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.