Flips, Tricks, & Skills (BP9)

My initial thoughts about the idea of a so-called "flipped classroom" were that it was nothing special. It seemed pretty similar to what we, as college students, are expected to do anyways. You have a reading assigned before class and the class time is then dedicated to reviewing what you were supposed to read about and work through any misconceptions or confusions. However, putting this into the context of regular school like middle and high school opened my mind a little bit. While this is a great idea for a resource for absent students, I feel as though it may be a little out of reach to expect from all students. Essentially the original idea was to post material that had been recorded and annotated during class online so students who were absent could access it, therefore putting less stress on the teachers to reteach the material. This could be a great way to integrate the idea into a middle school class. Then as high schoolers, maybe teachers could use it as a means to assign homework and readings and study materials rather than just for absent students. This way, by the time these kids enter college, they will know exactly what is expected of them.

I think my favorite resource that I have found so far in this class is an Open Educational Resource, or OER. These resources are websites or applications or files that are available to anyone to use or reuse as needed. In my eyes, I think this is an amazing creation for teachers. Not only can you reuse other lessons from other teachers which saves you a lot of time, but you can also just use other lessons to get ideas and inspiration from. The resource that I found was actually directly from OER Commons. This resource allows educators to create a resource, lesson, or module from scratch but provides prompts and sections to allow for organization. This is a great way to stay organized when creating a lesson plan and it is so cool to have everything automatically blocked out for you. Learn more about this resource here.

As I have discussed in other blogs, I have a love/hate relationship with PowerPoint these days. As much as I love the creativity aspect of it, I have found myself spending hours a day creating them for these assignments. I guess that isn't necessarily a bad thing because it shows how much I care about the assignment, but not really good news for my other classes that need my time and attention. Another thing that I struggled with more particularly was in my interactive presentation. For the most recent assignment, I created my own Jeopardy-style game. The part that I struggled with was how to get the buttons to become highlighted after the question had already been selected. This means that people who attempt to play the game will have difficulty remembering what questions had already been asked. Other than this, the assignment was pretty smooth-sailing. I used resources online that taught me how to link slides to other slides. I also asked some classmates for help too. All in all, I can definitely say that I am very glad to be done with the PowerPoint section of the class.