Flipping Classroom

            In the first video "Let's use video to reinvent education", Salman Khan has introduced specifically about the advantages of free teaching videos. To begin with, he narrated about his experience with his cousins. After posting some videos on Youtube to tutor his cousins, he received some comments that he did better on video than in real life. Additionally, they don't feel that they are wasting the time of Salman Khan because they can watch the videos again and again even when they need to review the information that they was taught few years ago. That is the first advantage of teaching video, it allows the learners to study with their own pace at their own time. It is impossible in traditional classrooms, just like the author of the article "The TransformationPotential of Flipped Classrooms" said, either the teacher wants or not, she must keep the pace of the lecture for the whole class although it is too slow for some students and too fast for the others. Everyone has different schedule and ability to obtain information, so the one-for-all syllabus is definitely not appropriate with the whole students in the class. Secondly, Khan has also gotten large amount of comments on Youtube when he declared his videos. They said that the videos bring the positive attitude for the learners. For instance, someone said "First time I smile doing derivative". From my own experience, math is boring, every time, and only thing I can do when doing math is just focusing on the problem, thinking how to solve it. However, Khan's video can bring the inspiration to the learners, and it has great impact on studying process. The most impressive example is the one about the boy that has autism. He had problem with math, could not achieve the expected result although his parent tried everything. Fortunately, the videos from Khan suddenly help that boy to get over that problem. He made it. Honestly, the teaching video method has changed that one's life. From that example, we can conclude the next advantage of this method, it has great potential to change the education. Khan got some letters from teachers and schools, they stated that those teaching videos can be applied into the classroom because they recognized the potential of this method. It not only help the children to learn on their own pace but also help teachers to track the learning process of the students. The number and result from Los Altos provided us the conclusion that the method is working really well. By tracking students' learning process, the teacher is now able to know which knowledge that students need to be improved, which information that they already obtain completely. Then, from those data, the teacher can ask the students who understand the concept clearly to tutor other students. From some aspects, peer-to-peer tutoring is better than teacher-student communication. They can use the easiest and familiar language to each other. However, the learners still need the instruction from the teacher because only teacher understands the concept completely and has deep, academic knowledge. In traditional classroom, the teacher only use 5% of their time sitting next to the students and work with them. But teaching videos created flipped classroom, where teacher can spend their whole time on class with their students directly. Come back to the article "The Transformation Potential of Flipped Classrooms", the flipped classroom will create time for students to engage directly to their learning process, they are able to practice problems with guidance from teacher, discuss issues with classmates, and work on specific projects. From my point of view, I would allow my students to learn the concepts from Khan Academy at home. With the diverse and huge database, covering almost all basic subjects, I believe the learners can find any information from Khan Academy. I, the teacher, don't need to worry about the financial problem because the supply from teaching videos is free. I also don't have to "host" the database because of the availability of cloud computing. All of the information is stored on the cloud and the students is allowed to access at anytime. In addition, I don't have to touch the hardware physically. Instead, I can manage everything about the information and details through my personal computer. "You can stop worrying about your hardware, you can work on building your business instead. Using cloud hosting will save your time, and money. And it's there for you to use instantly" (Cloud Computing Explained video). After, the students in my class can take some online quizzes to check their own learning process to see if they obtain enough knowledge or not. Finally, when they attend the flipped classroom at school, they are allowed to discuss the problem they had, how they resolve it, share the ideas and collaborate to work on specific projects. Although teaching videos and cloud computing are useful tools to support education, there are still some weaknesses and disadvantages of those technologies. I believe in next few years, these problems can be solved gradually, it depends not only on the development of technology but also on the way we utilize and apply them.

Twitter

Twitter has a great potential of supporting in education. It is really easy and fast to register for a Twitter account and then start using it. I had not have any idea about hash tag before, but now I know it would be one of the most useful advantages that Twitter brings to us. I personally can find the topic that I want to know in no time. For example, I can find many conversations about my favorite comic on Twitter. Thinking about applying hash tag in education, I think the learners can attend a discussion by searching for the hash tag of the class. Furthermore, students can find, connect and "follow" their classmates and teacher. It would be easier to catch up the discussion in class. There is a problem when I follow too many people on Twitter, so that the topic can be hard to be found on home page. Nevertheless, the "list" feature resolved this problem. I created 2 lists for my Twitter account: "friends" and "entertainer". The list "Friends" helps me to follow my friends, catch up with their new tweets and communicate with them. On the other hand, the list "Entertainer" is used for tracking news from singers or music bands that I follow. It would be useful for students to lend their friends who come from different classes into different lists, so that they have no problem in finding their class and its conversation. It has the same advantage for the teacher to list out his or her classes. The website www.bit.ly resolves the limitation of a message from Twitter. It limits each message's length is 140 characters and will lead to an inconvenience when people want to share a link to other websites. However, www.bit.ly will shorten the length of those links and make it fit with a Twitter message. Now the teacher can share a link of an instructive video to his or her students within a single Twitter message. Twitter can also connects teacher with parents, they can talk to each other and discuss about the learning process of the student. In conclusion, Twitter is really convenient for both students and teacher to improve their studying.

Learn more: https://twitter.com/

Photo Sharing

Photo sharing is one of the most important application from Web 2.0.
In this post, I will introduce some websites which provide this feature:

http://flickr.com/
http://zoto.com/
http://photobucket.com/
http://imgur.com/

Wikipedia and PBWiki

Wikispaces is the personal or public websites where we can find a lot of information. They are extremely useful and convenient. First, the website Wikipedia that we are familiar with is a public Wiki. That website includes a huge amount of information, concepts and details. The students can access Wikipedia to get the information they need, and due to its diversity, I believe the learners can find everything they want. Furthermore, there are a lot of languages available on Wikipedia, so that international students will access easily for searching and reading the details. However, there is a problem that not every language page has sufficient information. For instance, some of them only have the detail about definition, no example or other information is available. Therefore, I think these Wiki pages need to be improved, especially from volunteers who can translate the detail from English to other languages. One of the advantages that both public and personal Wiki pages can bring is allowing students to edit the content of the page. It means that the learners will get involve into the construction. The personal, or private, Wiki that I mention here is the Wiki page that we can create by ourselves. The teacher can make a private Wiki page to create a comfortable classroom for his or her students. In that classroom, the learners can contribute by sharing their ideas or rephrasing old concepts on their own words freely. Moreover, if the teacher allows their students to check the Wiki pages of other classes, I think they can learn the strengths and also point out the weaknesses of the others. In other words, they can help each other and improve their own skills. Next, by checking the syllabus on the private Wiki page frequently, the students can follow the learning process easily and logically. Finally, the personal Wiki page can support really well for the learners to prepare a presentation or exchange their ideas, so that they can achieve the best result by connecting with other students. If I have my own Wiki page, I would require my students to contribute their knowledge and then ask other students to check the information, edit it if necessary and then report to the teacher. The advantage how it improves the learners' skills were stated above. 

Learn more about Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

Learn more about PBWiki: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A204JcGQiY0

Social Bookmarking

From my perspective, Social bookmarking like Delicious has great potential in education, more specific, in teaching and learning process. It can support really well in sharing information, resources and processing. For example, when the history teacher A want to share the sources which are many websites relating to historical events to his students, he can share his bookmark list with the tag history event, revolution or history changing. Conversely, when the students want to find resources of information, he or she can visit the professor's social bookmarking page to look for them with explicit tags. However, the teacher also can improve the list by consulting the bookmark list of his colleagues, maybe there are a lot of useful sources for him to add to his list. Therefore his students will be provided better information. Another example is the information sharing among students. When student X created a list of many pages about Asian cultures, student Y made another list about African cultures. Then, the professor requires students to find the details about the cultures all over the world. Both of student X and Y don't need to spend a lot of time to find the sources. Instead, they can look at each other's list and tag to get necessary information. Additionally, they can also find the information from other professor's list. For instance, the student Y knows student Z in the class of professor B, so he find for the resource that professor B gave student Z to complete the assignment. That is just between students and teacher. The social bookmarking also can improve the relationship between teacher and parents. The parents can follow the teacher's bookmark page to find the source of schedule, syllabus or their children's learning process.

Learn more about Social Bookmarking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

Learn more about Delicious: https://delicious.com/about

Blogger and RSS

To me, Blog is like a "Notes" feature of Facebook, but has a little bit more options. Blog can help us to make a long note just like using Microsoft Word and after finishing it, we can publish that note on the Internet immediately. The greatest feature of Blog to me is I can manage all of my notes in a single page, see how many people have read that post, or how they commented on my notes. We can insert some photos or videos into the Blog also, this would make the blog posts become more visual and attractive. Additionally, RSS technology like Feedly changed my habit surfing the Internet. With the feature subscribing of RSS, I don't have to visit every single website to check the news or update that I need anymore. I only have to check my RSS Reader to see if one of these topics that I'm interested in has updated new information or article. When we combine Blog and RSS technology, I believe this will be a huge advantage in teaching and learning process. For example, the teacher can upload the lecture on his blog, and then, all of the students who subscribed that blog will get the news on their personal RSS reader page. Besides, if any students missed the lectures for a long time, they can visit the teacher's blog and see every post in chronological order.

Learn more about RSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss
Learn more about Feedly: http://blog.feedly.com/tutorial/