Blog Post #9

 Hey, everyone! Happy November. The weather here in Tallahassee has been wonderful this week. It actually feels like Fall for once! As always, I hope your week is going smoothly, and if not, it's not too late to change it! ☺

My Experience as A Distance Learner 

    This semester, I have learned how to be a distance learner. I have liked distance learning because I do not have to go anywhere in the morning, and I can stay in my pajamas if I want to. I have missed interacting with my peers though. In past semesters, I have made a lot of friends through being in class together, and even though we have Zoom meetings, it's just not the same. Also, in some of my classes it has been hard to get a hold of the professor through email, whereas if we were in a physical class, I could just go up to them and talk to them when the class is over. As a teacher, since I have experienced distance learning myself, I will definitely be very empathetic of my students because I know how challenging and out of the norm this is for them. I will do my best to be flexible with them and allow them to have extra time if they need it because I know technical difficulties always occur at the most inconvenient times. 

Open Educational Resources (OER)

    Open educational resources are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. It is basically other teacher's resources that they have created and have found to be useful for their students that they allow others to use as well. Here is a link to a website called "OER Commons" that allows you to enter your subject, grade level, and standard, and it will come up with a list a resources that would be useful to you. You are also able to upload resources that you have created, and other teachers can use it for their students. I think this creates a supportive network between teachers who may never meet each other. I also love that others are willing to share their resources. This shows that they want others to succeed as well, not just their class or school. 

Skills Learned on PowerPoint

    I really enjoyed creating PowerPoints for these 2 assignments. I learned so much from both assignments. I never knew that you could make an interactive PowerPoint with buttons that take you to other slides. I was so surprised by that, and I know I will put that to good use in the future to make review games for my students. I also did not know how many animations and transitions there were to add to each slide. I think these transitions will help my PowerPoints not become so monotonous in the future, because I know it can get boring looking at PowerPoint after PowerPoint. There really wasn't anything I disliked about these 2 assignments, besides the time it took to create these PowerPoints, but I'm sure that I will get faster with practice. 

Here are 2 screenshots of the PowerPoints I made for the 2 PowerPoint assignments:

Thanks for reading this far! I hope you have a great rest of your week. Talk to you next week. 

-Hannah