CONNECTED CLASSROOM |
With Popcorn Maker, editors can annotate existing web video, such as this TED talk.
Watch the remixed talk at bit.ly/12hEOIF to learn more about Popcorn Maker.
Annotate video footage and screencasts
on your iPad with Explain Everything.
Teach, a free iPad app, as “iMovie for
teachers.” Once you publish a video
to the Knowmia website, you can add
assignments that incorporate questions and track student responses in a
learning management system.
The Knowmia website also offers
more than 8,000 video lessons created with the Knowmia Teach iPad
app. Users will find teachable topics in nearly all of the major subject
areas, mostly for middle school and
high school students. The site also
has an extensive collection of how-to
videos designed to allow educators
with limited experience to begin using
Knowmia Teach (www.knowmia.com/
browse/teaching/knowmia-teach).
The good news is that the Knowmia business model offers polished
video creation tools for free. The
catch is that the terms of use require
users to grant Knowmia “a worldwide, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid,
sublicensable and transferable license
to use, modify, reproduce, distribute,
prepare derivative works of, display,
perform, and otherwise fully exploit
the User Submissions.” In other
words, Knowmia is crowdsourcing
from its participants exemplary instruction that it then distributes to
generate revenues. In return, teachers receive a free tool to create and
publish instructional videos for their
classes, and they may share in the
profits generated.
In contrast, Mozilla’s Popcorn tools
are not as polished, but users retain
full ownership of the materials they
create. Explain Everything falls in the
middle of this continuum: The app
costs $2.99 per license, but for that
modest cost, the educator receives a
complete tool and retains full ownership of materials.
Grokit Answers
You can use some of the tools in this
rapidly expanding genre in combination with others. For example, Grokit
Answers (grokit.com/answers) makes
it easy to create and link a private
Q&A session to a web video. Each
question appears at a specific point in
the video. Class members can answer
the questions alone or collaboratively.
The tool does not provide Knowmia’s capacity for automated tracking
of student responses, but it also does
not make any claim on materials generated or hosted on its site. In theory,
some of the functionality of Knowmia
could be replicated by using Explain
Everything in combination with
Grokit Answers.
More tools of this kind are sure to
spring up in the future. In the meantime, you can explore using these
tools to create your own, even better,
version of the flipped classroom.
Glen Bull (gbull@virginia.edu)
is co-director of the Center for
Technology and Teacher Education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, USA. Bull co-authored
this column with Willy Kjell-
strom (willyk@virginia.edu), a graduate fellow in
the Center for Technology and Teacher Education.
