Week 10 - Reflection

I felt that every moments that we had in the short course will gradually disappearing as it gets to the end. I could not phrase anything to illustrate how I will miss the great discussions that we had for the last 10 weeks in nicenet. I have undoubtedly master a great number of new knowledge from the interactions in the thread and the excellent lessons that Robert organized. This is my most valuable experience in learning integrating web-technology in language learning.

The week's discussion is very much discussing about the class participants reflection on their most relevant discussion in the course that they will use in their real language class and how they grade the level of technology utilization in their class based on the LoTi taxonomy of teaching innovation. However, in my opinion, the LoTi levels of innovative teaching is somehow does not clearly distinguishable.  One might found that the criteria are described in more than one levels. Nevertheless, having the tiers could help a teacher of knowing what is the expansion of certain technology utilization in their class.

Finally, this will be my last reflection for the course, and I hope I can keep posting to this blog for many other reflection of similar topic.

Thank you Robert and all of the class participants,
I wish great success for everybody. May God bless you all.

Sincerely,
Rahmat

Week 9 - Reflection

I am facing students having similar sytle of learning. My students are mostly having side jobs and having very limited time to study apart from classroom activities. Access to the library is also very limited. The only way to make students to find resources and learn is by directing or assigning them to do internet research. Therefore, project based learning is one of the potential approach to engage my student to devote to learn after the class. In addition to that, project based learning could enable the students to explore more about the discussed topics.

The discussion that we had for week 9 give a very good portrayal of the various learning style that each of us see from our students. Teacher should master the idea of describing the learning style of their students before they perform their role in designing lessons for their students. Many of my classmates give very detail descriptions of their students' learning style and how they conduct their teaching based on them that I can later use in the future.

Rahmat

Week 8 - Reflection

Hi all,
This is my another late reflection post. I'm struggling to get things done in time, but I unfortunately can't. My apartment Internet connection has been very sluggishly slow and eventually off for repair during the weekend and has just got fixed this morning.

This week's discussion was very interesting as Jeff Magoto introduces us ANVILL, the advance Course Management system that incorporate audio-video features that can be accessed freely. I can say that the website is very sophisticated as I managed to wander around the site and see the potential of how this can be effectively used for my context of language class. The idea of providing my students with materials and forums that could enable them to self-learn is among my primary aims. I would like to have a portal site that could give various links and service such as forums that enable students to have a synchronous conference with the teacher.

My only difficulty of getting this to work is the internet connection that are relatively slow in terms of very low bandwidth allocated for transferring data could be the greatest constraints to work with audio video. Teacher must understand the context of technology  condition and availability to serve the class with this idea.

Comments are very welcome

Rahmat

Week 7 - Reflection

Hi readers,
I am terribly sorry for not posting this reflection on time. I was very much occupied by many other academic urgent matters that I need to deal in the previous week. I managed to have a good look out for things that grab my attention from the previous week discussion. The most interesting point discussed in the class last week was regarding to make the best out of having minimum facility for classroom lesson. I picked out that many of my classmates do not have sufficient facility as to start a comprehensive technology integrated lesson. Nevertheless, that would not really be and end of trying to make the best aout of it. Perhaps, having as minimum as having ONLY one single laptop to create a lesson would really be a great issue if one is having more than average small-class number of students.

What to do with one laptop?
Here I would like to share some options for solution that you would need to try to understand as the basis of having only one laptop for a class. Having a single laptop for a number of students, you would likely have a very limited way to share the screen of your laptop if you don't have a big screen as of having a digital projector to project the display on the wall. Perhaps, if this is the situation you might need to choose to have as big laptop screen for you to get it best for the show. Considering laptop price that doubles if it gets bigger thatn 15.4', it seems that that size is the most affordable price for the biggest screen you could get. The idea is that you might have more students to have visible view angle at a close range. Remember that screen of that size will be hard to view in certain close distance.

The next thing you would need to have is to get a wireless mouse/trackballs that would make the teacher to control the input from a possible distance without blocking the sight of your students. A wireless keyboard would also great to use, which by most brands, it comes in a package of wireless mouse and keyboard. To have interactive class, where you need to have your students to work on certain inputs to the computer you are having, you will ease the students just by sitting at their position and move the input device around, without bothering them to rearrange the position.

Next will be about the sound. Indeed, sound coming out from the laptop speakers are relatively small. In addition to that, it would also be heard a bit treble-ish. It is not very good for listening comprehension lesson that you are presenting. Perhaps, as little as a few funds out from your pocket you can purchase a passive speaker with a small amplifier that would really boost the volume for the students to hear it clearly. Besides, it would also tweak the treble to a warmer sound that would help students to distinguish different voices, tone, pitch and various background sounds, in case you are going to deliver a audio clip of a average quality audio recording.

As for the materials, I would recommend to find lots of video and audio streamings on the net that can be downloaded freely, which of course with a little trick that I will write on another post. Some interactive education flash games are also available on the internet be downloaded and played offline. I can say that there are lots of free good stuff that you can use for your lesson with that specification of facility that you have. Also, I can say that to find these materials is relatively easy as we are mostly already familiar with web searching and finding great sites that offers free downloadable items. The hard part will be combining these materials and construct them into a lesson package. Creativity, patience and willingness are the most important quality for the teacher to be able to run the lesson successfully and interestingly. Often teachers with abundant of fancy facilities could not develop any, thus I think no matter of how low is the specification, the super teacher knows how to make it great--of course, with the lessons and all the great experiences that we all have been learning together in here, it will be a great challenge full of excitement.

Have a good day readers,

Best regards,
Rahmat

Week 6 - Reflection

Hi,

I'm struggling to get as much time to follow the discussion for week 6. Unfortunately I'm pretty much left behind. I was having great difficulties of getting connected to the internet because I am super occupied of the tasks and orientation for my initial week of my study.

As always, the week 6 discussions are extremely great. I've read many inspiring comments posted by my classmates regarding engaging students to focus more on the lesson that my they teach. Teaching large number classes is never easy. Teachers will find that there will be a number of students that will feel ignored due to the teacher unable to engage them all. Teacher at this point should be able to grab their interest of learning while in the classroom and should be able to open the opportunity for the students to have additional discussion outside of the class. Materials presented by the teacher should also design carefully and should have the 'hook' to make all students interested to find out more. That is why creating and presenting a really engaging materials will boost the students motivation to find out more about the lesson.

Creating interactive presentation was also very challenging and would give great impact on students' attention to the lesson. Most of younger aged students will love to play with interactive presentation that presented in a form of game. Younger students love this kind of challenge for their lesson. However, I found that older students as in university students will have less excitement of this type of game if it doesn't provide the styles and contents of their interest. Nevertheless, creating a great and exciting slideshow games is a great skill that need to be learned for teachers who want to engage their students with classroom interactive technology.

In addition to interactive slide show presentation, there is a new style of presentation tool that provides a non-linear transitions of its objects and presenting them in sequence of zooming in and out. The presentation is focusing on certain object assigned in the sequence. It is indeed very interesting and can be used alternately with slide show for the class presentation. The name of this tool is prezi. The best way of using prezi is to limit the text and liberate the teachers to explain and interact with the students while having a short phrase or keyword or even an image showed on the screen. This will ease the students to understand without being distracted with various other object on the screen. However, for offline presentation, for example, to post a prezi file online, can have lots of fancy additional objects integrated to enrich the display. One may also integrate a flash game or even flash video from youtube. It is extremely easy and fun, and also it can bring the wow effect on your students that make them excited to follow throughout your presentation.

Rahmat

Week 5 - Reflection

Hi,

There are numerous ways to create a motivating learning environment for your language classes. One of them is by assigning project for the student to discover and learn new lesson autonomously. This week we have an opportunity to learn about how this approach, the Project-Based Learning (PjBL, to avoid confusion to the other approach, PBL (Problem-Based Learning).

Project Based Learning gives a huge opportunity for the students to develop their sense of learning autonomy. The teachers only perform roles as director or moderator that give full access to the students learn by themselves in completing the project. Gaer has given a list of essential elements that the project needs to be geared to the population, students must comprehensively understood of the value of the project they are doing, and flexibility of time is a must.

There has been quite a discussion about these elements and how they can be integrated into classroom. For teachers who are given full access to modify lesson plan of their classes, creating PjBL can be of a great teaching-learning experience. However, for teachers teaching at school that provide pre-set lesson plan can improvise with PjBL with assignment-like project that requires less time consumption.

Adding to the discussion and reading assignment on PjBL, we are also introduced to creating rubric with rubistar. However, I managed to make customized rubric for the lesson plan for Cross Cultural Understanding lesson plan that I presented in the previous week, not with rubistar. I would love to use the rubric feature of zunal webquest. Perhaps, later, I would like to import to my webquest page.

Regards,
Rahmat

Stumbleupon & Delicious are Really “Delicious”

“Have you ever searched for certain information on the internet but instead of getting things that you actually need, you are arrested by time checking one-by-one irrelevant search results with annoying webpage full of irritating ads that loads sluggishly slow and consuming your precious bandwidth?”

Websites, webpages, webtools, webservices are among my able-to-mention features of the internet. Internet feature developers or more popular being called web developers are those who are utilizing internet networking service to publish their creative ideas or services. Not to forget to mention that tons of small and corporate businesses have also jumped online to seek potential consumers by disseminating their virtual advertisement in every space they could possibly afford to stick their logos and attract the internet users to pay a visit to their homepage. Today, this internet has been a comfortable nest for online ads raising revenue that actually outnumbered the ads of other media. Revenue wise this is very potential, but for content-wise, this is annoying.

Search Engines has a mechanism to find keywords of related queries from certain available tags or scripts hosted by a web page. SEO or Search Engine Optimization, the term used in web developing realm to increase chance of webpages' keywords picked by a search engine to be lined-up in search results are actually a trick to fool search engine users to get what they don't want. This is dark side of Internet.

Now, getting back to my headline, Stumbleupon and delicious, as these tools have been discussed intensively in the class disscussion before, are among the solutions to get rational search results of a query. These two tools are not as smart as the giant search crawlers that we have been using for some years. However, they tend to give solution to the needs of relevant search results and the avoid-me-from-junks searching experiences. Stumbleupon is a discovery engine that works quite similar to search engine, but instead of crawling to zillion tons of websites pages, it crawls within its own database. Is it the same with web directory service? Yes, but No. The good part of this website is the original intention of sharing the webpage link within its own members similar to community link sharing. Each user who has joined the Stumbleupon community has options whether to recommend a website/webpage or not. Later, the website recommended by a user will be rated by visiting hit of the community users happened to visit the page and also by the so called machine learning. Stumbleupon machine learning engine has an ability to learn users personal preference of type of specific information. Later, by having lots of stumble! you will likely get the most relevant information that suits your need.

Firefox users can install this addon from this link https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/138

Delicious is a social bookmarking service. The idea was very creative, which enables internet user to share their favorite webpage/links to other internet users out there. Besides of sharing bookmarks of a web page, the tool also provide hit counter of how many delicious members saved the same web links. This feature is very informative as it gives you the detail of who are the members who saved the link, thus later to search similar type of information, a user can visit the member's delicious page and have a peek of thing that become his/her interest. As in the class task, we are encouraged to visit other classmates Delicious page to see what they have bookmarked so far, have a reflection of how excited you become finding websites that you have never thought that they exist before you browsed your classmates' page.

A hint to make these two services to work at best is to combine them. I would recommend my classmates to signup for an account on both aforementioned websites. Once you have the account, you can install the addons that will really save your time in accessing them. I mostly use stumbleupon to discover the websites, and once I found them good enough, I save them to my delicious page. Remember, that using stumble upon is very effective to find a website, but rarely you will stumble upon the same website twice. So, always bookmark the favorite discoveries before you lost their trace.

I hope this post will give you better experience in browsing the internet.

Best regards,
Rahmat

Week 4 - Reflection

Hi,

I was pretty much overwhelmed with my extensive daily routine in this week, which has limited me to post comments in the classroom's discussion board. However, I have read great and creative ideas from my classmates in this week's discussions. The lesson plan was the most interesting of all. I have to admit that creating lesson plan was the most painstaking process for me in preparing the class because I never hold a class in a full-term before. Serving as assistant lecturer in my University, I have to be more opened to analyzing the lesson plans of the real lecturer of the course. Now, having great intention to share new ideas of utilizing internet resources with my students, I have gathered lots of fruitful concept of improvements for my teaching sessions with the preexisted lesson plan or maybe with my own lesson plan.

The benefit of having variety of internet resources to support a specific skill of language-learning lesson is that the students are not bewildered with the mere instructions given by the teacher or textbooks. Students are free to gather more information on the related lesson to enrich their comprehension. Therefore, besides having sufficient information to their inquiries from exploring the internet, the students tend to gain more insights and open their channels to discoveries of other related potential information, which later will develop schemata for future learnings. I always motivate students to experience learning autonomously. My future lesson plan will always have suggestion of additional resources accessible on the internet that the students need to explore by themselves. I am convinced that once the students have absorbed the chemistry of autonomous learning by exploring internet, they will gradually intensify their inquiries on the subject that will enhance their skills in language learning.

Best regards,
Rahmat

Week 3 - Reflection

This week's disscussions has brought me realizing that there are lots of undiscovered internet features that I have not known shared by my classmates. I considered myself very active in finding new 'magical' internet features before, but this time I have to admit that I have had skipped many interesting websites that could actually give more benefits for language learning activities.

Sharing bookmarks on the net can be very exciting if you are sharing with people with similar interest. Delicious as one of the most popular online bookmark sharing tool provides a quick access to get your bookmark saved on the net, where you can easily retrieve them on other internet connected computer. To find interesting websites, I use stumbleupon, and once I find interesting websites, I keep it in my delicious account.  This week I cannot help myself from not taking a shot viewing my other classmates' saved bookmark and soon I become overwhelmed with such amazing collection they have.

Another thing that I learned in the third week is about authentic materials for language learning. Lindsay Miller proposed wide choices of utilizing authentic materials for English listening practice class, which can evoke a more serious approach in teaching English listening. The idea of presenting authentic materials to enable students to perceive the natural English usage is an important objective of teaching the language. Most of textbooks have been adjusted for foreign listeners. The spoken text rate has been reduced and lots of natural features of real spoken text have been edited, which make the listening material to be less natural. I also found interesting discussions brought by Shahnoza and Nada that introducing students with different kind of listening material, designing it to suit with specific activities will give a huge advantage for the students to learn more vocabularies and gain more natural listening skill. Overall, week three has given a clearer picture on the potential activities to design for the students and what are the expected behavior that want the students to show after we integrate the technology in the English learning activities, especially in Listening and Speaking .

Rahmat

Week 2 - Reflection

Previously, in week one we are adjusting with many new tools to be constantly used throughout the course. And this week of class, we are guided to learn more serious matters. The most interesting topic discussed in week two is about utilizing web search engine for academic needs. As my previous post, I managed to learn how these thousands search engines on the web can actually give you better search results. As what everyone experienced and learned, Google is everyone favorite, nobody needs to argue about it.

In line with the discussion about search engines, there is a very informative article in Noodletools.com that actually offers a quite interesting discussion in the class. The article gives very detailed categories of information needed and the suitable search engine that will give more accurate search results. Some search engines are happened to be some of the class members' favorite search tool. I managed to try education.iseek.com, sweetsearch.com, wikipedia.org, idebate.org, ask.com, intute.ac.uk, and biography.com, which are recommended by some of the class members. All the mentioned search services offer good results. And as for Wikipedia, there are some arguments on the net that the information it provides is not trusted, which I believe to be too naive to judge. Needless to say, Wikipedia has helped many students and teachers to build the overall picture of the information they are looking for. Noodletools has a positive reason to include this web service in the list. Nevertheless, I believe that noodletools should also include web directory search, the open directory project, dmoz.org. This website is a directory portal that enables the user to search for specific information within the website's directory collections. Similar kind of directory portal is as well featured by delicious.com based on internet users' submitted favorite bookmarks.

Another topic that I learned in the second week is about developing learning objective of a class course. The ABCD style is not that new to me. I have had some discussions with my colleagues in the university where I teach regarding this learning objective model. By reading my classmates' ABCD learning objective, I have learned more about how to develop a lesson that enables the teacher to see the concrete behavior of the students after they had a series of teaching learning interaction in the class. I also learned that the objective must be specific, and measurable. Now I am trying my best to link the two discussion about describing a class/lesson and the ABCD learning objective that will give a stronger concept about integrating internet media technology and various webskills in the class with a decent learning objective. I can't wait to get into week three. I believe the class has lots greater ideas to offer in the upcoming topics. Thank you for reading.

Best,
Rahmat

Smart-Searching The Web

Searching for specific information in the Internet can be a quite an interesting thing to ponder. One could have thought that the subject to search is not available in the net, but on the contrary one could have to really dig through magnanimous list of result entries to choose for the appropriate needs. I bet that the second thought could spun your head.
Google, as the most popular and powerful search engine must not be deleted from your bookmark. Indeed some Web browsers has set this search engine as the default homepage of the browser. Moreover, some of those who are new to the Internet might say "I never opened any other websites beside google. I can find almost everything in that website!" I must admit, when I was first introduced to using Internet in 2000, i thought catcha.com is the website that host every single information that I needed, which later appeared only a search engine portal. Very sad, that the web search service of catcha.com is no longer available today. As I was trying search for information about catcha.com, I found one interesting blog that lists popular search engines in the 90s with screenshots of the front page that could bring us nostalgia. Here is the link.

In order for one to know how to effectively find specific information in the Internet, one should know the feature of web searching. Apart from google being the biggest search engine today, there are other websites that provide searching service. There are three major kind of search service in the Internet; Web Directory Search, Crawler Search engine, and Meta Search Engine.

Directory search portal offers searches for their web directory database, which are mostly has been stored in the portal database and the directory are grouped into categories. Categories are often provided with subcategories, and some of this service providers allows specific tag to make people able to search the subcategories in the directory. This kind of searching will give great advantages for internet users who don't really know how to phrase their search queries. They can just easily surf into directories listed in the portal and find the final list of the relevant links that they need to open. An example of this type of search portal is www.dmoz.org. To get a website listed in the directory, the webmaster needs to submit the url along with the title and the brief description of the of the website. Just try to find some interesting links for Instructional technology. If you manage it right you will get links of website/service with a very helpful short descriptions of the website.

The second major kind of websearch is the meta searching engine. This kind of search engine search for keywords of the websites' meta keyword tag. Meta search is very effective, as one could find exactly what description that the website has. The potential of getting relevant search results can be achieved better. But this kind of search is no longer popular. Most of the websearch analyst say that the meta search is dead even though the service is still available. The best known meta search engine is www.metacrawler.com. Good thing about metacrawler is that besides it tries to find information of a website, it also tries to find the information from today's popular search engines, like google, altavista, yahoo, etc. One can also publish their website google and yahoo to make meta-crawl based engine to be able to find the website's information. It is an interesting way to get your sites recognized by search engines. You can find more interesting information about meta search in the link below.
www.bestsearchers.com
www.ehow.com
www.searchenginewatch.com

The third type of  web search engine is the Crawler Search Engine, which comes as the most popular nowadays. This type of engine is capable to retrieve keywords or phrases from the webpage.  To find the desired information, one only needs to type the keywords, and to narrow down the search, one can use phrases. The search engine will collect information from websites page headers and also dig into the documents within the website. This search type's most popular service today is google.com. Google.com works like a spider that regularly scour the Internet and make a listing of index of every webpage it finds. Good thing about this kind of search is that it the website that had been indexed is regularly examined. The index list of  webpages is always updated by the engine. Webmasters can optimize their websites to get the 'spider' to be more often monitored the website that they administrate by making optimization called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This optimization can make the website to get higher search engine position. Higher search engine position can attract more visits; more visits will attract advertisers; more ads will give you better chance to get extra money from publishing your web. In short, no one would really browse search result page 874, not even search result page 9. You?

Actually there are some other known search service called the sponsored search. The sponsored search is often offered by the search engine to make people or corporates who are eager to get their website more often being reviewed and indexed. The sponsored search is relatively the same with other search engine service, which the difference was that the sponsored search is the premium service offered for those who are willing to pay to get their website link and description 'stickied' on the top first search page result.

Another interesting way to get fast, relevant, bountiful search result is also available in the Internet. It is way more effective than the aforementioned search services. But I might think it is too risky to post here. The search service is rather controversial. Surely, I will someday post and reviewed the service in other time.

Thanks for reading. As always, comments are always appreciated.

Rahmat

Annoying empty space at the bottom of your post

I was having trouble getting rid of the empty space right under my signature in my posts. I've tried to check for numerous time to make sure that I did not hit enter or line break when I was writing my post. My signature appeared precisely at the bottom of the compose text box. I tried to move the cursor, but it won't move, as that confirm that I had deleted the lines below my signature. Perhaps, this screen shot will show you what was the issue that I want to post here.

 

Week 1 - Reflection

Web services used in week 1

There are lots of new things that I’ve learned through the discussion in the first week of the Web Skills course. Even though I have some experience in integrating web-technologies for my class, but I can easily confirm that the course has given me more insights in organizing essential phase of the technology integration; setting up course guidelines. Setting up the course includes the first stage of getting all the students to fully understand about the objective of the class. In addition to that, the teachers who are in charge of the class should always be responsive to any queries addressed by the students by keeping in mind that integrating this kind of technology are completely new for most of our students. Besides, the technology itself is not always performing at its best. Internet connection, for example, is not always fast, it lags in most of the time. Fast Internet connection is rare in most of the place in various countries, in the city that I live for example, Broadband Internet connection are mostly only available in campuses, and big corporate offices, which those who want to have a reliable personal Internet connection should always pay a relatively expensive cost. The conclusion is that not all of our students can get. Thus, we might need set a steady slow pace at first, and see how they can catch up.

Anybody Can Do with WYSIWYG

The development of the technology of On-line Journal has now taken to a more developed stage. Before, web pages were developed by companies and web developers who has expertise in scripting hyper-text mark-up language and other web scripting language. To get a content on the Internet costs money. But later, as the market is reaching a wider Internet user, without spending money out of ones wallet, anybody can have their own personal website, where the owner can easily administrate, organize the contents and getting copyright of anything they publish without getting confused by the scripting.

Blogger, simple yet powerful

While having nice refreshing sips of traditional coffee in "warung kopi"(*) with wireless internet connection, I managed to play around with the look of my blog. In addition to that, I made a manga version of my profile picture. Check it out!

 

..87% looked alike. 

My very first post!

Hi all,
I am very interested in taking part in this course. Since the starting day of the orientation, I already felt full of excitement.  I can't wait to get into the main course to start and getting the best of it. I really hope to meet all of the participants and the instructors. Wish all of you the best.