BLOG 9

The “Flipped Classroom” is an instructional strategy and a type of blended learning that reverses the traditional educational arrangement by delivering instructional content, online and outside of the classroom. The model is a mixture of direct instruction and constructivism, that makes it easier for students who may have missed class to keep up because they can watch the videos at any time. For students to be successful on their own, videos used in the flipped-classroom model must include a variety of approaches in the same way a face-to-face lesson would, and they must also have good sound and image quality so that students can follow along easily. These videos must also match the curriculum, standards and the labs or activities the students will complete in class. As mentioned in our book in Chapter 10, social networking has become part of the learning strategy helping to build bridges to parents and the communities in order for them to keep up with what is going on in the classroom. Linking students to their world helps create a global learning community that enhances the learning environment in a way that helps students build confidence by developing interactive skills with their peers. This is the link that I found with information on the flipped classroom: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-pro-and-con-mary-beth-hertz. Check it out is has many videos and expanded content on the subject of the flipped classroom.

                Education in it of itself would be almost impossible to carry out without resources. As limited as resources may have been in the very first school classroom. This is not the case today as resources are plentiful and available to conduct effective teaching in the classroom. The concern is which is the best resource to use and how to make the decision to choose resources carefully. The open terms mentioned in the podcast relate to such resources and that they are available to anyone and everyone that intends to use these resources for educational purposes. The reuse in teaching, learning and research are interrelated and serve a great purpose to continue education at all levels from elementary to the university level. Universities in particular through their libraries offer extensive resources for students as part of their tuition. This enables students to prepare research papers and use resources and obtain materials they can use to enhance their education. UNESCO is an organization that participates in the effort to promote open content. You can visit their website here http://en.unesco.org/.

 

A paragraph on new skills you acquired from working on the two PowerPoint assignments.   Reflect what you like/don’t like about each and how you can improve it next time.

Preparing a lesson plan by using a power point format can be a challenging task as you must abbreviate content on slides in order to make them attractive and catch the attention of your audience and then introduce speech about the content on the slides. Animations were a little bit of dislike for me, maybe for the complexity of the produce; over all was a learning experience.