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.