Final post . . .

1. What I like about blogging.

I have a lot of freedom when I blog though I have to take into consideration in avoiding sensitive issues such as politics and races. I get to share my personal points of view of certain lesson as well as suggesting effective ways to improve the activity. I also get to voice out my dissatisfaction in my post and others who view my blog get to comment on my thoughts. When I come across any interesting website, videos or softwares worth meantion, I post it in my blog so everyone can be benefited. 

2. What I do not like about blogging.

Sometimes it's just laziness. Posting a blog does take effort and thoughts so that people who visit your blog will get benefited and it won't be a waste of time for them. 

3. What have I gained from blogging eg. Language skills, improved fluency, critical thinking, improved thought processes, technology skills etc.

Through blogging, my critical thinking skill has been sharpened and I can now think more critically in various areas and giving ideas that are constructive and effective. My technology skill has been improved such as editing the template, the fonts and colours as well as inserting links and videos. 

4. How?

 Through this blogging task, I always have to put my thinking cap together and come out with suggestions and comments regarding lesson of the day. Thus, my thinking skill has been sharpened. I improved my technology skill through friend's guidance and trial-and-error method. 

5. what I like about the course

We're exposed to a thousand of ways to produce technological material such as using the SmartBoard, PowerPoint presentation, animation, E-book, children softwares and many more. We have our lesson in the computer lab hence giving us more time to be exposed to the world of technology.

6. what I do not like about the course

Too much of tasks and assignments to be handled with weekly and light emphasis was given to non-technological materials.

7. what I have learnt from the course

Various ways to produce technological material and some technology skills such as image editing, audio and video editing. 

8. what I do not expect but have learnt from the course

Writing a tutorial for everything we produced. It's something new to me. 

9. what I expect but have not learnt from the course.

Developing non-technological teaching materials in case we're posted to a classroom with no technology facilities at all. 

Exam ... Exam ... Exam ...

Exam would be the last thing that came on my mind for this course as I thought with all the hard works we've put in for the tasks and assignments, all the marks would be well balanced. The announcement was only made 7 days before D DAY and I was like 'What ?!'

As the clock ticked away our remaining time, finally it's our big day of this semester where a total of 40% will be allocated to this assessment. As we had just been briefed on the importance of topic 1, all my focus went on to that. I copied all the slides that I could ever find on ADEC and repeatedly reading them until today I got the A4 papers. Thankfully my effort did not go in vain as some of the questions indeed related to what I had studie d.

It raised my eyebrows when I came upon question 3 when we were required to write a summary of a story as well as a storyboard. Doubting what it exactly required us to do, I chose the story "Cinderella" ( the one and only I could recall) and drew a I-think-it's-a-storyboard for the answer. Fingers crossed for now as I started the time frame to wait upon the results to be announced somewhere during our semester break.

An easy way to get video clips on YouTube

1. Simply go to this site:

http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/

2. Enter the URL of the YouTube clip you wish to have.

3. Click "Get the video" and it will be downloaded in flv format.

It's easier than 1, 2, 3, enjoy peeps !

16th September 2008

Stepping into the 10th week of this semester is not something so pleasing to me as I'm not prepared that I should be having 9 weeks of knowledge in my head pertaining this course. I was aware of we have exams for this course in the end and I found this surprising as it isn't stated when I first registered this course online. The worst part is I don't have any knowledge in my mind to sit for the exam except for the steps to download, store files, edit images, audio and video files. I really hope our lecturer would help us on this by focusing on the scope of the exam
to ease my anxiety.

I'm feeling relieved today as we've just handed up our assignment 2 and that's only temporary as immediately we were briefed on assignment 3 which carries a similar nature but with more lesson plans and resources. Personally I feel that the need to prepare tutorials is slightly unnecessary as we all know how to do the stuff and preparing all the tutorials on the resources development really take a lot of time and effort. We should spend more time focusing on how to produce a quiality lesson with appropriate and creative teaching aids rather than how to produce the teaching aids. Well that's my personal thought. Take care all !

9th September 2008

Things seemed to be more organized today since our lecturer has briefed us on the requirements of respective assignments and the weight age of them. At least I have a clear direction on what I have to do for this course to fulfill the 100% mark. It also helped me to plan my time as I still have assignments from 6 other courses to be dealt with.

We went on with our group presentations after that. At first I did not take this task seriously as I wasn't aware of when we had to present but fortunately I spent some time over the weekend to go through the notes. As I presented on 'Deciding how frequent and how long language lessons should be', it really gave me a better understanding and improved my knowledge on this because if I wasn't given the task, I would not bother to read it. So, thanks to my group members who assigned this topic to me ^^

Regarding the assignment 2, just want to thank those who taught me which software to use (you know who you are) and it's really easy to extract the images, audio and video files that I want to develop as teaching aids. That's 1 more week left, all the best to everyone !

My presentation slides

2 SEPTEMBER 2008

Looking at the date, that marks the 2nd day of the month of Ramadan. This somehow explains some absentees in the class today including our lecturer.

After everyone was busying submitting their E-book, we were given tasks again and were asked to form into groups of 4 and 6 respectively. Honestly speaking, I'm feeling worn out as we have a major assignment for this course to be submitted in 7 days yet we were given endless task to be done.

Another thing to be mentioned here is regarding the forms of submissions. I think it's sufficient if we hand in the burned CD as we included everything in it and having to upload it to the internet storage as well as printing it out, I'm feeling slightly troublesome to cope with it. That's why there are always some people (including myself) having problem with meeting the dateline. After all, these are all my own opinions and how I'm feeling deep in my heart and I think this is the right place to voice it out. Adiosss

Thank you so much

As we were told to meet our lecturer by Izyan this morning at her office, we felt an instantaneous uneasiness. We were anxious of what lied ahead and the destiny of our tasks that were yet to be submitted ^^

Thankfully, we were given a second chance by Pn. Foziah to submit the video on YouTube as well as accepting our 8TV production. The video is now successfully uploaded and can be viewed here and please feel free to comment on the strength and shortcomings of our production. Well, we've learnt a good lesson today that we're to be very sensitive to the datelines of assignments submission and be prepared to have back-up plan when technology fails us.

26th AUGUST 2008

7 days of rest meant a lot to me and getting back to this prestigious university of Malaysia wasn't something I'm looking forward to. It was week 7 since we started our adventure in UM. Once again we were left unattended for an hour in the computer lab and we took this time to update blog, checking emails and looking at our friends' video productions.

Alrighto, what's on for this week? E-book... We are required to work in pairs or individually to produce an E-book based on the topics we prefer. I personally think this is something good since the introduction of audio, picture and video editing as all these would come in handy when we step into the classroom 2 years later. Be it or not, it's still better to learn something new in this technology-dominated era.

Next, we were introducted to website that teaches us to create animated GIF online. This is something new to me as I had no idea how to produce such file that moves ! With the help of the tutorial, I just knew we have to create a few different pictures before the software can combine and make them move. Click here for the site.

12 AUGUST 2008

The clock is showing 10.45a.m. but our lecturer is nowhere to be seen. I took this time to study an article that we are required to make a summary out of it. As Pn. Foziah walked in and apologized to us for being late, we were showed some audio files as well as video files done by our seniors. Indeed, there were great works showed up there on the screen and I was really touched by the second video that shows the tastes of life such as love, anger, happiness and sadness.
We should not be having problem with this task as we have done similar one in our technology course when we were required to make a video clip using windows movie maker. We have chosen the theme ' 4 years of adventure in KL' that will picture our walks all the way when we 1st stepped into KL soil. With limited photos that we're still keeping with us, hopefully we can make wonders out of it. Gambateh !

Audio editing task

Audio editing tutorials:

1. Firstly, type in the keyword ‘audacity’ in the Google search toolbar to download the software.
2. After installing Audacity, launch it and click ‘project’ on the toolbar and click ‘import project’.
3. Select whichever song available in your hard disk you wish to edit. Remember that song files ripped from CD cannot be edited.
4. As I wanted to cut out the chorus part of the song to be set as my ringing tone, I simply clicked and dragged whichever part I didn’t want, and clicked ‘cut’ on the third row of the toolbar which has the icon of scissors.
5. After that, click ‘file’ and ‘export as MP3’. Audacity will require you to download ‘LAME MP3 encoder’ in order to encode the file into mp3 format.
6. Search again ‘LAME MP3 encoder’ in Google search bar and download it.
7. Locate the ‘lame_enc.dll’ file and click ‘ok’.
8. Now, your edited mp3 file is ready to be played.

Original file: http://www.4shared.com/file/57985312/94fb690/Leona_Lewis_-_Bleeding_Love.html

Edited file:
http://www.4shared.com/file/57984728/7d02c3f4/bleeding_love_Ed.html

5th August 2008

Time flies indeed, we have moved into week 5 of this semester. For today, we were formed into 6 groups where each group was assigned a topic by the lecturer and I was so unfortunately called to be the presenter of the topic "Making language exercises into real exchanges". Luckily this topic wasn't so hard to understand and within minutes, we were well prepared with our power point presentation thanks to the techno-savvy Zarne. Here is the link to our production: http://www.4shared.com/file/57861504/6b4a4c5/Making_Language_Exercise_Into_Real_Exchanges.html
In fact, all the topics presented were able to be cope with and we moved on to the lesson of the day right after that- audio editing. I have yet to read the notes on audio editing but I have somehow done some simple one like cutting short a song file. Hopefully this will not be a big deal for me and friends, remember to upload your link to ADEC and tutorial to the lecturer's email by 12am, Sunday, 10th August 2008.

and this is the work for week 4

Start off with these:

Changing the background of a digital image

1. Open your image and then click on an edge selection tool such as the Magnetic Lasso found in Adobe Photoshop or Elements.
2. Carefully outline the edges of the subject. You may have to use the Add and Subtract icon to get a more precise outline.
3. After the image is selected, Inverse the selection. Select > Inverse.
4. Next, open the image you plan to use for the background, in this illustration, a plain beach scene. The image will open in a new window. Select All, then copy. Select menu > All
5. Edit menu > Copy. The sunset image will be placed on the clipboard.
6. Make the first window active by clicking on it, then use the Paste Into menu to place the clipboard image into the selected area. Edit > Paste Into.
7. If desired, move the image around with the Move Tool selected until the background image is place as you like it.
8. Save image layers as a JPEG file.

and you get this:

29 July 2008

'Beep' and the lab door is open after Pn. Foziah flashed her ID card on the sensor indicating we've moved into our 4th week of this semester. The 1st task was asking us to fill in our email address other than our blog's URL. Most of us were quite confused as we have had our details on email add and blog's URL uploaded on the ADEC site in separate forums.
Next, 78 of us were asked to cramp in front and no one was allowed to sit beyond third row of tables. Though the request was slightly uncomfortable, we were given an interesting and promising lecture on photo editing. The last few slides on uploading your own picture on a celebrity's face really mesmerized us.
Then, we were given a tutorial on the making of E-book. In my opinion, I could hardly start on assignment 3 if I still haven't quite started on assignment 2 =p Good luck all and time to work !

Well...well...well

22 July 2008
Guess it was all because of the weather, we were really feeling sleepy and drowsy this morning and we were made to stand and 'exposed' to a music video on youtube to wake us up. I guess it was effective as we started talking and discussing about the assignment questions.
We were formed into groups of 13 where each group was given a topic on children's characteristic and we were asked to present to the class in... 30 minutes ? Thanks to the brilliant minds of our friends that we were able to come out with a powerpoint presentation in a short while and it was ready to be presented. Thanks to the convenience of Internet, our presentation was made more interesting with the addition of images and link to clips on youtube.
We were slightly confused when the lecturer asked of any question regarding our assignment 2 as I'm guessing some of us are still not sure of what assignment 1 is. If we do know, I think it's still early for us to discover any problems in assignment 2, yet. Well, there's no more time for us to be slumber anymore since week 3 is ending... Gambateh !

The journey continues...

15 July 2008 Tuesday
As we started to get into our groups for the assignment given, we had a hard time with the lecturer as students wanted to stay in their comfort zone as to work with friends that they are closed and familiar with. Thus, with frustration, the lecturer deleted all the registered group members again and again before we reached a consensus on having a non-muslim and at least a male student in each group.
After the groups have been set, we assigned roles to each group member such as resources collector, group leader and persons in charge of tutorial and write-up content. With ease and understanding, everyone was pleased with the responsibilities assigned.
Next, we were required to choose a topic that we are going to teach with support of Curriculum Specifications. As the topics were not to be the same with other groups, we posted our topic which is transportations at the forums as soon as possible as it was on first-come-first-served basis.
So that was all about what we did today and now it’s time to hunt for resources !

So it goes...

First ever post for this blog site as I had no time to update 3 blogs simultaneously without internet access. Honestly I'm experiencing a slight cultural shock on the heavy dependence of ICT in UM. Having said that it's much more convenient for the lecturers to update their resources, announcements and even marking of assignments, it's equally convenient for students to submit their work online and to voice out their opinions and comments. Maybe sooner or later we won't have to meet in the lecture hall but just having a video conference online would be sufficient ^^

Regarding this course, I believe technology would be really helpful in developing resources as conventional ways of resources preparations would cost more money, time and effort. Be it video clips, sound clips, pictures, e-book can be downloaded easily from the World Wide Web and easily presented in the classroom with the aid of technology.

Right until this moment, I'm still kinda 'struggle' with the ICT skills I need to fulfill the lecturers' requirements in assignments such as video recording and uploading. Well, what else can I do but to keep upgrading myself in this matter ? All the best to you too !

Relax, relax, to be updated soon ...