My first thought after looking at Pod 8’s Interactive learning resource is how wonderful and professional it appeared! Everything is very well presented, cohesive and aesthetically pleasing without the graphics or visuals overwhelming the viewer too much. The table of contents is a nice touch many often forget, and is incredibly useful especially when working with as many slides as in this particular resource. I cannot begin to imagine the care and consideration that went into just this aspect alone, it is clear Pod 8 put significant thought into all aspects of their learning resource.
I am normally against having a significant amount of text on a slide show like this resource displays, primarily because there are several studies that suggest that the human brain doesn’t do a very good job of absorbing information in that way. However, this is greatly mitigated by their decision to include audio recordings of all the text. This choice was made in order to aid ELL and dyslexic students to fully participate in the course. The touch was nice, as well as the other considerations such as speaker notes underneath each slide.
There was an element of this that confused me a bit, the audio recordings on each slide in addition to some other aspects made it difficult for me to discern which parts of the resource were meant for the educator and which for the student. I understand this is partly because of the requirements for this particular assignment, as there is some information you might not normally include in a resource such as this outside of the course. None the less it seemed to me to switch very quickly from one to the other leaving me occasionally feeling a bit lost about the actual target audience. It could perhaps be made a bit clearer with colours differentiating for teacher vs for student, or possibly slightly different organization?
Overall, however, the ideas on mindfulness and brain breaks are well organized and presented. I can see this being an incredible resource not only for teachers but also anyone who finds themselves working with groups of children. The additional outside resources such as videos and colouring sheets were a nice addition, and make this a very comprehensive tool for anyone who might have had the good fortune of coming across it. Great job Pod 8!!
Resource: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12DPkkY5v8EpEdW8iixby0AH5whE48rVKBIewVZyTVQA/edit#slide=id.gbb3ccd7b2a_0_0