Blog #9

     Distance learning has become an integral part of my life, along with many other students my age, and almost anyone who was in the field of education during the pandemic. I graduated high school in 2020, and when the pandemic started around March, school was cancelled for a few weeks at a time, until there was no more school at all. How were we supposed to finish our senior year and graduate? Would I be able to go to college? All of these questions were on my mind, and everyone else's. Luckily, my county switched over to Canvas pretty seamlessly, and I was able to finish out my school year on there. We still use Canvas here at FSU, so I have had an easy transition as a distance learner! Even going to in-person classes now, we still use Canvas as the main hub of information, which has been quite useful to me. As a teacher, I would do everything I could to keep distance learners engaged. I had trouble finding motivation and support for schoolwork during the time that I was distance learning, and it's difficult to feel like your teacher is even there.

    Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational resources whose intellectual property is not copyrighted - these resources are found online, and are open to available use by different teachers or students. They can also be edited or remixed for the purposes of a classroom. OERs can be very useful, because they allow teachers to work together and share ideas without the looming possibility of being sued for intellectual property rights. It is also very useful that OERs are free, because some teachers must pay out-of-pocket expenses for their classrooms. Here is a particular link to the Harvard library of OERs, which has OER resources and a general explanation about OERs:

https://guides.library.harvard.edu/OER

    Lastly, the two PowerPoint assignments were time-consuming, but not too difficult! The information for dissemination assignment was a little more straightforward, while the interactive assignment allowed me to be creative and design a story for the students to interact with. I do consider myself to be pretty knowledgeable about PowerPoint, but I still learned about a few features while I was doing this assignment, including adding a sound to a transition, which I had completely forgotten is possible! The two assignments definitely helped me get a grasp on how to use PowerPoint in a classroom, especially a younger one.

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