CONNECTED CL ASSROOM
Refresh Your Flipped Classroom
with Interactive Video
T he flipped classroom is one type of connected classroom that has received a lot of attention of late. For those who are
unfamiliar, flipped classrooms allow teachers to
dedicate more time to hands-on learning because
they replace in-class lectures with screencasts
and videos that students view outside of class.
(For more about flipped classrooms, see the
Connected Classroom column “Inventing the
Flipped Classroom,” L&L, August 2012, page 10.)
You can try Popcorn Maker for free at pop-
corn.webmaker.org. The current version works
well in Firefox and Chrome browsers, but there
are a few glitches in Internet Explorer. As the
initial release is essentially a beta version designed to demonstrate the program’s potential, it
will likely become more stable in future releases.
Popcorn is an open standards interactive video
initiative led by Mozilla, the nonprofit foundation that developed the open source browser
Firefox. The initiative’s goal is to give non-programmers the ability to create extensible,
interactive web videos.
Popcorn Maker is Popcorn’s free video annotation editor, which allows users to add interactive
links and overlays to web videos. Dragging an
image, text, link, or interactive media, such as a
Google map or Twitter feed, onto a layer causes
that element to appear when the viewer reaches
that point in the video.
Mozilla’s goal is to extend the possibilities of
the web by making video remixable with links
and dynamically updated information, similar
to other web objects. This would allow a teacher
to combine a web video with links to additional
instructions and information, for example. Students could also annotate video segments to
demonstrate their comprehension.
Another new genre of video tools is the combination of an electronic whiteboard with an inset
window for an instructor video. Khan Academy
popularized this format, which is sometimes
called whiteboard screencasting.
An iPad app called Explain Everything allows
you to make this type of screencast using the
tablet’s camera to record the instructor while he
or she uses the app’s whiteboard to illustrate and
annotate talks. You can combine source materials, such as PowerPoint slides, images from the
tablet or the web, and documents with diagrams
and drawings created by drawing on the surface
of the tablet. You can also export and share your
Lisa Johnson is an educational technologist
in Austin, Texas, USA, who uses Explain Everything to help students learn science content.
When her students study plate tectonics, they
use the app to consolidate their knowledge and
demonstrate their comprehension. Johnson
concluded that this approach “served as much
more than a substitution for paper-and-pencil
tasks, it redefined how students explained and
consumed content.” You can read more about
the project on her website at www.techchef4u.
The developer of the Flip camera, Ariel Braunstein,
founded Knowmia, a startup that provides another
tablet-based tool for creating instructional videos, with a twist. Braunstein describes Knowmia