The concept of a "flipped classroom" is very interesting. It is bred out of the blended delivery system for learning, which is a blend of face-to-face learning between teacher and student and online learning between student and technology. A flipped concept takes the elements of the blended delivery system and uses them to set up a classroom environment that is basically the opposite of what would be a "normal" classroom. That being said, a student in a flipped classroom would watch prerecorded lectures at home to familiarize themselves with the lesson content and then go to school the next day and work on practice assignments with the teacher there to guide them through the actual work. The textbook describes this as "The students’ role during their classroom time changes from passive receivers of content to active learners engaged in exploration and discovery..." I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this idea. I do think it sounds good on paper, but I wonder how it would play out in real life. The biggest variable I think would be whether or not the students actually do the homework portion, but I suppose that's something that teachers already deal with in traditional classrooms anyway. I also think that this method would only be affective for later middle school and high school students. I can't see it working very well with elementary students, which the age group I plan on teaching.
Here's an example of a video lesson for a science class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I95NwUlaHck
Web-Based Professional Development
I started out by google searching "professional development for teachers online" which brought me a lot of results that seemed really good...except for the fact that they were at least $50 and/or required preregistration for a scheduled webinar. Though I couldn't try out the actual professional development modules right now (because of the $$), I found that PBS TeacherLine had a large library of self-paced courses that seem very useful! This resource is something I will definitely keep on the back burner for when I am an actual teacher and can justify spending $50 for a 3-hour online course. The PBS TeacherLine catalog can be accessed here: http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/catalog/
Interactive PowerPoint
I worked on this assignment with Savanah. We decided to use a template for the game Family Feud because it was a game that neither of us had seen translated into a PowerPoint before. My only exposure to interactive PowerPoint games has been Jeopardy. The template we found was so well designed. I was very impressed! I think Family Feud would be really fun to play in the classroom, but maybe I'm just biased because that game show is a personal guilty pleasure. I don't think that it's something you could use in any lesson, though, because it was kind of hard to think of a lot of questions with multi-part answers. So I think it'd just be up to the teacher to wait for the right lesson to come along to use this particular game format.
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