Blog Journal 9: So much to do and so little time

 No, really. I have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. Is this the result of procrastination? No, absolutely not. I am on top of my work. Its just a lot. I typed out a whole thing about busy work, but since this is being posted online for all to see, I'll keep the information about the work I hate to myself.

Quick word of advice: if you're reading this with the hope to comment, then it will be significantly easier to respond to a post that is not this one. Check in next week though!

Onto EME! I am in an asyncronous class! And its been fine. I have enjoyed some assignments and have absolutely hated others. Nothing has been difficult, just time consuming. I am willing to put in the work though. When I am a teacher I will improve the classroom experience by making good powerpoints. Do I hate making powerpoints with all of my heart and soul? Yes, absolutely I do. But damn, I'll make some high quality ones to teach the class. I will NOT be doing 12 slides every six minutes though. 30 seconds per slide? There is too much space on one powerpoint slide for only 30 seconds of information. Unless you are using big letters for a lower grade class, but if you are teaching a k-5 class by primarily using powerpoints then you probably need to reevaluate your teaching methods.

I'm cooking as I write this

Open Education Resources! How do you describe these in a paragraph? There is an art to brevity, and a frustration in unnecissarily long winded explanations. When you are using a lot of words to say very little (which I admit I frequently do) you lose your audience quickly. An OER is a digital educational resource that is free. There is no point in complicating it beyond that. You can add words to describe the specificity of an OER, but if I do that then it won't be in my own words, because every other description of OERs has already used the very specific words that can be very specifically placed to describe what an OER is. Here is an article about OERs and how we as educators can transition into using them :) https://www.edutopia.org/blog/transitioning-to-open-educational-resources-andrew-marcinek

I did not like the powerpoint assignment. I think it is pretty obvious that I am frustrated in this blog post, and that is because I just finished working on the powerpoint assignment. It took up too much of my time. I made it about History to make it better for myself. 12 slides in 6 minutes is not enough time, either increase the time or reduce the number of slides. Recording was annoying. I know my audio is easy to hear. If I get bumped down to a "pass" grade because my audio is not good enough or because I went to 6 minutes and 30 seconds instead of keeping it right below 6 minutes, I am going to be absolutely pissed. There is too much to do, and too little time to do it. When a good portion of that time is being used up by work that I find not particularly difficult, exceptionally monotonous, and overly specific I get frustrated. It is even more frustrating, because I am unable to scale back the time and effort I put into something; it has to be good, no matter what it is. So in reality, I am not frustrated with the assignmnet or the class, but with myself because I put 100% of my effort into 100% of the things that I do, regardless of my enjoyment of thsoe tasks. I learned how to do a powerpoint recording though, that is pretty cool. 

God, I hope I don't get points off for this blog post. I probably shouldn't have written it so hot, but it needs to be done now so that I can move onto other things.