Reflection Week 1

This week has been very insightful for me. As I returned back to my classroom this week, I started to have thoughts about online courses run through my brain, thoughts of moving away from the classroom setting and starting to teach in a virtual learning space. It was interesting and frightening thoughts at the same time. I love seeing my students faces, talking to them in person, learning from them through their experiences and building rapport with them and their families. I was surprised by one of the studies from the readings this week, that explained how virtual vs. classroom has been the same effectiveness towards students being successful. In my blog, I wrote about my experience with my first distance learning course. It was interesting to read and listen to my peers blogs. Ali created a blog that was auditory. This was incredible. Instead of reading the blog, we listened to her presentation and read the "important facts" she highlighted through her presentation. This was a great example of distance learning. This week, I found that my peers and I had some sort of same first distance learning experience. We also agreed that distance learning has changed, but has made it more convenient to complete a degree while teaching full time. None of us have time to sit in a class and listen to a lecture. We are all self guided learners and like the ability to explore more resources, but also have assurance that if we needed there are others to communicate with or get support from. Distance learning is all about communication and to have conversations with open dialogue. Our twitter meetings, help use explore new ideas, share similar experiences or give resources to try. This can be done in a classroom based setting, but it's more teacher guided than student guided. Distance learning lets us explore and learn from people all around the world. With one click, we can connect to multiple people all over. In a classroom you only connect to the people who live in the same town.