Post #9: Flipped Classrooms, Professional Development, PowerPoint Interaction

Flipped Classrooms

A flipped classroom is a way of teaching in which students learn material at home through video lectures and then do activities and participate in discussions in class. This method of learning reverses the traditional teaching method of lecturing in class and doing assignments at home. This allows teachers to spend more time answering questions in the classroom instead of teaching material the whole class. It also allows students to learn at their own pace and utilizes technology to make learning more self-driven and interactive. Khan Academy is an online source for educational videos that I have used myself throughout high school and college. There are hundreds of videos on almost any subject. I was only familiar with their YouTube channels, so I was excited to find out that they have their own website where you can sign up for free to view all of their content in one place.

Professional Development

Edutopia is a website that compiles all kinds of professional development resources for teachers. Most of the content is blog posts created by other teachers, so it is a great way for educators to connect and share resources. I particularly liked the video section, it is cool to see what innovative things teachers are doing in their classrooms.

PowerPoint Interaction

Honestly, I did not enjoy doing this assignment at all. It took me a long time to find a game template that I liked, and then once I found one it was very time consuming to put in all of my information. I am very thankful that we could use templates, though, because I am not sure that I could have made a functional game myself. While this type of study game is something I might make for my actual classroom in the future, it was just frustrating to try and come up with enough questions to make a game for a hypothetical class for a subject I am not interested in teaching. I still learned a little more about PowerPoint from this assignment. I learned how to set up a presentation to browse at kiosk, which is the setting that allows the Jeopardy game to work. I also learned about action buttons, which can be used to navigate to different slides or links within your presentation by clicking on them.

Post #8: Future Technology, Digital Divide, & PowerPoint

Future Technology

I think that the Personal Learning Environment is the most promising new technology for education because it can be used for almost any subject or age level. I think that creating online content through programs such as Moodle to is a good way for students to express their creativity and process information in the way that they learn best.

Digital Divide

The digital divide is the lack of access that some people have to technology such as computers and Internet access at home. I have always had access to technology such as computers and the Internet at home because my family is middle class and we lived in an urban area where having technology was the norm. However, as a teacher I cannot expect all of my students to have the same access to technology that I did growing up. I need to be aware that some of my students may not have a computer at home and make accommodations for those students, such as giving them time on the media center to work on research projects.

PowerPoint

I learned some useful skills from the PowerPoint for Information Dissemination assignment. One of the biggest new things I learned about PowerPoint was the master slide editor, which allows you to make your own custom templates to use throughout your presentation. This is really useful to make all the slides look more uniform, especially if there's a lot of elements like shapes and text boxes on each slide. I also didn't know that you could record your voice on PowerPoint. This is a cool feature because it would allow a teacher to upload a complete lecture with voice explanation instead of just the slides. I think it would be really cool if more online classes utilized this feature. 

I also stepped outside my comfort zone for this project. I want to be a high school English teacher, but after looking over many standards I decided to do my presentation on a fifth grade science standard. The English standards for high school seemed way too broad or complicated for this project, but the elementary science standards seemed narrow enough to be thoroughly explained in about ten slides. 

In my actual subject and age level, I could see myself using PowerPoint presentations to show discussion questions on the books my class is reading. Many of my English teachers in the past also used PowerPoint for quiz questions and grammar lessons, which I can see myself doing. 

ILP #1 “Participation” – Lynda

I chose to complete a Lynda course called Up and Running with Edmodo by Oliver Schinkten. This course covered everything a teacher would need to know about setting up an online classroom with Edmodo, and even provided videos to show parents and students on how to set up their accounts.


I think that this course provided a convincing argument about why Edmodo can be a powerful tool for teachers. It is similar to social media sites and it can be a fun and engaging way for students to interact in a safe and private educational environment.  This online classroom can also teach students how to communicate online in a respectful way, which is a very important skill in the digital age.




The course also provided lots of helpful tips about how to use Edmodo effectively in the classroom.
I learned that you can link your Google Drive and Edmodo library, which allows for easy transfer of files from your computer to your students. The following screenshot is just some of the many uses of this program in the classroom discussed in the tutorial.


I had never used Lynda before this project, and I am sad about that fact now because I have been missing out on a lot of free resources. I thought the Notebook feature was great; I love how it marks where on the video the note is from. Here are my notes from the course.

PowerPoint Tips: Banning the Bullet

SlideShare

Today in class we talked about ways to avoid using bullet points in presentations. I enjoyed this SlideShare presentation on the topic. I really liked the idea on slide 2, I think that it is easy to read and a good alternative to the bullet point.

13 Alternatives to Using Bullet Points in Presentations from Melissa Milloway, MSIT

Post #7

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a useful tool for student's learning at each level of Bloom's Taxonomy. The first two stages, Knowledge and Comprehension, can be taught through the teacher's presentation of important key concepts and terms. Teachers can also incorporate discussion questions into their slides, which can help teach students Application if the questions connect the subject matter to other real-life scenarios. Discussion questions could also ask students to break down main ideas into parts or compare and contrast two concepts, which are parts of the Analysis level. A good project to teach the Synthesis level would be to ask students to make their own PowerPoint presentation about the topic since making a presentation requires creativity and incorporating many elements into a cohesive project. Teachers could also ask students to grade their presentations based on a set of criteria to teach them Evaluation.  

Adaptive Technologies

Adaptive technology is any device that assists people with physical or learning disabilities to use technology. The podcast talks about alternative input devices for people with physical disabilities, such as a joystick instead of a mouse. There are also many adaptive technologies for students with learning disabilities, such as text-to-speech software for people with dyslexia and productivity software to help students with learning disabilities organize tasks. I do not personally know anyone who uses these technologies because of a disability. However, it is good to know that this technology is out there in case I have a student in the future that will need them. 

Web Page Design

I really enjoyed using Weebly for the web page design project. I thought that the site was pretty easy to use, and the templates that it gave me helped a lot with creating a web page fast. I also appreciate the fact that when inserting photos Weebly lets you search for images under the Creative Commons license, and it even cites the photos for you on your webpage. That feature saved me so much time on this project. My one struggle with this project was figuring out what to write for the articles, but I'm sure that part will become much easier once my class is not fictional. I will definitely consider using Weebly in the future when I need to make a real class website. Even if I don't use that site, this project taught me valuable lessons about how to set up my own web page, such as Robin William's principle of C.R.A.P. (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity).