What is online learning?
Personally, in the spring of 2020 online learning was my saviour. When the pandemic hit I was drowning in a very highneeds class. When I say high-needs class I mean the class that had our learning support teacher off on leave, couldn’t keep an EA because nobody wanted to be in that room, and my main focus of the day was keeping the students from literally stabbing each other, not joking it happened once. I loved those kids so much but we were not learning. Enter pandemic. I no longer had to manage extreme behaviour. I worked on creating engaging online assignments and to my surprise, the kids responded. Instead of traditional teaching methods we had one on one zoom meetings, we used google classroom, we made videos instead of written work. The kids had options, they pursued their passions instead of just the curriculum. With the removal of some very big personalities being in the same room, we came together and we learned.
It was a very hard year, and now that I’ve had some time and space to come to terms with all the things that happened that year I am grateful for a chance to reflect on some positive things that were achieved that year, online learning being at the forefront. From the standpoint of a student, my experiences have also been positive. I enjoy working through the material at my own pace while my dog sleeps next to me rather than being in a stuffy lecture hall. That being said, I do miss connecting with other learners and still have my reservations about online group work, not about the value of it just the ease of execution. Needless to say, I’m a fan of online learning. I think in the right context it can be just what the doctor ordered.
I didn’t know much about open educational resources before reading chapter 11 from 25 Years of Edtech and if I’m being honest I’m not sure I’m totally clear on what they are now. However, I think reading about them and beginning to understand what they are will help my teaching by making me less afraid to use resources because I will know how to find ones I can use guilt-free. I feel like teachers may be the worst culprits (myself included) when it comes to stealing things they don’t have the right to, borrow an image from google here, copy some pages out of a textbook there. By educating educators on how to find these resources some of this “stealing” as it were could be reduced and replaced with better, properly credited, open resources.
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