Blog Journal #9
This class has been a really fun and beneficial experience for me. This course provided me with the ability to grow in my technology skills, and critically think about how I could apply those to an educational setting. I think the hardest thing in this class has been the blogs, surprisingly. While they are not objectively difficult, per se, attempting to formulate my personal thoughts about what I have been learning into a public medium, has been a growing process. I loved how we were able to get creative with assignments and try a lot of different websites, apps, and softwares. One thing that I would want to improve on or modify in the future as a teacher would be to include more group work for in-class discussions and activities. I would also not have group assignments or projects either. Personally, I feel that group projects or assignments can be more tedious than beneficial because it requires coordinating schedules and figuring out how to collaborate fairly and effectively. This is why I would rely more on group work for activities in class, when students do not have to try and line up schedules, or if there were group projects, they would be given dedicated class time.
OER's, Open Educational Resources, are free, available, and able to be used by those who follow the "Five R's": Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute. The goal is for teachers and those who work in the schools to have online resources that they can employ and modify for the classroom in a multitude of ways. A lot of resources for teachers have to be bought in a magazine, or paid for through a subscription, or a large, one-time payment. The idea really is to reduce barriers and obstacles for teachers to get the additional materials and information that they need to best teach their students and enhance the learning environment. One OER that I found is a lesson plan for a group project where students will create a timeline and quizlet flashcards that serve as an overview of the Cold War. This OER encourages the teacher to then use the quizlet flashcards to host an interactive quizzing experience with the students, giving each group a chance to share their work with the class in a fun and lightly competitive way.
As with all the other assignments, I loved having creative liberty to design it the way that I wanted to. I also really appreciated getting to chose what we lectured on. Having a mini independent research project was a lot of fun, and I even learned some new things about Germany during the Cold War in the process. One thing that I really struggled with was keeping my narration within the time limit. I know that I went way over and in the future, I want to try and avoid that by using two or three slides for one discussion point, to help me still have all the slides that I need, without finding myself with too much to talk on, and not enough time.
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