Students as Critical Thinkers in the Flipped Classroom

I recently read a blog post by +Alice Chen titled, "Don't Just Flip the Videos, Flip the Learning," in it she discusses that having children watch videos at home and then answer questions is just an extension of the teacher centered classroom. She writes:

This is a teacher-centered classroom, where the questions are driven by the teacher.  This is not new pedagogy.  It's simply moving the geographical location of the lesson from the classroom to the home with the help of technology.

Instead of the teacher providing the questions as accompaniment to the video, teach your students how to ask critical thinking questions that will drive the learning into their own hands.  Assign the video, but also embed it on a platform that will allow students to actively discuss the material they watched with each other.  

There are several free web tools that will help you to use YouTube to accomplish the goal of turning your students into critical thinkers while flipping your classroom.

VideoNot.es Allows students to take notes while watching a YouTube video. These notes are synced with the video so that when a student reviews the notes they will automatically be taken to the correct
spot in the video.  The beauty of this is that all notes are saved to Google Drive where students can share their insights and pose questions for one another.

CaptionTube allows users to add captions to videos. While it could be used for teacher produced videos, it could also be used to establish students as critical thinkers. Instead of passively watching a video, students could be instructed to annotate the video with extra information not found in the video, pose questions to other students, or draw alternative conclusions than the ones presented in the video. Thank you to +Educational Technology and Mobile Learning for this find.

TouchCast Is a free video authoring tool in the spirit of Camtasia.  Why this makes my list is that it allows for the teacher to make the videos more interactive. There are over 15 apps that you can embed within the video including webpages, polls, and social network feeds.

Bonus...
Blubbr I found this on a blog post from +Richard Byrne. The site allows you to create a quiz using YouTube clips. In his words:

creating a quiz on Blubbr could be a good way to develop review materials for your students. Students can take quizzes on Blubbr without signing into the service. 

While not establishing critical thinking skills, it is at least more fun than watching one clip and answering a set of questions.