Blog Post #9

     In my years of being a student, I have experienced many different methods of teaching. I was always enrolled in a traditional brick and mortar school however, when the Covid-19 pandemic occurred, I was forced to complete my eighth-grade year through a mix of synchronous and asynchronous online schooling. These forms of distance learning have varying effectiveness from student to student of course, but for me, I found the asynchronous approach to be most effective. Sitting in an online meeting listening to the teacher give lecture in the synchronous method always felt tedious and rather boring. On the other hand, the freedom of the asynchronous method worked well for me and allowed me to complete assignments quicker and then have free time. As for technology or methods of distance learning that I would like to experience, I can say that I wish some of the resources we have now such as canvas were more fleshed out back when we were forced into online learning.

        OERs are resources for educators to make use of in teaching that are open to the public and can be used for free. They can be websites, images or videos and can be saved directly to the teacher's device from certain sites such as OER Commons. On this site, I selected social science as my subject and high school as my grade level and found many OERs that I could use if I were teaching a class. Through this site, I found a resource in the form of a video that provides an introduction and brief description of five films that aid in the teaching of modern Latin-American history. This resource is found under this link: Teach With Movies: Modern Latin America

    Through the creation of my project for assignment four I was able to brush up on my PowerPoint creation skills and build my confidence in creating an engaging presentation. I heightened my design skills as well as my proficiency with animations in PowerPoint. I liked the way that this project stimulated deeper thinking by having us build the power point while keeping in mind how we would present it to students. I also liked how the project had us create a PowerPoint show rather than teaching our presentation to the class in person. For my own personal improvement, I could take more time in creating the show and not speak as fast, however this may have caused me to go over the six minute limit on the video.

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