My Flip Teaching Adventure

I made an end of semester resolution to work on making my AP Chemistry class more hands on.  It is very hard to do this with so much material and so little time available.  When the professional development day finally came I was able to attend a presentation about "Flip teaching" which sparked my interest and provided a possible solution.

The idea of "Flip teaching" is to allow the students first time exposure to the content (which most often is presented in the form of lecture) to happen at home with a fully produced video.  This video should contain notes and model problems.  This would then free up class time to synthesize the information (normally assigned as homework) in the form of in class problem sets and labs.  This would give me more time for inquiry based assignments and will allow me to better differentiate my lessons for each individuals learning pace.

The trick right now seems to involve finding excellent screen capture video software as well as a tablet to create the produced lecture that I would hope the students would watch and enjoy.  Thus I set out over break looking for a tablet to try.  I started at Frys and purchased the vistablet penpad.  This cheap ($40) tablet was light and flexible, but the size would not give me the precision to make my annotations legible.  I then returned to Fry's to pick up the next level of drawing tablet which had a much larger working space.  This allowed me to get started with some free trial video capturing software to see what I could do.

The free trial of jing gave me short files that I had trouble converting.  Jing has a purchasable version that has conversion ability but you have to pay $15 a month to use it.  I thought that was too expensive so I decided to search for something else.  I then tried SnapZpro which could compress and convert the file into a readable form, but it doesn't have pause capability so if I am having trouble with an aspect of the presentation I would need to edit movie clips in a 2nd piece of software.  Isn't there a single program that can record, pause, and edit?  Do you know of something?