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Using Effective Technology (BJ9)

The flipped classroom is exactly what it sounds like: a classroom that is completely backwards. In a flipped classroom, the learning is at home. Students get instructional resources where they learn new information. For example, the resources might be an interactive lesson plan, a video from the teacher, or a written lecture. The students do the learning at home, and then they come to school for reinforcement with worksheets, games, and other methods that help to reinforce information and smooth out any misconceptions of the information. Therefore, where a traditional classroom has students learning in school and practicing their skills at home, the students now are flipping that method with learning at home and practicing at school. 

Open educational resources are resources that teachers can use, usually found on the internet. With OERs, teachers can take information from other lesson plans, copy it, modify it, combine it with other lesson plans, etc. and allow teachers to use other people's resources. With an OER, the creative commons work is definitely at play. One such resource is BCcampus OpenEd Resources. This resource is an OER, allowing teachers to use textbooks of many varieties. With this resource, teachers, especially college professors, don't have to buy the textbook or make their students buy it; instead, they can go to this website and find textbooks that are available to the public. Also, this website is reviewed by scholars, so it is a reliable source. 

In the first assignment, I really liked learning about how to make a cohesive PowerPoint as a teaching tool. It was fun being able to actually record myself giving a lecture to a PowerPoint that I had created. With this assignment, I gained new skills with presentations, especially in keeping the design consistent and readable and learning how to talk with a presentation so that my ideas are explicitly understood. The only thing with this assignment that I didn't like, however, was the maximum cap on slide lengths. I wish that I had more time to do the review longer. With the second assignment, I never knew how people created stories, so the entire assignment introduced new skills to me. Particularly, I learned how to be patient with links in terms of finding where they go, and I learned how to make a story that is seamless with transitions and not in linear order. Overall, with this assignment, I really liked being able to dabble in creating a nonlinear PowerPoint because I think it will be a useful tool in my career. Also, there wasn't anything that I disliked about the assignment; it all was, in my opinion, fair and easily done. 



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