Blog Post 9

I think the "flipped classroom" is a great innovation for education.  It's the idea that classroom time would be better used by explaining content deeply and working through issues that the students have with the material instead of merely teaching.  To achieve this, students get homework, which consists of watching a short video of what in a normal classroom would be a condensed version of the normal classroom lecture.  Then the class time is spent working through any issues or questions that the students have with the material.  I feel that this approach is preferable to the normal structure because it allows the students to get responses from the teacher for questions instead of sitting through the lecture, then struggling with homework when they do not have any resources available to help them understand the material.  It probably wouldn't be ideal for every subject, but I do believe that in the majority of cases, it would benefit the students more than traditional methods.

"OER" or Open Educational Resources, are simply teaching materials and classes that are made available for study or as educational resources, freely online.  This is usually done through a creative commons license.  It can be anything a teacher or student might need in the teaching or learning, of a subject, including videos, tests, papers, software, and any other tool for learning or teaching.  This paper: http://www.ictliteracy.info/rf.pdf/OERMovement.pdf  is an excellent resource, as is has a brief history of the OEM movement, a list of some of the major contributors and what they offer, and also sections on the challenges there are in both producing and keeping access to the materials, and a section on the future and where the next logical step will take us.  Their thinking is that the next step is going to be OER with more interactivity between the producers and consumers and I think that is probably correct.  I would love to see these ideas carried through and hope that the backing for projects like those they describe continues to be available.

The PowerPoint projects were interesting, I learned a bit about the non-linear format and how it's used, which should come in handy in the future.  I apparently still am not so good with the footers and numbering and naming, but I don't think that having my name on all of the slides is all that important as a teaching device.  So long as the information is there, that's the important part.  The process is time-consuming, much more so than simply writing lecture notes, but it is more engaging for the viewer, so that is a definite plus.  I think the best thing about these is that they enforce conciseness.  You simply don't have the space to ramble on at length about a subject, and that is something I definitely struggle with.