Blog Post #9

            According to chapter 10 in the book, a flipped classroom is when a teacher posts prerecorded lectures and assigns the students to listen to them for homework. The students then come to class the next day where the teacher has planned discussions and activities to help deepen the understanding of the content discussed in the homework. The way the students listen to these lectures is through technological recordings, so they can easily find them on their course website at the end of the day. Here is a website where you can learn more about it:  http://flippedclassroom.org

            An interesting web-based resource I would like to use in my classroom is definitely wikis. I love that it gives the students a chance to add their own thoughts and feel as though they are apart of the page too. Wikis also ensure that the students are looking at each other’s work since it is all on one page. Blogs don’t have the same insurance when it comes to looking at other posts. While the students know that the teachers are looking at what they are writing, they can almost guarantee that the other students aren’t.

            I think it would be great to have a wikis for an English class so that we can openly talk about the books read in class even when we aren’t in class. I would make that homework. It would be like a Socratic Seminar, but on the Internet instead of in person. I think it would also be a great place to post questions about homework for me and to the other students. It would be efficient for me as the teacher because I’m sure it can be tedious answering the same question over and over again through email. Wikis would display the question to the whole class and hopefully that will stop the students from asking the same one. http://wikisineducation.wikifoundry.com

            Something new I learned from the PowerPoint for Information Dissemination assignment was how to add transitions between slides. I never learned how to do this, or even realized it was possible because I was sick the day we learned in in this class and my high school teachers never incorporated it into their presentations. I liked making up my own lesson for a class. It got me looking forward to one day having my own class, but at the same time I didn’t like how tedious it was. It takes a lot of time to add all the transitions and effects into the slides and that doesn’t even include adding the actual information and pictures. This assignment did teach me how to make things interesting for my students, especially during a lecture. I remember being so bored after seeing the same slide over and over again.