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