Blog Post 9

Something that I have enjoyed about distance learning is the amount of freedom I have in my schedule. Since I don't need to go to a physical class, I don't have to worry about planning out how long it would take me to walk to my classes on campus, and I have a lot of freedom in when I can do my assignments. Something I dislike about distance learning is that a lot of the time I find it really awkward to interact with people in my zoom classes because I don't really know anyone. Additionally, some classes to not translate well to an online environment, and thus become a bit more difficult or tedious. A big problem I find with distance learning is the lack of human interaction and built community, when compared to in person classes, so as a teacher I would want to emphasize the community aspect of my classes to make them more interactive with each other, myself, and the class material in general. 

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning and teaching materials that can be freely accessed, modified, and redistributed so long as it is for educational purposes. OER includes both physical and digital media. An article I found called "The Uncertain Future of OER"talks about some of the difficulty in access to Open Educational Resources. More specifically it talks about the difficulty in locating necessary materials, as there is no single platform or resources that gathers OER and makes it easier to discover quality materials for classroom use.

Between the two PowerPoint assignments, I think I enjoyed the voice over PowerPoint the most. The Interactive PowerPoint not difficult to complete, but I did feel like it was more time consuming and repetitive. I felt like I was more engaged while doing the voice over PowerPoint. I'm happy with how they both turned out, but I think that I could have optimized the text on my slides to make it easier for students to write notes, and for the interactive PowerPoint I could have written more complex questions for my Jeopardy game.