I recently discovered Flipped Learning. I know that a lot of you are probably all over this already, but it was new to me and I fell in love with the idea of saving time in the classroom. At the moment, I teach three year 9 geography classes. I see them all twice a week for about 2 hours in total per class. As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time repeating information. Sometimes I catch myself giving one class a really in depth lesson on a concept, and another a very quick snapshot. I realised that this wasn’t fair.

I turned towards the idea of flipped learning because I found it to be a really great way to give my students information, and allow them to work at their own pace.

Here’s how I do it

1. I record myself going through a particular resource or skill, such as a:
   • PowerPoint where I want to add commentary
   • Piece of assessment that requires a deeper explanation
   • Researching or referencing
   • Using Google Earth Pro
2. I upload these videos to my Google Drive and ensure that Link Sharing is turned on
3. I add these videos to the Google Site that I have made for my class
4. I direct my students to these videos as needed.

Here are some screenshots of what it looks like

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Here’s what I’ve discovered

At first I was a little hesitant about this idea as I felt that perhaps I wasn’t doing my job properly. We get trained to think that good teaching is us standing in front of the class and giving instructions (or at least, that’s what my experience was during my study) so having a video replace me in many ways was a little confronting at first BUT what I gained from doing this has been amazing.

I have more time! I now spend less time going through certain skills repeatedly AND I and I can direct students to these videos if they either need a refresher or missed the class altogether. The feedback I’ve received for this has been great.

It’s been better for students that require different paces! I’ve been able to differentiate better in my classes simply by using these videos and then adding in activities to complement them. For example, in one class I did an “Interconnection” activity that had 3 levels. The students all watched a video (I cheated a little with this one, I found a perfect video on YouTube), then I had 3 different options for activities. I directed the students towards choosing their own activity depending on their learning. I made it clear to them that they needed to pick the activity that would challenge them in the 15 minutes that we had. At first I found that some students needed some guidance with this, but after a little while they all managed to settle on the activity that I would have allocated them anyway. Overall, the learning that happened here was far more authentic than I had experienced in the past with my “Interconnection” activities, simply because the students had more ownership over their learning and I was able to spend more time broadening opinions and exploring ideas, rather than explaining things over and over again.

I’ve also used these videos in my research and referencing lessons. Usually I will be asked to visit a class and help them find resources and books on the topic they are studying. We in the iCentre, have found that the engagement with our resources has skyrocketed after doing these lessons and even though students grumble about having done this before, they do like walking away from a lesson with some good research to use for their assignment. Even though I will always go to classes for this type of thing first, I found a need for the videos AFTER I visited. And so, I created quick 2-4 minute instructional videos that went through exactly what I did during the lesson, and shared them with the teachers and students. I find that often, students just need a quick reminder on how to do something rather than a complete repeat lesson. So far, the feedback for these videos has also been very positive.

Final thoughts

With the feedback that I have received and the amount of time that I have saved so far, I’m going to continue using my version of Flipped Learning. I’d love to hear if you’re using Flipped Learning in your classrooms and how it’s going. I’m also curious to know how you host your videos as I am currently tossing up using YouTube as my hosting site – any advice would be greatly appreciated in the comments!