
Tech Tools to Support Engagement & WSQ
EdPuzzle is a free online tool that allows you to embed stop points and questions into videos/screencasts to increase accountability and to provide formative feedback/analytics. You can also disable the option of skipping ahead in a video.
With VideoNote.es, all student notes are synchronized with the video with the notes saved in their Google Drive. Students can then reference their notes and quickly rewatch related snips from the video.
Embed the video into a Schoology assessment where students can respond to questions related to the video content (M/C, essay, T/F, etc).
Embed the video into a Schoology discussion where students can ask their questions as well as respond to each others’ questions.
Seesaw Activities: Include the videos in the Seesaw Activities and have students use Seesaw tools to creatively process and communicate their learning.

Source:

Flipping the Learning by Jonathan Bergmann

Resources to Support Flipped Learning

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Resources to Support Flipped Learning

Following are some tools and resources to support Flipped Learning in your classroom:

SCREENCASTING

Screencasting is the process of recording your computer screen while adding your own voice narration to it. Screencasting has become increasingly popular due to the growing availability of free recording tools as well as the integration of flipped classroom instruction strategies. See this video for tips on how to record an effective screencast.   

Screencast-O-Matic is arguably the best free screencasting program for use on a PC or Mac computer. The free version allows you to record up to 15 minute videos which can be uploaded to YouTube or downloaded to your computer. Editing is limited to trimming the beginning and ending portions of your video. To learn more, see this Video Tutorial 

Screencastify allows you to record a screencast on a Chromebook. Screencastify is a Chrome extension that will work on a PC or Mac as well as long as you are using Google Chrome as your browser. While Screencastify is more limiting than Screencast-O-Matic, it has some nice annotation tools and is ideal for having your students create screencasts. Screencastify is free. See video tutorial to learn more.

Note: There is an OnDemand course available to support your learning about these screencasting tools.

RESOURCES FOR EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS

You don't have to always create your own videos. You are all familiar with YouTube as a source for free videos. However, there are some other excellent sources available to you, and many contain only educational or high quality content. Here are a few to check out.

• http://www.schooltube.com/
• Mainly videos
• http://www.watchknowlearn.org/
• Videos searchable by subject, common core standard, grade level, etc.
• http://www.teachertube.com/
• Video, audio, docs, collections, playlists, etc.
• http://www.mnvideovault.org/
• Twin Cities PBS video archives.
• https://www.khanacademy.org/
• Math, and much more! Create classrooms and track progress.

• https://ed.ted.com
• The TED Student Talks Program supports students as they discover, explore and present their big ideas in the form of short, TED-style talks.

Share your favorite sources for educational videos in this Answer Garden.

EDPUZZLE

EdPuzzle allows you to hold viewers more accountable to the screencasts or videos they watch. This is ideal for flipped classroom lessons. By using EdPuzzle, you can embed questions directly into the videos, requiring students to answer before they can move on. You can also prevent students from skipping ahead in the video, thus requiring them to watch the entire video. The teacher admin console give you access to analytics, including which students watched the video and how they performed on the embedded questions.

• Overview Video
• Tutorial Video

Note: There is an OnDemand course available to support your learning of EdPuzzle.

SEESAW: Adding Videos to Activities

You can embed your videos directly into a Seesaw Activity.

Note: There are two OnDemand courses available to support your learning of flipping using Seesaw:

SCHOOLOGY: Adding Videos to Activities

You can include your videos and those you find into Schoology pages, assignments, discussions and assessments. 

Note:  There are two Schoology OnDemand courses available to support your learning of adding video and other content in Schoology.

BONUS RESOURCES:

#1: http://safeyoutube.net/

• Paste in a Youtube or Vimeo video address to show w/o advertisements, suggested videos or comments appearing.

#2: Create a QR code or post a link.

• Create a QR code that takes students directly to the video or post a web link into Schoology or Seesaw for easy access by students.

#3: Create Captioned Flipped Videos with Google Slides

• This is a new feature released in Slides this past month.

#4: Adding Captions to YouTube Videos

        You can also add captions to your YouTube Videos.

The Flipped Classroom: What, Why and How

An Introduction to Flipped Learning

Most teachers have heard of the Flipped Classroom. However, many of us don't have a full understanding of this approach to teaching and learning. The video below provides an excellent introduction to the Flipped Classroom. The speaker in the clip is Jon Bergman, a former MS and HS science teacher. He is one of the two teachers who pioneered and developed the Flipped movement.

What is a Flipped Classroom?

In its simplest form, a teacher moves the lecture (or content acquisition) out of the classroom and then uses in-class time to facilitate engaging, higher-level learning activities.

A variation of the flipped classroom is a flipped lesson where a video (or other instructional resource) is used in-class as a replacement for whole class instruction. This often occurs during station-rotation or is embedded within a playlist.

Here is a more formal definition presented at the iNACOL conference:

“Flipped Learning is a framework that enables educators to reach every student. The Flipped approach inverts the traditional classroom model by introducing course concepts before class, allowing educators to use class time to guide each student through active, practical, innovative applications of the course principles.“ --Academy of Active Learning Arts and Sciences, 2018

Why Use a Flipped Classroom Approach?

Increased Student Engagement:
In the video above, Bergman says, "The magic of the flipped classroom" is not the videos. It's that students have more time in class for engaging learning activities. The "magic" is increased student engagement. He adds, "It's time to change from passive to active learning, so we can reach every student every day."

Because students are held accountable for their own learning of content, they must also be more engaged in the knowledge acquisition process. No one is doing it for them.

Inquiry and Higher Order Thinking Opportunities:
At the iNACOL conference, Bergman stressed to use in-class time to “give them [students] projects and inquiry activities. That’s where the magic will really happen.” He also emphasized that the flipped classroom can "transform a classroom" into a place where students are “applying, analyzing and creating.”

Increased Individualized Student Contact:
Bergman stresses that at the core of Flipped Learning is an intent to "give struggling students more of what they need--me [the teacher]." Full class instruction limits relationship building with students. Being freed up to interact with students one on one and in smaller groups goes a long way to helping establish deeper relationships with students. Bergman also says, "Flipped learning comes down to relationships," and this helps to turn the classroom into "an active place of learning where there is someone there for them [each student]."

Increased Achievement:
Bergman points out that Flipped Learning has been highly researched (over 500 studies), and the vast majority point to increased student achievement. In fact, there are now entirely flipped universities and even Harvard Medical School has adopted the flipped approach. Flipped learning has also been shown to increase the depth of learning due to the increased level of engagement in class.

A Meta-Strategy:
Bergman calls Flipped Learning a "Meta Teaching Strategy" that supports all others. It is a vehicle to move the classroom to more student-centered, active learning experiences. Below is a slide from his recent iNACOL presentation on Flip 3.0. Flipped Learning allows these other strategies to happen.

How Do I Flip?
Start Small:
Don't feel you need to flip your entire course. You can start by flipping a lesson or using an in-class flip as part of a station rotation or even whole class rotation. Consider content that can easily be understood by the student on his/her own.

Choose Your Method of Sharing Content:
Find a way to move whole class instruction to a independent learning activity. This is most frequently done through a video or screencast, but it does not have to be. The content can be gained through research, reading, listening, a slideshow or engaging with online content and simulations as well.

Design an Engaging, In-Class Experience for Students:
This is the most important part. Be sure you take advantage of the flipped experience to now provide students with a more engaging classroom experience. This could be inquiry based, collaborative, experiential, etc. and can free you up as the teacher to interact more personally and individually with each student.

More To Come
In upcoming tech tips, we'll dive deeper into more of the specifics of Flipped learning. Until then, here are a few additional resources to explore:

1. FLR -- The official online flipped learning eMagazine.
2. The Evolution of Flipped Learning (an infographic)
3. Flipped Classroom Model (video)