Blog #9: Flipped Classrooms, OERs, & PowerPoint

Flipped Classrooms

I am not the biggest fan of the flipped classroom concept, and while I feel many others share my opinion, I really admire teachers who make it work in their classrooms! Check out my Flipgrid video to see why I don’t like flipped classrooms.

Open Educational Resources (OERs)

Open Educational Resources are really cool, and as a hopeful teacher and current student, I appreciate them greatly! OERs are learning, teaching, and research materials that have been made available for educators and students to use freely! They are free, adaptable, and able to be distributed without limit. That’s right— one day, college students could have OER textbooks! 

One website I found that discusses Open Educational Resources is this one, a page by the United Nations. It gives a lot of important information about how to develop an OER, why they’re important, and discuss important declarations about OERs! I would strongly encourage you to check it out!

PowerPoint

For the past two assignments, I have been working with PowerPoint. I have found that I have learned a lot from each assignment, so I wanted to split up my discussion into two parts— Assignment 4 and Assignment 5.

Assignment 4:

Assignment 4 was relatively simple for me. I created an online lesson about a book we would be covering in my fictional American Literature class: The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I made small errors with Smart Art and speaker’s notes that I can improve upon in the future. For this project, I feel like I didn’t learn anything new about PowerPoint, but it did get me thinking about how I would develop an online lesson for my students. How can I assess what they are learning? How can I cover everything I need to in an interactive and engaging way? I obviously still have to work on these things, but Assignment 4 was a good place for me to start.

Assignment 5:

Assignment 5 was a little more challenging, but this time, it was more about PowerPoint skills than trying to figure out what content I would cover. For this assignment, I made a grammar baseball game! Students could pick a variety of different skill levels to test their knowledge in preparation for a final. Before Assignment 5, I didn’t know how to make a non-linear PowerPoint, and honestly… it was so tedious. I feel like if I was to make a non-linear PowerPoint for my students, it would have to be something much simpler than what I made for this project. For anything more serious, I would need a template. I don’t hold anything against the project itself, I just feel that as a busy teacher (and a busy student, too!) I won’t have enough time to make a quality, non-linear PowerPoint and would end up relying on a template, as much as I enjoy creating my own content. And who knows! Maybe I will make a very complex non-linear, more intense, grammar baseball game, but for now… I think I’ll stick with a template.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see y’all next Thursday!

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