Tomorrow night for my ECMP 455 class, I’m signed up to “present” for ten minutes about some form of technology that intrigues me and that I see practical classroom applications for. Deciding what to do was hard, not because I had no ideas, but because I had way too many. Initially, I was going to present about Wolfram-Alpha, but one of the guest speakers in our class sort of covered it. Then I thought I could present about UJam, but it just wasn’t going to be awesome enough. Finally, I settled on talking about flipped classrooms, especially since they’ve been my education crush lately (see definition below).
Definition of an Education Crush
Here’s where the real problem started. I wanted to talk about flipped classrooms in a flipped sort of way. I decided that I would do a short talk about flipped classrooms, as per a standard presentation. I am then going to give my classmates a link to follow to watch a video (sort of a makeshift flipped presentation, but not really). After they watched the video, we could have a quick discussion about it. Here’s where it gets ambitious. My friend, and fellow student-teacher, Kyle, introduced me to a free website called Sophia. It is great for making Learning Packets (collections of media and resources for students with teacher-created content capabilities) for students, and I really like it for setting up a successful flipped classroom.
I’m not exactly sure how this whole thing is going to over — a lesson within a lesson seems a bit chaotic. Maybe this is the part of me that really couldn’t decide what to do, or maybe this is the side of me who is trying to escape the standard “presentation.” I’m not sure. I just wanted to talk about some things that I’m passionate about.
Here is the link the the Jing I created for my flipped portion of my presentation (i.e. the part about Sophia). Feedback is much appreciated.
If I’ve got my wits about me, I’ll record my presentation and post it in another blog post as well. I guess we’ll just see how it goes. I hope I stick to the ten-minute time allotment!
A Slice of Sara 
That’s an ambitious presentation – would be even more authentic if you had everyone watch the presentation at home the night before, then facilitate a discussion the next day. There really is a huge wealth of tech tools – and the pedagogy required to use them seamlessly and effectively is a necessary skill these days. Hope you post some reflections on how things went! All the best 🙂
I agree with having everyone watch it in advance — I just wasn’t that organized this week. If I had the chance, I would likely try to have it ready to go earlier so that it could be more authentic. That definitely will work its way into my reflections (I can tell already).
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