CED 535 - Week 6: How I plan to flip my Classroom.

This week we needed to answer the following question: What item do you believe you can incorporate from this class into your professional or personal life and how will you ensure that you achieve the goal of incorporating it? If you can discuss it in terms of being a SMART goal for incorporating.

• S Specific - What exactly will you do?
• M Measurable - How will you be able to prove it was done?
• A Attainable - Will you have the resources and time, what might you have to do to make it occur?
• R Realistic - Make sure it is doable, you certainly can add something to a lesson plan or work item, you cannot get to the moon.
• T Timely - Assign a timeline - when will this be done by?

Goal: The concept that I chose to incorporate into my classroom is, screencasting/podcasting. This is something that I envision both myself and my students participating in.

I hope to do more screencasting of my classroom content. This year I specifically want to focus on skills that are not easily translated from the notes (determining significant figures, electron configurations, using Lewis dot structures for ionic/covalent bonding, nomenclature, graph analysis, and math problems). I plan on making the instructional videos accessible on our moodle site so that students can view them at later time if they need assistance.

I also plan on having the students create videos to demonstrate the labs that we are doing in class. The students can then upload the videos to our moodle site and the class can comment about what they learned. This is also a great way to demonstrate the labs for students that wree absent.

My long term goal is to make all of my classroom content available through online resources and screencasting. The students would be able to access these resources and instructional video lessons online so that they can learn the content outside of the classroom. This would allow me to dedicate in class time towards labs, projects, collaborative learning, and individual assistance. Essentially I hope to flip my classroom.

Measuring my Progress: Right now I am focusing on the first part of my goal. This year I hope to create at least one video lesson for each of my chemistry units. I also hope to have the students create at least one lab video for each of the units. This means that the students and I would need to create 9 video each (18 total videos). I believe that this is a realistic goal for this year and I hope to begin working on this during second semester.

As for my long term goal, I hope to continue to work on this process each year. I hope to continue to add more videos each time I go through a course. I hope to have my classroom completely flipped by the beginning of the 2014 school year.

This class has provided me with a lot of useful resources and the motivation that I needed to start making changes within my classroom. I now have a clear goal and timeline for the changes that I want to make. I believe that this process will help make my students become better thinkers and learners. It allows them to move through the course at their own pace and requires them to be aware of their academic needs and behaviors. This is a supportive system that helps individualize learning for each student.

Wish me luck!

Week 5 of CED 535

This week we needed to explore a new Web 2.0 application that we havent discussed in class, we needed to continue to work on our google site, and we started collecting our work for our portfolio.

We were given a few different resources to find new Web 2.0 tools (Go2Web20.net, All Things Web 2.0, Listio, Tech-lou-ology). This list of resources has a great value. I have actually bookmarked all of these website using Diigo so that I can reference them later and find new resources to incorporate into my own classroom. The Go2Web20.net has a great filter tool that lets you find the specific resources you need in an easy fashion. The All Things Web is nice because it has lists of the best voted and most popular Web 2.0 tools. Listio allows you to filter Web 2.0 tools by using keywords. They also post new Web 2.0 apps and reviews. The Tech-lou-ology website is actually our professor's, Louis Loeffler, blog. There are a variety of posts relating to Web 2.0 tools and reviews.

After a quick search, one of the resources I found to be interesting is bubblecomment. This is a cool way to insert video commentary onto webpages. This method is far more personal and really stands out. I hope to use this with my own website for the South Milwaukee Girls Basketball team.

We also needed to collect some of our best work from the graduate program and place it in a folder. This is the first step towards creating our portfolio. While this step seems like additional work now, I am glad that they are having us contribute to our portfolio so far in advance. This will hopefully make the process easier down the road.

Week 4 of CED 535

This week we continued to explore google sites, wikis, and twitter. I have continued to work on my google site for the girls basketball team and I am now following 41 people on twitter. Twitter continues to be a great source for new resources and interesting articles. We also discussed screencasting and facebook.

Screencasting is something that I have done before. One of my goals is to eventually create a flipped classroom. This means that the majority of the instruction occurs outside of the classroom and in class time is devoted for group work, activities, and labs. Some of the screencasting services that we checked out are: Screenr, ScreenJelly, Vocaroo, GabCast, Eyejot, Yodio, JingProject, ScreenCastle, ScreenToaster. I have used eyejot, and jing before. I currently use quicktime's screencasting feature. After recording a screencast with quicktime, I typically upload it to schooltube. I am excited to check out the other services as well.

Facebook is a familiar and popular social networking tool. I like the idea of creating a page for MEIT students and graduates so that we can continue to stay in touch and collaborate about educational technology.