In our latest post we spoke about how to flip a classroom . Here you will find some tools and examples to make this task easier and a lot of fun!

Create Virtual Walls

Padlet & Murally: Virtual walls that allow people to build up content on a common topic. It’s like an online canvas with personalized backgrounds were people (as many as you want to) can put images, videos, documents, text.

Creating video lessons or interactive videos

Edpuzzle: An absolutely amazing tool! Edpuzzle collaborates with brands such as Vimeo, TedEd, Youtube and you can choose any video you want, trim it, record audio, add open ended questions or multiple choice questions to check comprehension (yes! You can interrupt the video with a question to make sure they are getting it!), add comments, etc.

Hapyak: Another app to create interactive videos. You can use a video from youtube or other channels and add photos, questions, drawings and chapters to it, among others. Very easy to use!

Educanon:  Is a free tool to embed rich, dynamic questions with explanations inside a video. You can embed any html object, ask free response questions to see the thought processes of your students, add images and hyperlinks and even add lessons to your different classes and organize them in the calendar.  You can pull any video from YouTube,VimeoShmoop or TeacherTube to create an eduCanon lesson. That means Khan Academy, LearnZillion, Crash Course History, and your own screencasts (among many, many more) are all at your disposal.

Interactive Quizzes

Quizlet: With a free account, you can create your own study sets, track your study progress, and compete with your friends. Quizlet offers flashcards, tests, and study games that make learning fun and engaging for students.

Socrative: “Socrative empowers you to engage and assess your students as learning happens. Through the use of real-time questioning, result aggregation, and visualization, you have instant insight into levels of understanding so you can use class time to better collaborate and grow as a community of learners”.

Gnowledge: Free-to-use education platform where everyone can create, publish, share and take tests, exercises and assignments.

How can I use these tools?

Here are some activities that will help you to flip your class and get your students engaged.

For homework: get your students to watch a video (it can be a lesson you prepared yourself or a resource you found online). Afterwards, instruct them to write down in a shared Padlet/Murally wall a question or doubt related to the topic that isn’t there already. Ask them to take a look at their classmate’s questions and give them a thought.

In class: open the Padlet/Murally wall and use everyone’s questions and doubts to initiate a discussion. Encourage your students  to be the ones giving opinions and answers.

For Homework: Get them to watch a video that you’ve previously prepared with comprehension questions. Let’s imagine that you use a fashion’s show video and you record the audio narrating what the models are wearing: “Naomi is wearing a black velvet dress, a pink scarf and silver wedges. On her last fashion show she fell because she was wearing really high stilettos!” and so on… Every now and then you can add images, or intercept the video with a question to make sure the student is getting the target vocabulary. Ask each one of your students to bring an outfit for the next class and accessories.

In class: Prepare your own fashion show! Get your students to dress-up, put the tables together imitating a catwalk, play some music and let the fun begin! In turns, you pick a host that will narrate what’s going on. Different and fun!

For homework: Get your students to watch a video you’ve previously recorded on any topic. Imagine you want to introduce vocabulary related to cooking + ing. By using images, audio, etc. build the presentation and get your students to watch it as many times as they want to!

In class: Pretend you are on a MasterChef reality show and your students are the contestants. In pairs, get them to cook something (remember to get them to bring ingredients!) and one they are done explain to the judge (you) what they cooked using the target vocabulary and tense.

For homework: Get your students to read an article and then answer a comprehension quiz (for example on different music genres)

In class: Play different songs and get them to decide to which genre they belong to and argument why based on what they read. Have your students work in pairs, groups or individually!

Now go and flip your class… let us know how it goes!