An Annotated List of Flipped Class Tools and Resources
Flipped Class Tool and Resource List from Turn to Your Neighbor
We will keep a (clearly very incomplete) list of tools and resources we use and/or discover relative to flipped teaching here. Help us grow this list using the form at the bottom of the page. We try to emphasize free tools on this page. There are many paid, inexpensive tools that we are big fans of including Screenflow (screencasting software) and Learning Catalytics (classroom response and assessment system).
Turn to Your Neighbor! blog.peerinstruction.net – tons of practical, evidence-based help with flipping using innovative methods check out these in particular
- The Most Popular! What is a Flipped Classroom in 60 Seconds?
- 7 myths about flipped classroom quiz, also in Spanish and Portuguese
- Our self-paced short course on Flipped Classrooms
- 2 of the most powerful tips for flipping
- A quick start guide to flipping your class with Peer Instruction, translated into 10 languages.
Hundreds of Tips on Flipped Teaching and Peer Instruction
- Categorized tips and resources from the daily flipped classroom tip series – #flippedtip on Twitter, curated by @julieschell
Some people who do cool stuff with flipped classrooms
(very incomplete list in no order, please feel free to send suggestions – find others at flipped learning network and peer instruction network)
- Eric Mazur, Harvard professor, flipping with Peer Instruction, Project-based Learning, and Team-based Learning
- Julie Schell, Harvard researcher, studies, speaks and writes about innovative flipped classrooms, founder of #flippedtip series and Turn to Your Neighbor. Read more about Julie at www.julieschell.com
- Jon Bergmann, Aaaron Sams, Ramsey Musallam leaders of the flipped learning movement
- Brian Bennett, creator of #flipclass chat
- Gregory Green, school principal who flipped his entire school
- Lorena Barba, Professor flipping university classrooms
- Robert Talbert, Professor, writer of Casting out Nines, flipping his class with Learning Catalytics
- Kari Arfstrom, executive director of the Flipped Learning Network
- Jennifer Ebbeler, Professor at University of Texas, Austin, flipping a huge Classics course – writes an awesome blog about innovative teaching and learning.
- Cynthia Bailey Lee and Beth Simon out of UCSD, launched Peerinstuction4Cs – an extensive and incredible resource specifically for using Peer Instruction in Computer Science.
Methods
What it is is: Think-Pair-Share is a collaborative learning technique introduced by Frank Lyman in the 1980s (see Lyman, F., 1987, Think–Pair–Share: An expanding teaching technique: MAA-CIE Cooperative News). It involves posing a question to students in class, having them think about their answer individually and then sharing their response with a neighbor.
Why TTYN likes it: Think-Pair-Share is a central feature of Peer Instruction. It’s easy, requires no technology, and can help boost activity in class within seconds.
Social Networks
What it is: The official social network founded by Julie Schell and Eric Mazur for current and future users of Peer Instruction. Read more about the Network here or join here.
Why TTYN likes it: Because innovation, in teaching or elsewhere, rarely happens in insolation. Use the network to connect, share, and learn with other educators across the globe.
Software
What it is: “Educreations is a global community where anyone can teach what they know and learn what they don’t.” It is an interactive cloud-based whiteboard to be used on iPad. You can record your lesson as you write on the whiteboard with voice annotation and then publish your recording on the web in a matter of seconds.
Why TTYN likes it: Recommended to TTYN by a reader, who reported that she appreciates that students must log in to Educreations to view the videos, which provides her with a roster of who has completed assignments.
What it is: NB is a social annotation tool. It allows instructors to upload reading assignments in PDF format and then transforms the reading into an object where students and course staff can highlight important passages, pose and answer questions, and write commentary. Take a guided tour of NB here.
Why TTYN likes it: In flipped classrooms, we feel strongly that students need to be just as actively engaged outside of class as as they need to be in class. NB allows instructors to engage students beyond the passive activities of simply watching a video lecture or reading a document.
What it is: A free tool from Utah State University Center for Innovative Design and Instruction “that creates a syllabus in native PDF format” with a unique learning objectives portion that maps to Bloom’s Taxonomy. Requires Adobe Reader.
Why TTYN likes it: Makes it easy to build learning objectives into your syllabus. Here is a video tutorial on how to use it.
What it is: PeerWise is a educational social software tool which allows students to write their own questions and share them with peers. From the PeerWise website: “Students use PeerWise to create and to explain their understanding of course related assessment questions, and to answer and discuss questions created by their peers.”
Why TTN likes it: PeerWise helps teachers flip their classrooms in innovative ways. The system gives students the opportunity to think about subject matter in the way an instructor must – posing interesting questions about a topic AND evaluating answers, logic, and reasoning to those questions among their peers. And it is free. Search #peerwise or @peerwise to see what students and teachers are saying about the tool. Peer Instruction Network members, including Simon Bates at UBC, have used PeerWise with great success.
What it is: Many teachers are interested in flipping their classrooms by putting lecture content online for students to view, and review, at home. A free tool I’ve recently discovered is called “Showme” -an “interactive white board” on an iPad (yes, and iPad is required). Showme brands themselves as “The Online Learning Community,” and on their site you can see hundreds of examples of how teachers are using Showmes to create online tutorials or lessons.
Why TTYN likes it: Some teachers are taking the ideas behind think-pair-share and Peer Instruction to new levels using Showme, giving students opportunities to create with subject matter, work together, and teach one other using the cloud-based app. See this video introducing Showme.
Showme Screenshot
What it is: “Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.
Why TTYN likes it: While the features are limited (you can only use with a class of 50), Socrative is extremely quick to set up and easy to use. Watch a video here.
What it is: From Sophia’s website: “An education platform that is customizing the way students learn by offering more than 28,000 tutorials on a variety of academic topics taught by thousands of teachers. This vibrant, first-of-its-kind learning community helps teachers enrich their classrooms, empowers students to learn in their own way, and provides a pathway to an affordable college degree.”
From Turn to Your Neighbor Reader, Carrie: “I have my entire course here with videos, text, screencasts and tons more. Embeds with others and can embed google forms and educreations right into tutorial. Also offers professional development – FREE – on flipping.”
Why TTYN likes it: We love resources that teachers find helpful for flipping their classrooms. Read more about Sophia here.
What it is: Ted-Ed is Ted’s new venture where anyone can create free lessons using Youtube videos and embed assessments at the end of the lesson as well as provide additional resources for the “student.” Take a guided tour of Ted-Ed here.
Why TTYN likes it: Allows anyone, anywhere to easily create a free lesson and build an end of lesson assessment that is tagged to the related portion of the video. Don’t like the Youtube videos that are out there? Make your own through some kind of personal capture or screencast software (e.g. Screenflow, Camtasia, etc) and then publish it to Youtube! You can see statistics on how many people have viewed your lesson and their responses to your assessment questions.
While Ted-Ed is still in Beta and needs some instructional design updates (for example, it is not intuitive to a user what “flip this lesson” means. It means you would like to make your lesson, so you are going to take that video and then make your own introduction, assessments, and resource page) we were able to create a lesson in less than 10 minutes with no previous experience using the cloud-based software. Click the image to the right to check out our Ted-Ed lesson or click here.
What it is: A video hosting site that has a cool analytics heatmap that can tell you portions of the video where students paused, or rewatched or skipped ahead. Other software programs do this as well, such as Echo 360.
wistia.com
Why TTYN likes it: Free hosting for 5 videos for life. Easy to read heatmap packed with tons of useful information.
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Have a cool tool or resource for flipped classrooms?
Comment here or fill out this form to submit a cool resource:
Turn to Your Neighbor: The Official Peer Instruction Blog 
Elie Fabs
Good post – For my two cents , if others is interested in merging of PDF or PNG files , my colleague merged a tool here altomerge.com.