Animoto

                             

     Animoto is the kind of video making tool I have been looking for. I can just choose the style, photos and music, and then the video is right there. With this tool, I made the video--Beautiful cities in the world. It can be used in classroom to teach the beautiful cities. Students can learn it faster with images and video. Specifically, with this video teaching, my future students will be able to match the pictures with the city names. Besides, they will be able to recognize the country of the city with the help of the video.

    To assess their learning, I will present the pictures only on the screen. Students are required to write down the city names corresponding to the pictures. I can check whether they know the cities when they see the pictures and whether they memorize the city names or not. Besides, I will ask the student question like “Where is New York City?” If they answer correctly “It is in United States”, that means they know the country of the city. My class can either be an ESL lesson teaching city names or Geography lesson.

Rethink Flipped Classroom

    

    With the increasing use of technology tool in present classroom, the pedagogical notion of flipped classroom is getting more and more attention. The model is new to me before this class. Soon I realized that actually I have the flipped classroom experience before. My teacher recorded a small video to introduce a new concept before the class and we discussed it in the real classroom. Since it is becoming popular now, it’s time to rethink the advantage and disadvantages of flipped classroom before it is prevalent in modern teaching. According to 7 Things You Should Know About Flipped Classrooms, the term is widely used to describe almost any class structure that provides prerecorded lectures followed by in-class exercises. Knowing what it is, let’s think about its how good it is and what problem it might bring.

    First, just as mentioned in the article 7 Things You Should Know About Flipped Classrooms, “they can watch, rewind, and fast-forward as needed”, the most obvious advantage is that student can view the video again and again, which provides opportunities for them to fully understand what it is in the video. Traditional classroom teachers cannot repeat it again and again just for several students’ low learning pace. Besides, flipped classroom leaves more space for student interaction and cooperation. Student-controlled, rather than teacher-oriented classroom is the trend for classroom development. I still cannot stop worrying whether flipped classroom is as effective as it looks like. Does the video make them better students than those don’t watch the video? Will it be a huge load for teachers to prepare the video teaching? Can students get immediate feedback or assessment in flipped classroom? Can student get access to the Internet or online tools? Those are all the potential weakness need to be considered in flipped classroom.