Sunday, October 02, 2011

Serendipitous Discoveries


I am creating a presentation dealing with online tools and utiities for my January webinar for the edWeb.community, PD in Action, and I am learning some new features of the tools that I have used for a long time! It is always a good thing to go back and re-visit the features of the tools because, over time, they all become better and better!

For example, I am typing this blog entry in ZohoWriter and I am going to post it directly to my blog from within ZohoWriter. It will be interesting to see how that works out.​ (Well, I could not do a direct post, but I was able to save it out of ZohoWriter as HTML and past the HTML into Blogger. I assume I could not do it since I have a custom Blogger URL.)

In addition, when doing research for the presentation dealing with strategies for the role of teacher as facilitator to support student learning, I bumped up against the "flipped classroom" model. I had been hearing about it for a couple of years, but never really had investigated how it works and the impact it has on student learning. (Where have I been?) What a great model! 
I have to give it more thought, but I do not know if every teacher can totally "flip" their classroom. A blended model of some "flipped" days and some "non-flipped" might be a great topic for a PLC and for teacher or curriculum team goal-setting for a school year. Here is a overview of the model from the teachers who developed it, Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann.



Wonder what other discoveries I will find today?

BTW,  If you are interested in the upcoming webinar, just sign up for the "PD in Action" community and you will find the information about the next four months of presentations.