Quality Matters is a faculty centered, peer review course that is designed to guide individuals who are creating blended learning or online courses. The workbook and rubric is very easy to understand and is straight forward in how to help you set up a successful online or blended learning class. A successful Quality Matters course includes receiving an 85% on the course as well as allowing a panel of three certified Quality Matters instructors peer review your coursework.

I thought the Quality Matters certification is a great way to help guide instructors who are interested in creating online or blended learning classes. I have taken online classes where there is no student to student or student to instructor interaction. These online classes consist of an assignment being uploaded each week and the student completing the work. It tends to create a cold environment, which I do not prefer. The Quality Matters helps instructors also create course objectives that are measurable and flow with the content they are teaching.    

I recently had the opportunity to create a movie using the Movie Maker program on my PC. It was pretty easy to use, but the program did have a few disadvantages. For example, I had to record my voice separately using the voice recorder program. Once I finished recording my voice I had to then upload each file into Movie Maker. This wasn't hard by any means, but very time consuming. I thought the end product came out great and I would recommend trying this program out when you get the chance! 

In this day and age it is easy for students to feel the urge to copy and paste material in a word document. I always try to teach students in my classroom the rules of plagiarism as well as the correct way to cite sources in their written documents.  I have used the Turnitin program, which notifies teachers and students with the percentage of their document that is plagiarized. The higher of a percentage you receive on your written document means that there is plagiarism in your document.  The program takes 15 minutes to review your paper and give you results on the percentage of your paper that could be plagiarized. I think this program can be used in the k-12 setting as well as the college level. Plagiarism is a serious offense that students have a hard time understanding, but I think instructors need to make students aware of how to correctly cite information into their paper. I always try to tell my students that I want to be able to read information they have written not repeated verbiage from a website.

In the Chapter four link I incorporated a flashcard system using Google Docs. The positives of using Google flashcards is that it is very user friendly. Individuals will only need to use a spreadsheet to type in the concepts they would like to be quizzed upon. Once individuals have completed the task of typing in the information they will just need to highlight the information and click on insert gadgets. The computer will pull up a screen with the flashcards. I think this is a great concept for instructors and students. I know I always used the 3 x 5 card method, which took a lot of time to write everything by hand. This is easy to incorporate and saves a lot of time for everyone.  The only negative would be that not all individuals have computers or internet access to be able to create the flashcards using Google Docs.

I thought the strategies were a great idea to help build student motivation in the classroom. Everyone is motivated by something either by money, the self fulfillment, or a better job. I know I have different goals that help me keep motivated through college and my career. As an instructor I try to provide many opportunities for student motivation. For example, we provide plenty of fun field trips and the stipulation is students must have passing grades to attend. Every year students strive to achieve passing grades to attend and get out of school to have fun for one day. It is rewarding for them to have passing grades as well as to be able to attend the field trip. 

I enjoyed recreating the Organization of Knowledge picture in PowerPoint. I actually forgot how many different tools and designs they had in the PowerPoint program. I have also changed the background theme to the Weebly website to help students who may have visual difficulties. As far as the chapter 2 Organization of Knowledge I thought it was interesting the various strategies instructors can use in the classroom to help build long term knowledge. I will definitely try to use the strategy where students draw a concept map to help expose their knowledge organizations about a topic. It is a starting point to help figure out what students understand or have retained about a specific topic.

I thought chapter 1 of the "How Learning Works" book was very interesting. I enjoyed learning the different strategies that educators can use to determine students' prior knowledge. In our building we are preparing our district for the 2014-2015 merit pay and evaluation procedures. Currently we are using the pre and post tests to determine students' prior knowledge as well as the clickers. I also try to meet with my colleagues in the high school building to collaborate ideas on how students are adapting to new classes, lessons, and classroom procedures. After reading about collaborating with teachers about their previous year with each student it makes sense to ask instructors how they teach that specific class (powerpoint, lecture, hands on learning). I have noticed that each of my students learn differently and they always have one class that they struggle with, because they are unable to learn the material if they are a kinesthetic, visual, or auditory learner. I think it is great when a teacher tries to incorporate all three of these types of learning in the classroom. It helps to ensure that each student is going to grasp the material in one way or another.