ILP #2 Design - Prezi

I chose Prezi as my ILP due to its popularity with students today. I've already seen teachers beginning to use it in their own presentations to classes. While I have collaborated on Prezis, I'd never made one on my own and wanted to get a feel for it, as I imagine it will continue to become more popular.

The interface was easy to understand, but the tools used to move things around weren't my favorite. Everything snapped to grid which made it hard to customize my presentation the way I wanted to. Additionally the limited frame shapes also felt a bit stifling. The interface provided easy-to-understand instructions when problems arose. That said, I would need to spend more time with the program before I made it my primary presentation method. 

I made my presentation as if I were giving a presentation to college-aged students learning about WWII, as an introduction to the topic of female espionage.

http://prezi.com/8l75hjn5g_44/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy 

Blog #10

In the future, I think I would use data collection tools to gauge how familiar students are with a subject before I begin. I once heard a history professor say that they spend most of their general ed courses reteaching what students learn in high school, because the students don't usually fully comprehend the progression of results of certain events in history. Because of this, they try not to expect their students to know very much, but then this means they potentially waste time on subject matter that students might already know. So, for example, I could ask them to write a brief in-class writing assignment on the year they think is most important to the class curriculum, in which they explain why that year had the most impact on the subject matter.

When looking at class blogs, I was drawn to the creative designing assignments we had. I was really impressed with what other students came up with, and what they saw as important in their webdesign projects. I also enjoyed going through the interactive PowerPoint presentations and seeing the ways they incorporated different PowerPoint functions.

In the future I would like to learn more about e-research methods. I know many archives put up electronic versions of their materials online and I think I would like to be part of that process. Additionally, I'd like to see if there are any resources like blogspot or Diigo specifically for researchers, so that others in the field may keep up with the progress of their research. I think this would be encouraging as a fellow researcher, and could potentially be useful in a classroom where we learn about researching methodologies.

Blog post 9

In a regular classroom, teachers give lessons and lecture, and then assign homework for students to do at home, where they can apply the things they learned. The flipped classroom refers to the teaching model in which the students have learned the lesson before they come to class, and they then do all of the activities in class. This ensures that students have the help they need when they are attempting to apply the knowledge, because the teacher is right there to better explain or help with understanding concepts. The Khan academy offers videos categorized both by subject and grade, covering k-12 and everything from basic fractions to WWI. 

"Open" refers to resources available to both teachers and students to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. These resources are open in that to copyright keep people from using them to educate themselves and those around them. While the podcast focuses on teachers' ability to find these sources and use them in class, it is important to know that those contributing the resources also benefit. This system allows for free revising from peers, and also allows them to expand their understanding of their own topics, as teachers might use them in new and interesting ways that the creator might not have thought of. 

I've been using PowerPoint from a fairly young age, I used to do them for fun just because I was excited to get to use the computer, so while I had fun with the assignment, I'm not sure I learned anything completely new. With the other PowerPoint project I learned how to do nonlinear navigation which was new to me, but this one felt more basic to me.