Blog #4

My Prior Online Learning Experience

The first online class I ever took was a photography course my freshman year of high school. It was a graduation requirement for me to take an online class, although I will admit that I do not remember which LMS was used for the course. Since enrolling at FSU, I have take numerous online courses all of which have been asynchronous. Although fellow students and myself have always been encouraged to roughly follow a schedule, many of these online classes have allowed students to do the course work at their own pace. In our current online class, we have weekly due dates, however students are able to find time within their weekly schedule to do their work. Personally, I believe that there are benefits to learning in both the classroom and online. I believe that whether or not an online course works for a student is highly dependent on the personality of said student. Online learners often do better if they have good time management skills, dedication, and are better suited to learn by themselves with the right materials and some assistance.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

From my understanding, open educational resources are essentially informative, educational resources that can be accessed for free. This allows teachers and students everywhere, including even at poorly funded schools, to be able to access the newest and most relevant information to greatly improve their education. OERs are also associated with five rights which are retain, reuse, review, remix, and redistribute. The link that I am sharing below is to an OER called "Introduction to Technology Integration for Educators" which goes over how K-12 teachers can integrate technology in ways that help all different types of learners. I found this extremely interesting and relevant to our course.

https://www.oercommons.org/courses/introduction-to-technology-integration-for-educators

Newsletter Design

Creating a newsletter using Word was a new experience for me. I have had marketing roles in the past in which I have created newsletters, but I am much more familiar with doing so on websites such as Canva or S'more. I think it was a great experience to use Word instead because it allows a lot of creativity, however I certainly did have to be more creative myself since there are extremely limited templates on Word. I learned how to create banners (I created a chalk board banner for my newsletter) as well as many other simple but important skills such as shading a section. In the future, I hope to create a more colorful and visually appealing newsletter as I have on other platforms which I believe will become more possible with experience in doing so on Word.

Comments

I commented on Olvia's blog post. I focussed on her comments about her prior experience with online courses. I connect with her personal experience and suggested a couple of ways in which I believe that online courses can almost mimic the same effect as the classroom effect while still allowing the benefit of taking classes online. I also commented on Hayley's blog. In this comment I focussed more on the benefits or OER.