The Student-Centered Classroom - Liberate Learners To Flip Their Own Lessons

The expanded availability of easy tech tools has empowered educators to rethink homework and daily instruction. Flipping the classroom with teacher-made videos allows students to self-direct their at-home learning. Many of these clips, however, still involve a one-day delivery of information, from teacher to student. Another approach is to allow children to make their own educational videos. They can enlighten their classmates with their creations, and they can teach themselves the material and the skills during the process of production.

Adobe Voice is an ideal tool for this kind of student-generated video. Free and simple, Adobe Voice for the iPad encourages four key proficiencies:

• Symbol and visual metaphor - Students must choose images and icons to pair with their explanations, which fosters an understanding of figurative meaning.
• Narration - They must unite each visual frame with a seamless spoken narrative, to relate the core information via a smooth story.
• Text - Children must select crisp words to highlight vocabulary and terms, while avoiding large paragraphs and irrelevant language.
• Design - As filmmakers, they must combine colors, music, transitions, and layout, to assemble a compelling video that clearly conveys the content.

Our eighth-graders made videos for their final exam review. It proved to be a perfect way for the students to teach each other. It took only one class period to create the clips, and now they can be embedded and shared for review at home. The kids have been watching them on their phones and tweeting them with a shared hashtag for online archival. Here is the page featuring all of their videos.