Sarah TolsonEDET 650Internship in Educational TechnologyFall 2015

Reflection from October 26th-November 9th

Goal Progress

I am excited to be flipping my classroom throughout my internship. I have made

progress in prioritizing math standards and creating a standard-based math unit. I have

started planning my website and started using the ADDIE process to think about how I

want to create videos and resources to accompany content that students will learn at

home as their “homework.” I have met with my mentor, our media specialist, Carrie

Balavender, to discuss the direction I’m headed, as well as my progress and plan.

I have explored Screencast-O-Matic and believe it will be a great tool to use to

create screencast videos. I’m also looking into some virtual manipulatives to use on my

screen as I work through sample problems. Our math curriculum, Pearson Envision,

offers these tools. Unless I find something else I absolutely love, I will use the Pearson

tools, since my students can access these in their accounts too. I was going to create a

special wiki for my students (and their parents) to access from home, but, instead, just

decided to create a dedicated area for my “Flipping it Out” in my current wiki that my

students use on a daily basis (and access for fun on nights and weekends!):

www.mrstolson.wikispaces.com. After thinking about it, I think this will make the

transition easier on my students since they are familiar with my website. I created the

“Flipped Math” page, which just currently says it’s under construction. I contemplated

how I want to set up my website, and I decided to create pages for each standard and

use the “Flipped Math” page as an index page.

Learning Reflection

Flipping my classroom for my internship has really caused me to reflect (quite

more than usual) on my teaching. For example, if you look on my wiki, I organized math

rotations/games/activities by week last year. Honestly, I started strong, became

overwhelmed, and my resources began to dwindle. I planned to add to them this year,

as the year progresses. However, now that I’ve been forced to spend time to reflect, I

think I organized things poorly by posting by week. At the time, I thought it was a great

strategy because it matched our weekly morning work and homework numbers and

would be easy for the students to access. Now, knowing that the weeks don’t match up,

I know it would be better to sort these activities by standard and simply direct the

children to the correct standard number. I plan to reorganize these activities by

standard, as well as continue developing my wiki for my students and parents, as time

allows throughout the year. This is why I decided to organize my flipped classroom

assignments and resources by standard.

I’ve also been forced to really reflect and dig deeply into the standards. It has

been surprisingly tough to figure out exactly what I want the students to know and how

I’m going to get there in a timely manner. I don’t want to be too concise, nor too

lengthy, with my videos. This is forcing me to really think about each standard and how

to break it down to best meet the needs of my students.