Blog 9

The Flipped Classroom is a new idea aimed at increasing learning and productivity in the classroom. The idea is that teachers create online lessons and videos for their students to learn at home and then spend their class time practicing and going over any issues the students might have with the material. It is called a "flipped classroom" because home becomes the place of initial learning and the class becomes a place to work out any kinks or confusion with the work. 

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning resources which are open to the public for anyone to use for whichever purpose they choose. These resources are made available to the public through different ways such as the "five 'r's' of OER." These five r's are: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Each R offers a different way that intellectual information can be shared freely on the internet. OER Commons is a place where intellectual resources are available to the public. 

This semester in EME2040, we spent time learning about different applications and technologies that will be useful in the classroom in the future. One of the items we spent a good deal of time on was PowerPoint. In fact, the past two class assignments were done on PowerPoint to test our understanding of the tool. 

Assignment 4:

Assignment 4 asked us to create a lesson on PowerPoint that included use of different types of slides, fonts and transitions. This assignment basically was used to test our understanding of basic PP functions. I enjoyed this assignment. However, it took me longer than it should have because I spent too much time coming up with what lesson I wanted to teach. I did not like how tedious and nit-picky the assignment was- it asked me to follow very specific guidelines in order to get full credit that I felt were asking a bit much for a small assignment. If I could change anything, I think I would want to add more color to the PP to make it more lively. 

Assignment 5:

Assignment 5 asked us to create an interactive PowerPoint. I chose to create a 'Basic Knowledge Quiz' to test students on their basic understanding and display my understanding of the trickier functions that PP offers. Again, I was asked to include lots of little things that made the work tedious, but I managed to put everything asked of me in the PP and get the full credit. I did not enjoy this assignment as much as the last one, but I was grateful for the knowledge that it gave me. If I could change anything about it, I would use different colors- the black background is intimidating and makes it look less fun than it is.