Blog Post #9

A flipped classroom involves students listening to prerecorded video lectures for homework before coming to class, and use class time to work with content in group or individual activities and with their teachers in order to deepen understanding of the content. This allows for students to become active learners engaged in exploration and discovery within the content's framework. Teachers can use various technologies to record and share their instruction with their students, whether it be through a closed network, website, blog, or YouTube. A great source of educational videos that could be used for online instruction is www.brightstorm.com

This podcast talks about how open education, open content, and open source all affect the classroom. Open education involves making educational experiences available to a wide audience. This includes lessons on various material being available online for anyone to use when they please. A great source to access open education is https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm which offers free courses and materials. Open content specifies what people can and cannot do with the educational material they find online. It is made up of four credentials, including reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Reuse includes using material for your own needs, whereas redistribution includes putting the material out into a different means of access to be used by others. Remix and revise includes modifying content on it's own or to be combined with other useful related content. A great source to access open content is http://search.getty.edu/ which provides free access to periodicals, photographs, and many other resources on a variety of topics. Open source includes software whose source code is available for anyone to access, allowing for people to modify or add new features to it. A great form of open source software is Linux, which is a free computer operating system that can be used on PC's.

Some new skills I gained from working on this assignment is using action buttons to make presentations more interactive and including audio throughout a presentation. I really liked creating questions and linking the answers to multiple slides in order to navigate through the presentation. The only thing I was hesitant about was making sure everything linked to the correct slides. I think I could improve my presentation by making it a bit more interesting with animation, but I wanted to make the presentation as clean and clear as possible. I think this assignment was a great way to prepare me for making these types of interactive presentations and quizzes for my students in the future!