Most of the students were quite awkward in their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a seminar on "Designing for Effective Change" for the Honors Program, but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class there was a need for them to unlearn much of their approach which had been finely tuned and was quite successful in their other classes. They needed to take more responsibility for their choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on which to write, I also gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so long as they could create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of the early writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other readers if they didn’t first please themselves. It was a message they were not used to hearing.
Laura Diaz on 27 Oct 13"Not too long ago, many teachers would have been horrified at the thought of their students watching them on YouTube. But in the world of "flipped" classrooms, students watching online videos of their teachers is a key part of their instruction. Tyler Johnstone, an algebra teacher in Folsom, CA, is one of the growing number of educators who have integrated the flipped model into their classrooms."
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