Flipping the class with Ed Ted

Not so much about Moodle in this blog post, but of equal importance materials that you can use as part of your course. If like myself you make use of YouTube videos in your lectures and classes, then I feel certain that you will have come across the Ted Talks, so I was really very pleasantly surprised when the other day I discovered Ted Ed lessons worth sharing. Essentially these are a collection of Ted Talk videos that have been ready packaged with quiz style questions, a Think section for open answer type responses and a Dig Deeper area for any further resources. The attraction here soon becomes obvious, because now you can select a video from the Ted Flipped library and use it as a ready to go online lesson. Furthermore you can even add additional questions and content to each lesson you choose. Having selected your flipped video and material, it is then published to a unique url so that it can be shared either through your vle, e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter, brilliant. So how do you get to track your student activity? Well after your material has been shared, you simply log-in to the service and see who viewed the lesson, the number of questions they attempted, the answers they provided, in the case of multiple choice questions, even the incorrect responses; though it seems this last feature does require permissions from the student. The whole idea of flipping has become a popularised term for a practice not entirely new, but through which we can certainly leverage technology to effectively push learning away from the more traditional taught environment and into a more distributed style.  I do feel ready to buy into this approach, because through applying the flipped model to some parts of delivery anyway, it could release greater scope for the traditional type and range of class bound activities; if learning takes place elsewhere, then the class perhaps becomes a place for more student driven activity, innovation and personalisation. And there is more, you do not have to rely on flipped content becoming available, because you can make use of any YouTube video and add your own Questions, Think and Dig Deeper content, now surely that really makes it worth trying. Have you tried the Ed Ted yet, if you have, then please feel free to comment.

Regards