VIDEO LECTURES AT HOME? HOMEWORK IN CLASS? WELCOME TO A NEW WORLD OF ACTIVE LEARNING!

Hello my dear readers! This week I will be talking about "Flipped Classroom". Contrary to the traditional classroom, flipped classroom is a new strategy which enables students to learn the content at home and practice it in the classroom. Students watch the educational videos that their teacher uploaded and then when they come to the class, they do activities and have discussions with their classmates about what they have learned.

This approach benefits both teachers and students in many aspects. First of all, flipped classroom enables students to learn at their own pace and have more ownership for their learning. And also, since flipped classroom saves time for classroom activities, the students become more interested and engaged. In other words, this approach makes the teaching student-centered. 

There is one point that the teachers must consider. Some students may not watch the video. To prevent this from happening, the classroom activities must require watching that specific video and not let those who didn’t watch the video participate in these activities. 

A Flipped Classroom Video - Conditional Clauses-Type 0 and Type 1 from İzel Gür on Vimeo.

The video you see above is the one that I prepared with my friend Izel. This week’s task was creating a grammar teaching video as an example of a flipped classroom. Our assigned unit was focusing on If Conditional Type 0 and Type 1. 

To create this video’s animation, we used Powtoon. We recorded ourselves narrating the subject and then added it to the animation with an uplifting background music. We shared the topic as the introduction and Type 0 for me, Type 1 and the exercises for Izel. 

Powtoon is a very user-friendly tool. It enables you to both add your own audio and choose a background music from its own list. It is easy to edit the animations as well. The only problem that Powtoon caused us is that it doesn’t allow you to make videos for more than three minutes. That’s why we needed to create multiple videos and add them one after another from a different tool called Adobe Premiere Pro. 

Overall, creating the task was enjoyable and the result was satisfying for me. I believe that Flipped Classroom is a really useful approach and I will use it when I am teaching.