Blog Post #9

I have had many experiences with distance learning because I was an online student from seventh grade to ninth grade. This was during the COVID-19 shutdown, and teachers were new to a lot of the distance learning technologies. In my K-8, they started with BigBlueButton. It was confusing for everyone, including the students, and it made it very difficult to interact with learning. In eighth grade, they switched to Zoom, and that made things a little easier because people had more experience with it. However, many of my teachers couldn't figure out how to balance virtual students with in-person students, and I oftentimes would be forgotten or left out of class activities. I've used Canvas for my dual enrollment class since tenth grade, so my distance learning didn't end even when I started high school in-person. I feel like I've used many technologies over the years, and there aren't any that I would like to experience simply because I don't know of anything new that might benefit me later in life.

Open educational resources (OER) is a website that has a collection of resources for educators to use. You can sort it by category or by grade level, but it gives you common resources for a wide variety of subjects. I think this is super helpful for teachers because it gives them easy access to classroom resources.

In the example to the left, the OER resource for observing clouds gives a description about the resource itself, what subject and grade it is geared towards, and what type of material it is. The resource button leads to a short video on PBS LearningMedia about observing clouds.

Here is the clouds example on OER: https://oercommons.org/courses/observe-clouds

Here is the site that the resource leads to: https://florida.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ess05.sci.ess.eiu.clouds/observe-clouds/

I really enjoyed the PowerPoint assignment. The more assignments I do that require me to pretend to be a teacher, the more I actually want to be a teacher. I liked seeing how I can make the slides interactive just through presenting, like when I added animations to the candies so I could make them appear while I counting. The one thing I didn't like about it. was that the animations didn't sync very well when I was watching the recording back, so the animations didn't work with my counting very well. Additionally, I think having a minimum slide count for content is good in theory, but I was struggling to think of content slides that would relate to teaching kindergarteners how to count to 10. I also found that I couldn't keep the recording under six minutes because I kept having to stop and explain my slides. Especially when working with eight content slides, it's hard to talk for less than a minute for each slide. That was the only aspect of the assignment that I didn't like, but I think I could also try improving my presenting time and maybe condense some of the things I said.