Blog Post #4

1. While in high school, I took one required online course. This was a health class that a majority of the school opted to take online. The learning management system that was used is asynchronous. We would have a handful of assignments to do, however there often weren’t specific due dates. If we did not complete them in a timely manner, we were threatened to be dropped. As a result of the course being asynchronous, there were not many times that I would communicate with the teacher and I don’t believe I ever communicated with other students.

As for my college online courses, I have had to communicate quite often. For example, this course we need to comment on other students work in order to understand where other people are coming from. I think that if you are going to take an online course, having this form of communication is very helpful.

When I first started college, I was very against online courses. I thought I would learn a lot more sitting in a classroom. However, as time has gone on, I realized I do not mind an online class. As long as you are putting in the effort to learn and do the assignments I feel as though you will be successful!

2. Open Educational Resources (OER) are a very helpful tool for teachers. These sites are made up of hundreds of different worksheets, lessons, test, etc. The part that makes them considered “open” is that anyone can use them and there are no charges associated with use.

Not only are teachers able to use other people’s work in their classroom, they have the opportunity to share their own creative resources. The OER websites provide the option of keeping credit for your own work which I think is very good!

There are a few strict rights and rules to follow when using websites as such. They are described in our Module 4 reading as the Five R’s of OER. These include retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. These rights and rules are here to help make sure that people keep credit for their work, while allowing other teachers to change and make the resources work best for them in their classroom.

Before reading about these websites, I was unaware that they were this popular. I think it is a very good tool for teachers and it would definitely be helpful to have guidance in the classroom.

I found this blog post from a teacher who explains what open educational resources are and how she has used them in her classroom. Seeing how a teacher explains their use and/or how they might not always be useful was interesting to me. Learning from examples is much more efficient than from a textbook description. https://myteachingstory.wordpress.com/2019/11/12/oer-oep-and-me/

Citation: Brooke. (2019, November 12). OER, OEP and Me. Retrieved from https://myteachingstory.wordpress.com/2019/11/12/oer-oep-and-me/

3. I really enjoyed making the newsletter. I felt as though I learned a lot of valuable skills that I can take with me to any future career. I am honestly not very good with technology and struggled a lot in the beginning. Once I started to get the hang of how to organize the newsletter on word I had a lot of fun.

If I had the opportunity to do the assignment over again, I would have made it prettier and organized it better. For the sake of completing the assignment, I just made sure to have all of the checklist complete. I am overall proud of how it turned out and am slowly getting better with designing different things that would be used in the classroom.

I commented on Mallory and Olivia Maihan's posts. I found that we could relate on a lot of things, but I was also able to learn from them, which is great!