Choice of Technology in the Classroom

After the second group talked about giving students choice of technology in the classroom, I started thinking more about how this would play out.  For the classes I teach, we often talk about making sure that things are fair, so that everyone has a way to complete the assignment even if they are not using the method that the teacher prescribes.  For example, I have my students write journals for class, but they have the option of handwriting those or writing them on computer, whichever they are more comfortable with.  So, if a student did not have access to a computer they could always write them by hand and still get full credit. 

Although choice and fairness is good, I am now thinking that there have to be some sort of limit to this.  For example, having two options of doing an assignment, so that students can interact with each other in a way they are comfortable with, but not having five or six different formats of assignments to grade and organize .  Yes, students should be given reasonable options, but teachers are still in charge in the classroom and can and should place limits on that, or else students might just take advantage of them.  As long as the crux of the assignment is the same it should not be a problem allowing various presentation methods, but if there are distinct differences in the requirements of each, it might be unfair.

Can students be given too much choice?

Flipping the classroom

I think it is mainly providing the lecture and notes to the students outside of class and before class and then spending most of the class time doing activities and correcting misunderstandings.  I like this idea to some extent.

After talking about it in class, I am still a little hesitant to use it as the main mode of teaching because I am not sure that all students would be interested and engaged in powerpoints video presentation.  The flipped classroom I have seen worked well mainly because the studnets wer all self-motivated and chose to take a class with a large online component.  Not all students would be like that.  How can I ensure that they'll watch a video if some of them don't read the textbook?  How do you make the lecture aspects engaging to watch/listen to especially when you are sometimes covering boring material?  I usually add discussion questions and examples throughout my lecture because it's dull to listen to one person speak the whole time and will engage them in some way.