A Short Overview of 12 Tools for Creating Flipped Classroom Lessons

One of the most frequent requests that I get is for suggestions on developing flipped classroom lessons. The first step is to decide if you want to create your own video lessons from scratch or if you want to develop lessons based on videos that others have produced. In this post we'll look at tools for doing both.

Developing flipped lessons from scratch with your own videos.

The benefit of creating your own videos is that you can tailor them to exactly match your curriculum. The drawback to this is that it requires more time on your part. The other drawback is that your video might not be as engaging to your students as those made by professional video editors. For example, it would be years before I could make videos that look as good as those produced by the staff on Hank and John Green's Crash Course series.

Tools for creating your own flipped video lessons:

The Knowmia Teach iPad app is an excellent app for creating your own whiteboard videos. Some of the highlights of Knowmia Teach app include the option to use your iPad’s camera to record yourself while drawing on the whiteboard. You will appear in the corner of the screen so that your students can see you while you’re talking them through the lesson. The app includes the option to import images and graphics from your iPad to your lessons. You can draw free-hand on the whiteboard screen, type on the whiteboard screen, and insert pre-made shapes and figures. All Knowia Teach lessons can be uploaded to the Knowmia website with just one tap of your iPad’s screen. Students can watch your lessons on the Knowmia website.

Educreations is a free iPad app that turns your iPad into a whiteboard. You can use the app to illustrate concepts and narrate what you’re doing on the screen. You can draw images from scratch on the Educreations iPad app or you can upload images and draw on them. Your completed lesson can be shared directly to others or made public on the Educreations website.

In the free eduClipper iPad app you can create instructional videos on a whiteboard in the Khan Academy style. You can also use the app to create a video in which you annotate an image or document while talking about it. After creating your video you can save it to an eduClipper board that you have shared with your students through the eduClipper classroom setting. Your students can view the videos on their iPads or in the web browsers on their laptops.

If you don't have an iPad, PixiClip is a good option for creating simple instructional videos. PixiClip provides a whiteboard space on which you can draw, upload images to mark-up, and type. While adding elements to your PixiClip whiteboard you can talk and or record a video of yourself talking. In fact, you can't use the whiteboard without at least recording your voice at the same time. Recordings can be shared via social media, embedded into blog posts, or you could grab the link and include it in an eduClipper board that you have shared with your students.

Clarisketch is a free Android app that has great potential for classroom use. The app allows you to take a picture or pull one from your device’s camera roll and then add your voice to it. While you are talking about your picture you can draw on it to highlight sections of it. Completed projects are shared as links to the video file hosted on Clarisketch. You can share the link to your Clarisketch video and have it play on nearly any device that has a web browser.

One other option to consider is simply recording yourself talking over a set of slides. Screencast-o-matic.com makes it easy to do that.

Creating flipped lessons from videos produced by others. 

The benefit of creating flipped lessons in this manner is that you can save a ton of time by not having to develop everything from scratch. The drawback is that you might end up using videos that don't exactly match your curriculum. You'll also find that YouTube is the largest source of flipped lessons. If your school blocks access to YouTube, you may find it difficult to find good video lessons.

Tools for creating flipped video lessons with videos produced by others. 

Vibby is a service for breaking YouTube videos into segments and inserting comments into those segments. To segment a YouTube video on Vibby simply grab the URL for the video and paste into the Vibby editor. Once inserted into Vibby you can highlight a segment on the video timeline. Vibby then plays only the sections you've highlighted. Click on a highlighted section to add a comment to it. Videos edited through Vibby can be shared via email, social media, or embedded into a blog or website.



EDpuzzle is a neat tool that allows you to add your voice and text questions to educational videos. On EDpuzzle you can search for educational videos and or upload your own videos to use as the basis of your lesson. EDpuzzle has an online classroom component that you can use to assign videos to students and track their progress through your video lessons. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use the main features of EDPuzzle.



Gooru is a free service for locating and organizing collections of educational resources to use in math, science, social studies, and language arts lessons. Gooru makes it easy to create collections of videos, images, and interactive websites to use as part of a flipped lesson. Being able to add quiz questions for students to answer as they go through one of the units you've created is the feature of Gooru that I like best.

eduCanon is an excellent service for creating, assigning, and tracking your students' progress on flipped lessons. eduCanon allows you to build flipped lessons using YouTube and Vimeo videos, create questions about the videos, then assign lessons to their students. Once you have found a video through eduCanon you can add questions to it at any point along its timeline. Students need to answer your questions before they move on to the next portion of your chosen video. You can track your students' progress within eduCanon.


MoocNote is a free tool for adding timestamped comments, questions, and links to videos. To do this on MoocNote you simply paste a link to a YouTube video into the MoocNote editor. Once the video is imported you can start to add your comments, questions, and links. The link features is particularly useful for providing students with additional resources for learning about the topics covered in your shared videos. MoocNote allows you to organize playlists (MoocNote calls them courses) of videos according to topics that you identify.

Zaption is a tool for creating video-based quizzes. Unlike some services like TED-Ed that have students watch a video then answer questions at the end, Zaption allows you to display questions for students to answer as they watch a video. To create a quiz on Zaption you start by creating a "tour" in your account. A tour is a combination of videos, images, and text arranged into a sequence. To add a video to a tour you can search and select one within Zaption. Zaption pulls videos from YouTube, Vimeo, PBS, or National Geographic. After choosing your video, start watching it then pause it when you want to add a question. You can add questions in the form of multiple choice, open response, or check box response. When students watch the video they will see your questions appear in the context in which you set them. Take a look at the Zaption showcase for some great examples of Zaption tours that incorporate video, images, and text.

What's an Algorithm? What Does an Algorithm Do?

Algorithms is the topic of the latest video produced by Common Craft. The two and a half minute video explains what an algorithm is and the roles that algorithms can play in our lives, particularly in our online lives.


After they watch the video ask your students if they can think of other ways that algorithms are or could be used in their lives. See if they can make the connection between their social media habits and the types of advertising that they see when they're online.

A Couple of Ways to Add Reminders to Google Calendar

Earlier this week Google added a new "add reminders" option to the Google Calendar mobile apps. If you have updated the Google Calendar app on your iOS or Android device, you should now see a red "+" button. Tap that button to add a reminder to your calendar.

The same option to to add reminders hasn't been added to the desktop version of Google Calendar, yet. There are other methods of adding reminders to Google Calendar. One option is to use HashtagToDo to add reminders to your Google Calendar. With HashtagTodo enabled in your Google Account you can create a to-do list in any of your Google Calendars by simply adding #todo to the end of any calendar event title. Once you've added the #todo to your event HashtagTodo will create a daily event listing all of your to-do items for the day. When you've completed a task on your to-do list, delete it from your calendar and it's deleted from your list. If you don't complete an item on your list for the day, it is automatically rolled over to the next day.

I'm a fan of using Google Keep to set reminders for myself. Creating reminders is just one the many things that you and your students can do with Google Keep.

How to Create Interactive Videos

In one of yesterday's posts I suggested creating interactive year-in-review videos with your students. This morning my inbox contained at least five emails from folks who wanted to know a bit more about that process. I like to use Wideo.co to create interactive videos. In my Wideo videos I can build interactive buttons that viewers can click to learn more about anything they see in my videos. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of how to create interactive videos on Wideo.

7 Free Spelling Apps and Sites

Over the years one of the most searched terms on FreeTech4Teachers.com has consistently been "spelling games." It has been more than a year since I published an updated list of good spelling apps and sites. Here's my latest round-up of free apps and sites for spelling practice.

Manulife Word Hunter is a free iPad app designed to help children learn new words. The app features a board game that students move through by rolling dice and correctly spelling new words as they go. Kids can play the game alone or with up to two other players. To start playing the Word Hunter game students select avatars then roll the dice. The dice indicate how many spaces to move on the board. The spaces on the board contain new word challenges. Students see the word, see an object representing the word, and can hear the word read aloud before attempting to spell it on their own. If a student spells a word correctly he or she gets a bonus action that allows them to either skip ahead, skip another player’s turn, or move another player backwards.

Rocket Speller is a fun iPad app designed for students in Kindergarten through grade two. The purpose of the app is to help students learn to spell words simple words that are three to ten letters long. As students progress through the levels of the app they get stars. After they get three stars students pick out the parts they want to use to build a rocket ship. Rocket Speller has five levels for students to work through. The first level uses three to six letter words and gives audio and visual clues to students. The second level features words up to ten letters in length and offers audio and visual hints. The third through fifth levels have words up to ten letters in length but reduce the number of clues available to students.

Stumpy’s Alphabet Dinner is a fun app in which students feed letters and shapes to cartoon characters. The letters and shapes that students feed to the characters have to match the letter or shape displayed on the character’s stomach. If the child makes an incorrect match the character spits out the letter.

Building Language for Literacy offers three nice little language activities from Scholastic. The activities are designed for pre-K and Kindergarten students. The spelling activity is called  Leo Loves to Spell. Leo Loves to Spell asks students to help a lobster named Leo identify the first letter of a series of spelling words arranged in a dozen categories.

Spell Up is a fun Google Chrome experiment. Spell Up is a game in which you hear a prompt to spell a word then have to speak into your laptop or Chromebook to see the word spelled on your screen. If you spell the word correctly it stays on the screen where it becomes part of a tower of words. If you spell a word incorrectly, it will fall off the screen and you will be prompted to try again (you can skip a word after a few tries).

Your students can test their spelling skills against those of past winners of the Scripp's National Spelling Bee on Vox's Spell It Out challenge. Vox's spelling challenge presents you with the final winning words from twenty past national spelling bees. You will hear the word pronounced then you have to type it in the spelling box to submit your answer. Before submitting your answer you can hear the word used in a sentence and see the origin of the word.

Spelling Monster is an Android app (free and paid versions available) that students will enjoy using to practice spelling words. On Spelling Monster students can create their own lists of words or use lists shared with them (sharing only available in paid version). The app contains a half dozen games through which students can practice spelling the words in their lists. Spelling Monster keeps track of the number of times a game is played and the percentage of words spelled correctly. Students do not have to create an account to use Spelling Monster. The app can be used without a connection to the Internet.