Blog Journal 9

     From previously talking about "The Flipped Classroom" in class, I come to understand it as a reverse instructional method. So in other words, instead of the teacher traditionally teaching content in the classroom and then giving students work to complete and practice the concepts learned in class, it is the other way around. This means that teachers will provide instructional material for the students at home rather than in the classroom, via online, an article, a reading, etc. anything that the student can learn themselves at home. Then the work that would have traditionally been homework, is done in class based on the concepts that the students learned at home. In my opinion, this instructional method has both a good and bad side to it. The good is that it is spicing up the classroom and changing it in a cooler way to avoid students from getting bored of the traditional method. The bad is that it may not work out as intended. For example, teachers can flip their classroom and have lessons taught at home online, but this may not work because not every student may have access to technology, and some students do not like to do homework in the first place so they might not even watch whatever videos the teacher put out for them to learn from. Although it seems like a cool and new instructional method, the cons outweigh the pros, and it may not always go as intended.

     Open Educational Resources (OER), are exactly what it sounds like... resources that are "open" for anyone to use. These open resources gives others permission to modify and share with others for whatever their purpose may be. Online examples are created to give people easier access to learning material, free of charge, rather than having to purchase expensive standard textbooks. There are also five rights associated with OER's: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. An example of an OER is the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL). This site provides open resources for learning foreign languages. COERLL aims to "promote a culture of collaboration that lies at the heart of the Open Education movement." The purpose of them creating open resources for learning foreign languages is to allow others to modify them based on a variety of settings. I personally think this is a cool resource because it provides many different learning materials, tools, and teaching methods for a lot of different languages.

     The main skill I obtained from the PowerPoint assignment was disabling linear navigation to create an interactive PowerPoint. I never knew this was possible and it is very cool to me now that I know how to do so. Unfortunately, I did not complete the first PowerPoint assignment, but I have made a comeback with this recent one☺. What I liked the most about creating the interactive PowerPoint was how creative I could be when doing so. Also, it allowed me to showcase my new skills that I learned and was most excited about. What I did not like was how tedious it was creating it, although, by the end of everything I was happy with the way it turned out. This assignment took a lot of patience to make sure everything was done right and that I got all of the requirements done. I am very proud of this assignment and my hard work on it has paid off. With this assignment, I just took my time and made sure I did what I needed to, so there is not anything I would change about it if there was to be a next time. Although, I would probably use better graphics. Below is a sneak peek at my version of an interactive Jeaopardy game.