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.