Reflection Week 15

Hello everyone! It's the last blog and i cant help to feel NOSTALGIC albeit the immense RELIEF!

This last blog is an OVERALL REFLECTION regarding our course, helping us to improve on the things that needs more effort on, and to keep up the efforts that were beneficial.

First of all, blogging has been a good REFLECTOR for me personally. It helps me sum up what i have learnt during a partcular lesson during the week. The blog also acts as an FILE STORAGE where i can always look back and look for whatever is useful for me in the posts written.

The downside however, is the EFFORT required to put in to write a blog post. At times when my hearts' desire is in contrary with my mind, i have a difficult time to push myself to write a blog post as i do not want my post to end up like an essay, ready to be marked by the teacher.

Blogging has helped me in terms of my LANGUAGE SKILLS-where i would always double-check my spellings and sentence structures, CRITICAL THINKING-where i get to internalize the input given during the lesson, as well as TECHNOLOGY SKILLS-where i would include videos and pictures into my post to make it more interesting.

As for the course itself, it has provided much input regarding KNOWING and PREPARING the resources for use in ESL classrooms. I like this course as it is truly relevant to our profession as a primary school teacher. It exposes us to practical TEACHING AIDS that could be beneficial in classrooms as well as how to put the teaching aids into full use.

Though there are no tests or quizzes for this course, the ASSIGNMENTS were truly in the amount that just about exceed our capabilities! It did not help that most of the assignments were assigned nearing the end of the semester and that the due dates are well after our exams. It would benefit us alot if the assignments were evenly distributed along the whole semester.

Overall, my COMPUTING and TECHNOLOGICAL SKILLS before taking up this course may be at the scale of 3 to 4. However, after immersing myself in the techno-world so to speak for the whole semester, i felt that the scale has increased from a mere 3 or 4 to at least an 8 thanks to Ma'am Foziah and coursemates.

Reflection Week 14

It's the last week of classes! Gosh that reality hit like a slap when Ma'am mentioned that she forgot to bring her camera to snap some shots before each of us go our separate ways =')

In spite of the fact that it's the last resources class for us all, the workload still continues, well after our exams in fact. So far we have assignment 3 (lesson plan), assignment 4 (portfolio), as well as a special blog post awaiting us to complete all before the 9th of November, 2009.

The fact that we have so much to accomplish in such a short period of time reminds us all of the importance of good time management. With the exams coming hot on our heels, it is impossible for us to have the luxury to slack back or procrastinate any longer.

The only consequence that we will face would be a harsh one: heartbreak and a very very bad dent on our results! Thus, to avoid these to happen, you bet i'm going to try my best to plan things out, attempt to finish them all, and admist the seemingly impossible tasks, find time for revision!

All the best to my comrades out there! Thanks to Ma'am for a resourceful semester and all that you've offered us. Till then, God bless and good bye!~

Reflection Week 13

Today's class is interesting! Why? Because we have hands-on tasks to accomplish! Nothing sets me on more than an aim and an end ;)


We've been introduced to Microsoft Publisher, not a new software for us techno junkies. However this time, Ma'am Foziah brought us into a new perspective of manipulating the publisher.




All these while we've merely used publisher for the main purpose of creating a brochure for assignment purposes. Ma'am challenged us to view publisher as an aid to us in creating useful teaching aids. Imagine, creating greeting cards, invitation cards, advertisments, menus etc. as teaching aids! How interesting!


After a general introduction to the software, we were left to explore and create a few teaching aids using the software. I created four wonderful products: 2 greeting cards, a menu, and an advertisment.



Through this experience, i'm now more open to the usefulness of publisher and how it could help me enhance my teaching as well as my preparation for teaching. It certainly provides attractive and easily made teaching aids that could save me tonnes of time and effort!

Reflection Week 12

Wonderful week everyone! This week is so much more relaxing compared to last week's class. Today, all of us exhibited our hard efforts: video production. A total of 18 videos were viewed and my personal opinion is that ALL the videos were fabulous!

Above of the creation of Fendy and I. I'm sorry to inform that we did not manage to come up with the video content that we would delivered all these while. We found out that video shooting took up too much of our time, as we were faced with unexpected situations at the same time.

A little comment of the videos we all made: i picked up quite a few language/grammar errors along the way and i sincerely hope that our friends would edit and correct the mistakes. As future English teachers, we have to keep up to the standard and not show our 'bad' side to other. It is even more crucial to do so as we are uploading our videos to YouTube for everyone out there to view!

Other than that, i found that all of us really put in the effort to look for the pictures and video clips, edit them, and nice audios were inserted too. All in all, kudos to all in tuesday's group! All the best to our comrades in the thrusday group! =)

Reflection Week 11

Oh no! This week Ma'am Foziah came in sick. Too add oild to fire, there were little little things like people coming in late, slow responses and so on, making the class atmosphere very tensed =(

Since we from the tuesday group joined the thursday class, the class was almost chaotic with the noise level. Despite of that, the class got on with the thursday class presentations regarding the articles assigned by Ma'am.

When the presentations were done, we thought we could finally break away from the tensed atmosphere. But lo and behold, there're more waiting for us to endure.

Firdaus, our classs rep, suddenly asked us if we remembered that we have an assignment dued on the 15th of October, two weeks from now. Of course, all of us were shocked as we totally forgot about the assignment!

Thus, chaos broke out once again as 'lost' groupmates looked for each other, questions were raised regarding what we should do for the assignment etc. While doreen took up the brave responsibility to coordinated the whole situation.

And so, after an hour or so of discussion and clarification, we got back in our groups, discussed about the assignment task for assignment 2, as well as divided ourselves into another group for assignment 3.

Though the process was nerve-wrecking and tensed, i was gald everything was accomplished by the end of the class. Special thanks our gracious lecturer and class rep for the reminder, my groupmates for their cooperaiton, as well as everyone for making things go smoothly as they were.

Reflection Week 10

Today was quite a day! To start off, we had 5 presentations, all in regards to integrating technology with learning. The titles presented are as follow:

1. Use of technology in teaching & learning (Pushpa Dixit)
2. Brave new digital classroom (Robert J. Blake)
3. Technology profesional development for teachers
4. Internet, technology & teachers
5. Educators and the internet: a case study (Lynne Schrum)

From the presentations i've learnt that integration of technology is absolutely possible, if not crucial for the teaching and learning today. However, to successfully deliver our lessons with the integration of technology requires a great deal of preparation, equipping, suitable pedagogy, as well as the acceptance of learners towards the programme.

To put it simply, teachers today have to be flexible and humble enough to pick up new teaching strategies to cater to the demanding learners. Without doing so, learners with varied learning style would not benefit from the teaching and learning processes.

The next segment of the class was video consultation with Pn Foziah. We showed ma'am our progress of storyboards and had further guidance and advice from ma'am to continue with the prodcution of our video clips.

As for me and my partner, Fendy, we evolved our initial theme of food and racial unity into plainly racial unity. With this simple message, we sought inspiration from a tv commercial by TMnet entitled 'As 1 We Care', as shown below:

As to how we are going to adapt the video and how we are going to present it in our video is for us to know and for you to find out when we are done with our video shoot ;)

While anticipating for our video, i'd like take this opportunity to wish every one of my Muslim friends Selamat Hari Raya, maaf Zahir dan Batin. Enjoy yourselves during the festive season and see you in two weeks time!

Reflection Week 9

Today in class, we were shown several interesting videos from youtube. It was an attractive set induction for the class today as we were glued to the screen, enjoying the scenes flashing before our eyes.

It was after the enjoyment that we were brought back to reality with the instruction to come out with a video production in pairs. Since this is not the first time we were required to crank our creative juices for a video production, we were not quite 'alarmed' by the prospect of being 'directors'. Anyhow, uni life is all about learning through exploring, right?

Together, my partner Fendy and I came up with the initial idea themed 'food and people'. Our idea branched out food from different states in Malaysia, and how these food bring people together.

However, after consulting Pn Foziah with our idea, she guided us to a clearer pathway - Unity in Malaysia through Food. She adviced us to focus more on the issue of unity among the different races in Malaysia, and how food plays a partial role in it.

Our task now is to come out with storyboard next week to show our idea to everyone. Meanwhile, we are looking forward to work on our storyboard, coming with interesting ideas to portray our theme in our video.

Thus, it's time to explore, discover & learn! More of our progress next week.. till then, See ya!