Helpful Technology

The pre-class portion of a flipped lesson provides students with their first contact with new material.  This contact should go beyond simply assigning a text or video to include some sort of accompanying structured activity.  These activities help to improve comprehension and provide focus and accountability.  We can approach this in various ways, and these technologies can help:

Blendspace

This is a curation tool which allows you to pull together various resources (texts, videos, audio, PPT, etc.) to create a presentation of new content.  In addition, you can create and insert quizzes at various points in your presentation.

Hypothesis

Mentioned as one of Robert Talbert’s alternatives to video (#3 - text + social annotation + structured activity), Hypothesis is a social annotation tool which allows your students to interact with each other online as they read digital texts.  They can, among other things, ask questions, offer alternative explanations, and link to supplementary resources.

Perusall

This social annotation tool is an alternative to Hypothesis with much of the same functionality.

Loom

Loom, a Chrome browser extension, is an easy-to-use tool for screencasting (video recording of your computer screen).  It can be used to create presentations of material or to give student feedback.

Vizia

Vizia allows you to make your videos interactive by inserting various types of questions at key points. As students watch and answer these questions, their answers are stored and can easily be exported to a spreadsheet.

Since first exposure to new content now takes place in the individual space, we need to rethink the way we use the group space.  If we view these changes through the lens of Bloom’s Taxonomy, “understand” and “remember” now happen in the individual space through some sort of structured activity, and the group space (in our case, in-class time) focuses on “apply” and “analyze” (and sometimes even “evaluate” and “create”).  While in-class activities can take a range of forms, they should all encourage students to be active participants in the class and in their learning. This can be challenging, especially in large classes, but technology can help.

Clickers

Clicker technology brings interactivity to classes both large and small. In the context of flipped classes, for example, the numerous polling and quizzing features could be used to check students’ comprehension of pre-class preparation materials and/or collect answers to application and analysis tasks. There are many software options available:

iClicker

Key advantage:  Integrates well with Blackboard, so quiz and poll data can easily be synced.

Slido

Key advantage:  Free for up to 3 questions per event (i.e., class), so this is a great way to experiment with clicker technology before transitioning to premium software.

TopHat

Poll Everywhere

Honeycutt, B. (2016). Flipping the college classroom: practical advice from faculty. Madison, WI: Magna Publications.