Position on OER

     OER or open educational resources typically online or digital that are offered at most of the time free or at low cost. One of the pioneers of OER is curse-aware from MIT. I think that OER posses a great opportunity to increase the knowledge of every day people. Some people has no chance to attend college, due to either their financial situation or personal decision  Despite the reason why people did not attend higher education schools, knowledge should be available to all, not just to those who can afford it. 

     In my opinion MIT decision to open their content resources to everyone is what every college should do.MIT open course-ware  allows the public to have full access to their courses materials. Many colleges around the nation are doing the same thing. Now colleges that have open their courses to everyone will have the chance to go in their content in a deeper lever because students will be able to read and learn from the material before they even get into the classroom. Students now will be responsible to read the material in advance and prepare to be challenged in a dipper level level of knowledge by the professors.

     There are other sources to obtain OER on line such as EDUDEMIC. It provides us with valuable resources about Japan's crisis. It could be a really good topic to discus in your class and take advantage of the free resources available on line.

     

Teaching Channel

Teaching Channel is a web site that holds thousands of education video. It is divided in subjects, therefore  you can pick what do you want you to watch. This website in my opinion is similar to you tube educational videos.

Teaching channel follows commun  core standards of education.  It is a great tool future educator and perhaps parents who just want to know more about what their children may be learning. Teaching Channel can be found following this link.

Flipped learning

What is Flip –Learning?

Flip-Learning (as disused in the video)is a form of teaching in which the teacher acts more as support to enhance the students understanding of the lesson that is being taught. In this teaching modality the teacher also has more time to interact more with his students and also dedicate more time to those students who are having problems understanding the lecture. There are many sources online where we can obtain Flip-Learning lessons and provide more information such as,ed.ted.com, flipped-learning.com, flippedlearning.org and thedailyriff.com. This are very good sources that will help you to create your own conclusions just like they did with me                        

 An example of Flip-Learning class would be a classroom where the teacher utilizes Khan Academy (as shown in video) to teach math to the students, but instead of imparting the lecture lets the computer to do it and he focuses on the students who have trouble with the lesson. When the teacher can focus his attention on students who are at lower levels of understanding, he can help those students to reach the same level as their peers due to the extra one on one attention that they can receive. There will always be questions about any given lecture, however, with Flip-Learning students can rewind the video or call the teacher in order to understand the lesson. Now when utilizing Flip-Learning students will have more resources to succeed and reach their full potential.

However, there are some down sides of Flip-Learning. For instance Flip-Learning does not offer a great deal of benefit for students who learn best with hands on activities (primary education level). Therefore, those students will be always requiring the teacher’s assistance in order to understand the lecture. In this case if only few students hold the entire teacher’s attention the rest of the group may not get the quality of education that they should be receiving.

I strongly believe that teachers should be facilitators of knowledge and that teachers should help students to incorporate what they are learning into their lives so that way that knowledge will never go away. Teacher’s should not teach students just to pass a test, teachers should guide students to a path of adequate learning by using all the resources available around them and Flip-Learning for what I can see is a very attractive option that should be used in more schools.

More Information about Flip-Learning can be found at en.wikipedia.org, www.learningconversations.co.uk and 21 century learning. After learning the origins and the benefits of implementing Flip-leaning in the classroom now you can from your own opinions about Flip-Learning. 

Experiencing Group

         I learn a lot working on this project because we were asked to use other method different than Power point  to create our presentation. That specific part was the biggest challenge to overcome, because we not only had to come up with a creative presentation but also we did have restrictions in what to use to do so. in the begging I really thought that Mr. Smith just woke up in that morning in a bad mood and wanted to make us suffer, but later I understood the purpose of the project. 

         Now thanks to that project I know how to use Prezi, which is a very cool FREE program that allows you to create presentations just like Power point but much cooler and did I mention that is FREE. Also due to our research we all learn that we can use other communication tools such as Blogger and Facebook to improve the communication within Teachers, Students and Parents. Over all I think that we should take advantage of all the technology available to us in order to become the best teacher we can be.

PowerPoint Terrific!!!!!!!!!!!!

This project was really confusing for me at first. Also it was kind of a big challenge, because before this project I never used power point before, so I had no experience with the program at all. Honestly when the professor was explaining what we supposed to do, for few minutes was almost as if he was speaking Chinese  because I did not get a single word of what he was saying. However, after few minutes into the class when he stared showing us how to use power point I made sense of what he said earlier.
    In essence the project was to create a self taught interactive activity in which the children will use the technology as the main method of learning and not the teacher. The activity had to used links and one embed video. The video was one of the most difficult parts over all, at least for me. Also we had to followed the current PA standards of education, therefore it was a practice for what the future teachers will have to do in regards of using technology

Education Department Grants Money to Colleges to Help Strengthen Postsecondary Institutions

     The federal goverment finally is trying to help colleges around the nation. After budget cuts left and right plenty of colleges are suffering, this help comes just in time to help aliviate somehow their current finantial situation.    Education Department Awards $5.4 Million in Grants to 14 Institutions to Help Strengthen Postsecondary Institutions
A complete list of grantees follows, with first year funding:

Somerset Community College	KY	$383,561
Valencia College-West Campus	FL	$375,361
Central Carolina Community College	NC	$408,747
San Francisco State University	CA	$394,360
Renton Technical College	WA	$521,856
Bay Path College	MA	$399,957
Lehigh Carbon Community College	PA	$401,074
Orange County Community College	NY	$392,669
Fairmont State University	WV	$399,117
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro	NC	$398,586
Williston State College	ND	$399,900
Community College of Allegheny County	PA	$311,314
Monroe Community College	NY	$400,000
Saint Joseph’s College	IN	$299,160
TOTAL		$5,485,662

Two more for blog role

This comment article that I found in the internet is a very clear example of how education now is more politics that education itself. Polictics role on education is harming the process education for children. For instance in Chicago ,IL the teacher's union have desided to go in strike and now republicans and democrats are taking sides.

                                                                                    

                                                                                    "But how will it play in the presidential campaign?

Already, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, put out a statement saying he's "disappointed" by the union's decision to strike, and that Obama has picked his dog in this political fight (the unions)".  However are the teachers right? or not. I think they

are because, a teacher should not be evaluated based only on the test scores of the children of his class. In some classrooms there are a diversity of learners including children with special needs who will not perform as good as their average peers, therefore how we expect to evaluate a teacher vased only on the results of a standarized test? Goverment have to come up with a more realistic way to evaluate the teacher's performance.