Tenth Post

As instructional designers we are constantly being bombarded with new technologies and new trends. It's difficult to distinguish which are fads, and which are worthy of our time and resources.There also seems to be be the perception that you can teach any content using any technology which is hardly the case. A blended instructional delivery method that I might use when teaching is flipping the classroom. Flipping the classroom is where the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects,, or discussions. The pros of a flipped classroom is that students have more control over their own learning, it promotes student-centered learning and collaboration, lessons are content and more accessible, easier for parents to see what's going on and it can be more efficient. The disadvantages is that it can create a digital divide, there is significant work on the front end, not really a test-prep form of learning and time in front screens instead of people and places is increased.

Microsoft Excel offers a lot of benefits with its functions, formulas, graphs or charts and tables. Teachers can extract several benefits from Excel worksheets in the classroom. Since I want to be a Reading or Language Arts teacher for middle school students, I can make use of the worksheet columns. The spreadsheets can be used for creating sample sentences and linking with other sheets pertaining to the lesson plans.

I didn't really learn that much from the PowerPoint assignments because PowerPoint has been a very big part of my technology life. However, I was very fascinated with adding buttons and linking them all to the slides was the only thing I learned which was really cool because I always wondered how did my teachers from middle school and high school used to do that when we played Jeopardy in class.

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