Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources are resources found in different electronic forms across the internet at different locations across the United States. All these resources are kept on the Open Educational Resources website. This program let's students access different textbooks, course readings, and other learning materials. In the article, 7 Things You Should Know About..., they discuss everything there is about Open Educational Resources including the positive and negative effects of the program. 

Positive:

             OER has many positive effects on education. The program spreads across the cost to bring great amount of materials to a bigger range of students. These materials can help modify lessons to become more technology based. OER also has the ability to show instructors and students a widespread of educational materials that do not ever actually make it to a normal classroom. 

Negative:

              OER may have positive effects but it has a long way to go till it becomes a efficient program. There is flexibility in the open resources but many of the resources need to be changed to meet requirements of different educational institutions. Another negative to this program is not all of the resources can be adapted to students with disabilities. 

In another article, Open Educational Resources, it was explained the main focus of OER. OER strives to create a functioning open educational system and great deeper learning through online student access.

There may be an extreme number of followers of this program but in the article, Some Examples of Resistance to Open Education, they explain groups that do not support OER. The four largest textbook companies refuse to become a follower of OER. They have sued through a copyright infringement suit against an open textbook publisher. These companies believe OER creates almost identical textbooks to their own.

Regardless of negative effects and non supporters I believe this is a program worth having around and improving on for students to use across the United States for years to come.

Teaching Channel

A website we discovered as a class today is a wonderful site called Teaching Channel. It lets teachers post videos about teaching, lesson plans, core standards, student behavior and much more. This way teachers’ can share their experiences with each other so everyone can grow as a teacher. I watched a common core video on a kindergarten class learning to skip count by 5s and 10s. It was interesting to see how the teacher gave them directions but also let them have freedom with the activity. 

Flipped Learning

Flipped Learning

What is Flipped Learning?

Creators Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams became part of the chemistry department at Woodland Park High School in Woodland Park, Colorado and they saw their students falling behind with no way to catch up. They found software that let you record a PowerPoint including video and voice. They then converted the file and distributed it online for their students to view anywhere. This way they can catch up on school work on their own time and work at their own pace. Below is a video, featuring Aaron Sams, explaining flipped learning. 

Positives and Negatives?

Outcomes:

 Students won't have a reason to fall behind because through flipped learning they can work at their own pace. They can pause and repeat a lesson as many times as they need to until they fully understand. This way advanced students are not held back as well. They can move forward working on lessons without being stuck at a slower pace. Also they can connect to these lessons at any time. If a student is extremely involved and can't learn until late at night they have that option.

Drawbacks:

All students don't have access to the technology at all times to connect to the lessons. Also, not every student learns best stuck behind a screen.  

My Future in Teaching

This type of teaching and learning will affect my future classroom. Technology already has, on many levels, expanded the 21st century classroom. Flipped Learning is the start of teaching anywhere at any time. It has given students freedom with their own learning. I believe this could ultimately in the future lead to students having more control over their learning then the teachers do. Almost like Pre College to actual college. Also, the technology this has given us I could even have students anywhere in the world learn with my class. With technology improving every day the possibilities are endless.

Resources for Exploration:

Flipped Learning

Flipped Learning Channel

7 Things You Should Know PDF

Resouces for Research:

Flipped Classroom

How the Flipped Classroom was made!

The Flipped Classroom: Pros and Cons

Not Flipped for Flipped Learning

Experiencing Group

During the last couple weeks we were assigned to create a presentation on anything on education of the 21st century. My group decided we wanted to find out what have the last two recent first ladies, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, done for education. During the research we split our group of four into two mini groups of two. Each group researched a first lady then we collaborated together to create our presentation. My group decided to use the powerpoint program prezi. Prezi is an advanced form of powerpoint letting you explore different paths for your viewers to enjoy with possible pictures, charts, graphs, and videos. The program at first is hard to handle because there is so much you can do. It can become quite intimidating. Luckily, I used prezi last year for an English class presentation. My group soon became pros as I showed them how to use it. I believe prezi is an excellent program for teachers to use. It lets you revamp an old traditional way of teaching to make it new and exciting again for students. I will be sure to use prezi in my future classroom.

Below I attached a link to our prezi presentation. 

Ladies in the House

Wordle!

PowerPoint (Terrific)

During the last week we were to create a powerpoint lesson. There wasn't much that we were not allowed to do. We were able to pick any age group, grade, and subject we wanted to teach. The only restriction was that we were not allowed to use the powerpoint for direct direction because the purpose of the project was to open our minds to different ways of enhancing our classroom using powerpoint. This project caused myself to question teaching techniques that I have seen growing up in elementary school. Since I'm an early childhood education and special education major I decided to make a lesson for kindergarteners. Since children that age haven't used technology much yet I knew I had to be creative. My lesson was on representing numbers with objects. I decided that before I introduced the powerpoint I would explain to the children how numbers can represent objects by using actually objects and letting them explore on their own before we would practice. My powerpoint has example problems where they must count different objects properly. Each question I would call a student up to the computer to click their answer to see as a class if they got the question right. After all the questions are done I would give the children more time to explore with the objects and practice. During class I was able to see other students progress and I was extremely impressed how much thought and time students put into their powerpoints. Everyone had such great ideas that I wrote some down so I can use them eventually in my future teaching. Overall I think this project was perfect for our class. I think it made us all think and change some of our views on technology. 

Below I have added a Links to my powerpoint so you can see my lesson I presented in class and my Narrative which explains all about the lesson, not just the powerpoint.  

Kindergarten Number Lesson
Narrative

Two More for the Roll

I decided to follow two more blogs that were related to my different interests. Taekwondo and Cooking. I don't think you have ever seen that combination together! 

First I stumbled upon this amazing blog about cooking called

 33 Shades of Green. It displays many delicious looking recipes with creative photography. It also has recipes from other blogs. I love that their all interconnected cooking blogs! I love to bake more then I love to cook so the deserts are my favorite part. Here is a picture of Snicker Brownies! They look so good I would eat them all!

The second blog I found was about Taekwondo. Taekwondo has been a passion of mine since I was nine years old and I couldn't imagine my life without it. This blog, called TDA Training, basically posts everything about Taekwondo and Martial Arts in general. It gives you history, training tips and videos, and recommended readings if this blog didn't help with what you were looking for. I found an article on here with a video about a girl who has been studying Martial Arts for years and was assaulted while on a run in her neighborhood and used her experience to protect herself. Heres a link to the video!

Messed with the Wrong Girl

My Beliefs about Technology and Learning

I believe that technology in the classroom is a great thing to have. Students are able to use technology to explore different internet sources and applications to help understand what they are learning better. The only two issues I have with technology is that its always changing which can become hard for a teacher to keep up with. How can students learn from technology when the teacher barley knows how to use it? The second issue is that the role of technology in the classroom is what makes the technology worth the effort. Certain teachers may not be capable or even want to use the technology for the right reasons.  

Important to Me

The most important educational issue to me as a learner and a future teacher would be making sure all my future students learn everything they need to prepare for the the state tests and that my future school earns AYP. Subgroups tend to fall behind and cause schools to go under AYP but I want to learn how to teach these children to reach the highest success on these tests.