Blog Journal #9 - March 27th, 2022

 

        I've enjoyed my experience in EME2040, at least for the most part. I'm in an online section, which, while sometimes ironically difficult to keep up with, I think worked better for me than an in person section would. The course hasn't really taught me all too much, however it's at least more practice for skills that I already know, and more specifically, applying those skills in a way that I might use in a classroom. In terms of classroom experience, we didn't really have one, as it was online, however one thing that I want to do with classroom experience is have something like a "brag wall" (probably not named that way) where students can post their scholastic or personal achievements. I think it's a lot nicer for mentality to have some form of recognition or place to show off, even if it's just a spot on a classroom wall.

        I think Open Education Resources or OERs are great for supplemental material for students of various ages and levels. Typically, public and private schools will both have mandatory readings for courses, specific textbooks that they want you to use, so in that regards OERs can't really be a 'replacement textbook'. That being said, they're great supplemental tools because they are, as the name suggests, open, so any student can use them if/when they want to. I've used this website in the past to search up textbooks myself (namely in college when I don't want to pay for stuff), so I know that this is a decent tool to find books for given material.

        So the main skill that this assignment allowed me to pick up was the recording function, which I had never really used before on PowerPoint. I had tinkered with it in the past, so when I saw that that was an aspect of the assignment, all I could remember was that I didn't like the recording feature. I still don't. Overall, the recording feature is fine, but my main gripe with it is that you have to record everything linearly, because it records it by slide, so I can't go back and look at previous slides without cutting the recording, which is bad, because I often reverse through PowerPoints to reference prior content while instructing. That being said, as mentioned before, even though I didn't really garner anything new, It was nice to practice application of skills. I've posted a few images of the presentation down below. 

    

        As you can see, I'm a fan of having as little words on the slide as possible. I skipped a lot of slides because I just wanted to show the best few ones, at least in my opinions.