Blog 9

    Hi everyone! Today I am going to discuss my experiences as a distance learner. I am a distance learner doing online and remote courses due to the pandemic. Before COVID-19, I had taken a few courses online. As someone with a lot of anxiety, having courses online has helped me relax easier while learning. Although relaxing is good, online courses sometimes provide too much of a lax environment in terms of zoning out in class and turning in assignments late. I have found that in online courses I prefer synchronous meeting but asynchronous due dates. The problem with the alternative to this, asynchronous meeting/none and synchronous due dates, is that I often forget to watch videos and when I do, I often zone out because there is no interaction. I also get behind on assignments when I forget to watch videos. 

    If I become an online teacher, I would give students a guideline to follow for the semester but allow for plenty of time to turn in assignments and as this class has, allow late tokens. I also would hold weekly classes to make sure my students are up to date. These classes would be mandatory as I feel if they are optional, students will fall behind. I really like this class because we have items recommended to turn in on certain days, but our portfolio check is at a later date.

    I had never heard of OERs, open educational resources, before this class. OERs are free websites and other digital media that can be used by educators and students to learn more about a variety of topics. Resources include textbooks, PDFs, research articles, online learning games and more. The OER I found on OERcommons.org is a lesson plan for a preschool classroom. The OER provides a link to a read aloud book titled "Go, Dog, Go". Below the link are questions the teacher can ask his/her students such as "Where do you think the dog is going?". I like that this resource provides questions, a video, and an overview of what the lesson is assessing (conversation skills and critical thinking). Click here to view OER.

    I have learned so much working on our powerpoint assignments. First of all, I learned how to properly voice over a powerpoint movie. I knew how to insert a sound bite, but before this assignment did not know how teachers made videos with themselves drawing on the screen and going through the powerpoint. I also learned how to turn off the linear slide progression and the control buttons for when you want to make a powerpoint into an interactive learning experience. I honestly really liked this assignment. I spent about 8-10 hours on each powerpoint and think the only change I would make would be choosing a more interesting topic for viewers! I suppose, in the future, I might have based the powerpoints off an actual lesson plan for first grade instead of guessing what a first grader might be learning. 

I used gridlines to help me keep the design even.