How I started flippin'

My first flipped class. Videos on iPads, mark book on the board.

Had a great night once and went to bed at 4am full of joy and excitement.

No, it wasn’t the night I met my better half –I didn’t sleep that night 😉

It was the night when I started flippin’.

One day, a colleague came to the staff room pointing at her iPad:

"Look what I did!."

It was 2012. A school in the Middle East.

Burning hot outside, freezing cold inside.

I looked at the screen; it was a screencast maths video.

I was like “so what?!”, and she gestured me to listen.

I listened for a second or two and gasped:

"Ooh!. But how?!"

It was HER talking on the video.

She created the video all by herself on her iPad.

"I loved it!. Show me!."

"How did you know the app?"

She “ShowMe”d everything –that was the app she used.

That night, after dinner, like 8pm, I started playing with it.

I planned a chapter; 4 videos.

I created a web page on WordPress to add the links to the videos.

All in one hour.

And I started recording.

Took me 8 hours to finish all the work.

No typos; eight hours.

Just four 5-minute videos and a most basic web page on WordPress with links to the videos.

You see, I am a perfectionist; any mistake I made meant starting over –there was no “edit-on-the-go" back then.

Pronunciation mistake? Start over.

2 + 2 = 5? Scrap the video.

I went to bed at 4am that “night”, only to wake up 2 hours later.

Then I went to school “the next day”, flipped my Grade 9 class for the first time and never looked back!.

I must admit, my main motivation was not student agency, nor personalised learning or mastery.

(flashback to the convo with colleague the previous day)

"I used my videos in class today and they were dead silent!."

She was beside herself with her little eyes fully open with disbelief; the videos worked like magic and no behaviour issues.

Well, in a boys’ school, “challenging” is an understatement when it comes to attempting to describe classroom management issues.

But the videos worked.

Misbehaviour was not an issue no more.

Very soon, I needed a mark book to track my students’ progress.

I created a table on Google Sheets and started recording students’ scores.

That’s when I realised for the first time how different students’ pacing were.

Some were fast pacers, forcing me to shoot videos almost every night.

Some were pausing, rewinding or even re-watching the video.

But all were progressing, not only on my mark book but also on their tests, too.

My videos were followed by what I called as “Online Self-Checks".

These were (and still are) the answer keys for the exercise sets at the end of each video.

Students were to solve the exercises on their books and then check their answers on the Online Self-Checks.

Soon, the “less-than-100%” scores on the mark book started bothering me.

One day, before the class starts, I announced the “100% Ban”.

No one was allowed to move on to the next video unless they got 100% from the Online Self-Check.

That’s when I discovered the power of one-to-one conversations that lead to Mastery.

A few guiding questions and step back to watch the student’s “a-ha moment”; that was professional satisfaction to the core.

And a few personal bits shared in between the lines; “my cats never let me do my HW before I play with them”, “we are seven siblings and I am the youngest”, “I will go to America for the university”.

How many students have I taught without knowing absolutely nothing about them?

What a pity.

Not knowing them, yes, but more than that, not having the time.

Now I do.

Everyday was a new discovery for me.

There were no guidelines, no online / on-site trainings.

There were only a handful of apps for video creation.

Heck, I didn’t even know what I did was In-Class Flipping.

All of these came later, of which you may find out all about the history, as well as the other essential information about Flipped Learning in my free course.

Today is totally different.

Lots of information.

Plenty of apps in any shape and form.

And last but definitely not least;

AI models that can help you set everything up to flip your classes.

I want to spread the word.

I want to help you reclaim your agency and