Jun 30, 2013

Annotated Bibliography

1 comment
Reflection

Having Jill Morningstar come to our class was a great resource. Having her show us which were the best couple of indexes to search through saved a lot of time because I really wouldn't have known where to start. I also started using Mendeley based on the recommendation that we start using some sort of citation software. Already its been helpful just keeping track of things that I have read. To find articles, I used keywords to find a few articles and then I followed though on some of their references. I had a hard time finding articles on flipped classroom. The keywords for each article were very different. This is the best way I know of to search for articles, and I will be using it in the future.

Herreid, C. F., & Schiller, N. A. (2013). Case Studies and the Flipped Classroom. Journal of College Science Teaching, 42(5), 62–66. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.msu.edu:2047/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eft&AN=86988365&scope=site

The Herreid article describes 13 benefits and 2 drawbacks for using the flipped classroom, both of which he gives solutions for. Two of the benefits which are the most interesting are that class time is used more effectively and creatively, and that achievement, interest, and engagement are increased. He uses the case studies to demonstrate to support where each of the 13 benefits came from. For the future of flipping the classroom, he prescribes finding quality videos and standardizing the format and sharing of the teacher-made videos.

This article gave a few jumping off points for finding interesting studies. The benefits of flipping could have been narrowed down because there was a lot of them. I was attracted to the article because they mentioned Camtasia, but that is all they did: mention it as one of the possible piece of software to edit video. I found it interesting that only two drawbacks were list in the article as there should be a lot more.

I will be using this article as a reference and I will be following through on some of the cited sources to see where they lead.




Parslow, G. R. (2012). Commentary: the Khan academy and the day-night flipped classroom. Biochemistry and molecular biology education : a bimonthly publication of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 40(5), 337–8. doi:10.1002/bmb.20642

This article talked about how students are leading a change in how they learn. They are starting to gather information outside of the classroom, and teachers that are not following the trend are going to be outdated. KhanAcademy has created a new trend in student learning. Small segments of video that are recorded unscripted allow students to learn at their own pace. The criticisms are that the current system are not broken and KhanAcademy instruction is substandard, only focusing on "naked math" and not connected to anything else. The author prescribes a wait-and-see approach before using KhanAcademy.

The purpose of the article was to start a dialog about how flipping the classroom is an innovative new approach to teaching that is being embraced by students. This article was more personal commentary and dialog starters then an academic paper.

Since I have used KhanAcademy for two years in my classroom I'm familiar with some of the good ways to use it and some of the bad. Many people think it is going to "revolutionize" education. What gets lost in that situation is that teachers still have to be a large part of education. Most students won't use KhanAcademy just for fun. During the time I spend in the computer lab, I do more teaching, than I do when I lecture. The author led me to see KhanAcademy more of a tool than as a revolution.




Ani, K. K. (2013). KHAN ACADEMY: The Hype and the Reality. Education Digest, 78(6), 23–25.

The author for this article tries to separate Khan Academy from the media circus that surrounds it. He quotes Sal Khan as saying "I don't know what I'm going to say." He calls the videos on KhanAcademy "low-res" and not "very good." He also points out that Khan does "two minutes of research on Google" before recording lessons. He recognizes that Khan has created a vast library and given away his work for free.

The goal of this article is to point out that there are a lot of problems with KhanAcademy and the hype and attention of the media has far outweighed the benefits. There are also some major questions about if KhanAcademy is pedagogically sound. There are many good ways to approach teaching, and KhanAcademy is just one of them, and teaching should be left to teachers, who know best how integrate the content, pedagogy, and technology into the Total PACKage.

I feel like this author picked the worst things about KhanAcademy to expose and left many other beneficial aspects out. I found it interesting that he pointed about that KhanAcademy only focuses on isolated skills, instead of connecting math to the real world. That is true, but I do think everyone, and even Khan, expects teachers to be teaching in other ways in class, like doing projects, and knows that the drill-and-kill aspect to KhanAcademy is only one part.




Khan, S., & Slavitt, E. (2013). A Bold New Math Class. Educational Leadership, 70(6), 28–31.

Khan details some of the best ways that KhanAcademy can be used. He details how Summit San Jose, a charter in the Bay Area, uses it to let students learn at their own pace. It encourages students to take responsibility for their learning. Besides KhanAcademy's video, it also has an ever-expanding collection of math practice problems. The data collected from this is used to generate graphs about each student's learning, and each student has access to their data. There are also many different ways to use KhanAcademy. Students can watch videos, do practice problems, get step-by-step hints, remediate or race ahead.

The goal of this article is to show that there are many ways to adapt KhanAcademy to the classroom. The important thing is that it is just another learning tool, and not a replacement for teachers or schools. This source was useful because Sal Khan wrote it and it gave his vision for how KhanAcademy is being used and the work they are doing with schools and teachers.

This article shows that KhanAcademy knows that it is not the silver bullet for education. They see some interesting ideas and are building on them. I did not realize that the goals feature came from classroom experience. I think it is great that they are working so closely with schools and are excited about putting the experiences from those schools to work on their site as fast as they can.

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