Chapter 8: Have you had any distance education or blended course experiences? Try to remember what were the benefits and the disadvantages of that experience. If you have not had either type of course, try to imagine what it would be like and what characteristics of it you would like and which ones you would not. Why? I have come to learn that the concept of distance learning is very different depending on which side of the table you are on. My experiences with distance learning as a student are completely different than my experiences with distance learning as a teacher. As a student, the only distance learning experiences I have encountered were through a few online courses during my undergraduate years and throughout my time in the MAT program at Southern Miss. I found there to be many benefits, especially throughout this graduate level program. For starters, if this program did not offer distance learning courses, I more than likely would not have been able to attend this institution. Having the program composed of nearly all distance learning courses allows me to be able to attend this institution and receive a degree while not living in Hattiesburg. Another benefit is that it has allowed me to work around my own schedule of teaching and other commitments. Aside from synchronous class meetings, the work for this program can be completed on my own time, at my convenience. This is has been very helpful in balancing work, school, obligations, and my personal life. Now I have found that there are a few disadvantages to this experience from a students perspective as well. For example, it does require a great amount of time management, planning, and responsibility to be able to keep up with the work load. Especially for asynchronous classes, most of the work is self-paced, so it is up the student to be responsible for reading materials and completing work in a timely manner. However, from a students perspective, this is only downside I see to this form of learning at this level of education. As previously stated, my teacher perspective of distance learning is completely different. During this past year, our school faced many challenged when it came to distance learning. There were several students who were at home learning who would not complete assignments, not feel connected to the teacher, and simply just not even come to class. With distance learning comes a vast amount of responsibility and self-accountability and, if we are being honest, most students at this age do not have that. They lack the motivation to be able to complete work or attend class at home. Overall, however, distance learning in my school over the last year was most difficult on the teachers. Trying to manage a classroom full of students while also trying to manage and motivate online students was a very daunting task. It was a highly difficult task that we had to maintain while also in the midst of a very difficult year that was full of changes. Through several trial and errors, though, we prevailed and made it through the year, but I am hopeful that moving forward, teachers will not have to worry with managing both in person students and distance learners at the same time Learning ExperiencesThis week we were tasked with the assignment of creating and editing a lecture video. Throughout this pervious year, I actually used this as a tool several times for my distance learning students, so this assignment was one that I particularly enjoyed. I started by creating my video through Zoom. I found this platform to be a very user-friendly platform that allows me to easily record, share my screen while also showing my video, and quickly save my video for uploading. I created this video demonstrating how to set up an MLA formatted paper in Google Documents. Once the video was complete, I used the Mac application, iMovie, to cut the beginning and end of the video, add a title slide to the video, and add credits to the end of the video. It was during this part of the project where I was thankful for the two year of broadcast journalism that I took in high school. Once the video was edited, it was uploaded to Edpuzzle where various questions were added to it in order to engage in student learning and comprehension of the topic. This application is also one that I have used several times and I find to be very user-friendly. This week I learned how valuable lecture videos can be to student learning. Not only is this a way to include additional content for students to view before arriving to class but this is also a great way for students to be able to go back and view class content that they may have missed or that they may have not understood fully. I plan to continue to utilize these in the future and will continue to use the skill learned throughout these projects to heighten my students' overall learning experiences. Project 6: Screen Capture youtu.be/5_mV98oj4Dk Project 7: Video Editing youtu.be/e9NYhmcefOU Project 8: Interactive Video (code: ocfufvo) edpuzzle.com/join/ocfufvo
3 Comments
Eli Morgan
7/4/2021 02:39:45 pm
Hi Michaelah, great work on your post for this week and you really put into perspective the dichotomy of virtual education from the student and the teacher's perspective. As you stated, I would agree that a large amount of that divide is in thanks to the nature of education/responsibilites and the age range of those students. The capabilities of a virtual college (or graduate in our case) student is far more than that of, say, a 14 year old 9th grader. I think, and I believe this is something that we have all come to realize through virtually teaching, but it is all about managing expecations and working with those virtual tools as best we can. Again, great work this week Michaelah, you killed it!
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Kimberly Jefferson
7/5/2021 06:46:20 am
Hey Michaelah,
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Sarah Holder
7/18/2021 08:09:36 pm
Hi Michaelah,
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About AuthorMy name is Michaelah Martin and I am a Human Anatomy and Physiology teacher in the Jackson Metro area. I love teaching, dancing, and DIY projects! Hope you enjoy my blog! BlogrollVictoria Parker
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