The Final Remark

A new week is now no longer to mark a new beginning and new tasks for this semester is coming to its end. Assignments were all completed and handed in. Time really flies. For this semester has come to its end, it also marks a curtain fall for this course; GGGE1155 Computer in Education. It is ended but the knowledge that I gained will never expire. There are tons of bittersweet and memorable experiences throughout this course.

Personally, I shall say that through this course I have grown a lot in computers and technologies. From a person who was pretty naïve about the skills and applications, I am now a total opposite of who I was before. For this while, I have been utilizing internet and computers for social networking and assignment purposes but the skills I have applied can be considered as the basic skills.

Started off with minimal skills and knowledge about ICT, I told myself not to take this course for granted for it is not going to be as easy as we spell out its name. As what has been mentioned in the course proforma, we have 9 assignments altogether to be completed within only 7 weeks of lecture. I was shocked for this was the first time I have 9 assignments in hand for only one particular course. However, now I shall say that I am proud to be able to complete all the assignments within the time frame given with endless guidance and support from our course coordinator, Dr. Siti Fatimah and our own lecturer, Mr. Fariduddin. A thousand of gratitude I praised to both of them.

My diary for assignments started off as early as in the first week of lecture. It was a light start actually for we only had to sign up for numerous accounts on the net and these accounts had to be official accounts. They were Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Groups, Facebook, Facebook Group and lastly to create a personal blog for our weekly reflections. For this course, we were required to work in pairs and there were 10 topics to be chosen. I paired up with Vanessa Cordilia and we chose the 8^th topic that was Web 2.0 in Education. Since that, every new week marked new assignments and experiences. Started off with doing an article regarding the topic chosen and uploaded it to Facebook Document in our personal Facebook Group, I realized that Facebook is not only a platform for social networking. It actually can be utilized as a discussion site for educational purposes as every members of the group can post any comments and questions. Then we moved on to learn about Learning/Content Management System (L/CMS). It was followed by writing a literature review on the topic Web 2.0 in Education. After that, we came across the toughest assignment that was the Mini Research. It was really lots of new skill that I have learnt throughout managing the mini research; from designing the questionnaire till writing the report. I think one of the most outstanding parts of it that the other researchers seldom utilize was to design and distribute the questionnaire via online (SurveyMonkey and Google Docs). Normally, the respondents are being approached manually and by face to face interaction but for our research, all the responses from the respondents are being recorded automatically via online. That was really a meaningful experience for all of us in preparing us for a bigger research in the future. Then, saying goodbye to mini research, mark a “hi” to the sixth assignment that was to design a brochure and booklet. It was followed by the multimedia week in which we have to prepare a power point slides using Open Office Impress and to create a courseware after learning to edit songs to be used as the background music for the short movie clip that we created using Windows Movie Maker. It was such a great experience to do create multimedia courseware. After finishing that, we moved on to a more serious assignment which was related to spreadsheet. We were to plan a one year financial management using Open Office Calc. To do that, I felt like I was an accountant. (sigh). Yeah, at least I know a bit about the work of an accountant even though I guess that was just a small partition of their actual work. Moving from the job of an accountant, we faced the real job and responsibility as a teacher. We created students’ score and grade using Microsoft Excel. The skills learnt are very crucial to be utilized in school later. And finally, as the concluding assignment, we were to design a database.

There are really a lot of meaningful skills and knowledge I gained in a short period of time. Seven weeks time flies just like that. One of the most crucial thing I learnt was good time management. Despite the tiredness of completing all the assignments in a short period of time, I learnt to manage my time wisely. Every seconds and minutes were like gold to me. It is very precious and I should not simply waste it. Apart from that, what I have discovered about learning ICT is, it is not an instant, all concrete and an express thing to be learnt. We learnt about ICT directly or indirectly, formally and informally. Learning about ICT is continuous. The skills learnt need to be practiced and renewed from time to time. Like the golden phrase, “PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT”. Besides, I guess there is no such thing as failure in ICT. Every mistakes and unfamiliarity has a solution for it with the permit of a true determination and real patience. It is all about self-exploration. Grasp the interest and determination and you will never be upset by it. Learning ICT I shall say is wonderful, interesting and fun.

As a teacher-to-be, it is very important for me to be proficient and competent in ICT. To make the lesson interesting, I have to utilize various skills such as Microsoft Powerpoint, Open Office Impress, videos and etcetera in order to grab the students’ interest and attention to the lesson. Besides, for database purposes, we really owe ICT for the convenience it served for teachers to record students’ data, score, and grade.

For the concluding remark, I would like to take this opportunity to bid a token of gratitude and appreciation to our course coordinator, Dr. Siti Fatimah for her endless support and guidance to us even though it was all done virtually for we are separated by the distance. Besides, a thousand of appreciation I channeled to Mr. Mohd. Fariddudin Wajdi Anthony for all the knowledge and experiences that he has shared sincerely. Last but not least, I would like to thank my partner, Vanessa Cordilia ak Paterson for all the cooperation and support while doing our assignment. Thanks for always being there with me in sweetness and in pain. I owe you much for that. Lastly, THANK YOU so much to all my coursemates for the endless sharing of knowledge. Seven weeks of course may seem very short but the experience I gained is so precious that it is irreplaceable. 

Reflection Week 7b (Assignment 9)

Database

The super hard effort to complete the assignment for this week continued. Besides doing spreadsheets, we were also being instructed to create a database using Open Office Base (Assignment 9). This was another thing that I have never utilized before. But, nevermind; LEARN, LEARN AND LEARN. Despite my unfamiliarity with the applications, I was so grateful that the instructions given were very comprehensible.  We could clearly see what were the things that we have to do. And for this particular task, I owe it to our beloved lecturer Mr. Fariduddin. He was so dedicated to assist and guide us endlessly. I truly appreciate it form the very bottom of my heart.

Included in the instructions for Week 7b, we are supposed to:

FIRST

1. 1.      Tables: Create table in Design view ( 4 separate tables and using the students ID as the primary key)

v  Student table

v  Parent table

v  Curriculum table

v  Co-curriculum table

NEXT

1. 2.      Tool-> Relationship: Create relationships between the tables by linking the students ID.

AFTER THAT

1. 3.      Use wizard to Create Form:

v  Student form

v  Parent form

v  Curriculum form

v  Co-curriculum form

THEN

1. 4.      Data entry using Form
2. 5.      Create several queries from the database
3. 6.      Create reports based on the queries

By referring to those outlines, I encountered fewer problems in creating the database even though it was my very first time to create a database. I shall never say I have totally zero problem as it was my first time utilizing it so I didn’t even know how to start at first. I owe my work much to Mr. Fariduddin.

            Database is another crucial thing for teachers to know. By using this, it is easier for teachers and school administration to keep the data for each student. Imagine if we were to use a manual file for each student to store their database, teachers’ life will be miserable and the office will be flooded by files of hundreds and maybe thousands of students.

I am proud to mention that I am very fortunate to learn this skill as early as now. Not everybody is given the same chance to learn and explore computers and technologies comprehensively as what have I experienced while doing the assignments. The skills shall be kept tight in my mind and I definitely being applied during my working time in a few more years to go.

<I have uploaded the database that we have done to my Yahoo Group.>

*Happy reading* 

Reflection Week 7a (Assignment 8a & 8b)

*Speadsheets*

Just by a few blinks, the enjoyable week of working on multimedia presentation finally gone. Now, we have to change our mood to a more serious mode for we have three sets of assignments needed to be done by this week by the mean that before we sit for our final examination. I know it sounded pretty a lot and burdening but for me there is no such thing as so call “burden” when we are students who are in the journey of seeking and discovering knowledge.

            As an opening for this week task, we were instructed to work on a one year personal financial management (income, expenses and balance) which was to be our Assignment 8a and upload it to Google Docs when completed.  For this task, we were required to work upon it using Open Office Spreadsheet. Again, this was a new thing to me. As Open Office Impress, I have never used Open Office Spreadsheet before. So I guess, that was the challenge for teachers to keep on moving with technology advancement and always ready for new skills learning and exploring. First of all, before I started with the task, I should at least know what is a spreadsheet all about. From my reading, it has come to my knowledge that a spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet, (Wikipedia). In a spreadsheet application, each value sits in a cell. We can define what type of data is in each cell and how different cells depend on one another. The relationships between cells are called formulas and the names of the cells are called labels.

Next, lets move on to the task. The first step was to record the one year income and expense hence calculating the balance for each month in Open Office Spreadsheet. After that, what we all need to do was to link the formula between the sheets. To record the data might be sound a piece of cake but to link the formula between the sheets, that baffled my head a bit. I finished up the data record and then searched for how to link the formula between the sheets in Google search engine. I managed to find it in a blog so I started to make the link from sheet to sheet. It was not hard actually. Within 15 minutes, I succeeded to make the balance for each month to be able to be added to the balance for the consecutive months. With that, the objective for this assignment was accomplished!

But, that was simply not a sign for relaxing. Realizing that the examination was just a few days to come and I need to do more intensive revision, I have to deny my feeling to take a rest for a while. Without further ado, my partner and I moved on to Assignment 8b, the second assignment for Week 7a. For this assignment, we were still going to work on spreadsheet but for this time, we were to do it using Microsoft Excel. As what was instructed, we were to plan, create and edit a spreadsheet of students’ score and grade analysis. There were a number of functions and formulas that we have to utilize such as VLOOKUP, STDEV, COUNTIF and AVERAGE. These functions are useful fro it allows values of data to be read automatically from the given range. Knowing that nowadays teachers utilize those functions to record students’ examination score and grade, we are consider fortunate to be exposed early to those vital skills. Unlike teachers in schools, some of them are struggling to learn how to utilize those skills in order to catch up with the advance technology and education at the time they are likely to be called as veteran teachers. It sounds pitiful but that is the real life as a teacher. Education globalized from days to days, years to years thus the learning process of new things will never end. By using Microsoft Excel to record students’ score and grade, it makes teachers life easier. We don’t have to insert and calculate the scores manually as in Excel everything is easier and more accurate. We can even use graphs and charts to display the data analysis.

I have learnt so much valuable things from spreadsheet application. It was not something familiar to me for I didn’t take accounting during my secondary school and I personally seldom use it. So far as I remember, I learnt to do a spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel during my first semester of foundation which was about two years back. So now, I am refreshing back some of the skills that I have learnt before. I am very and very sure that those skills are very crucial by the time I am being placed in school later. Hence, learning it was not a waste of time but it was a precious experience as a student.

*Happy reading*

Reflection Week 6

Life has been busier than I ever thought. This week was hectic. Somehow I felt worn out over the endless in assignments. For this week itself, there were four assignments need to be done and handed in. Personally, I am worried about the exam. It is just around the corner and yet we still have loads of assignments to be done. I could hardly spare my time for revision.

But whatever it is, life has to go on. The hectic schedule has to be endured as patient as I could. This week was the sixth week of lecture and we were given the seventh assignment (Assignment 7a & Assignment 7b) to complete. Assignment 7a was about the application of Open Office Impress. We have to do a power point slides based on our Mini Research report using Open Office Impress instead of Microsoft Powerpoint. It was indeed pretty challenging at the first place for I have never utilized Open Office Impress for doing powerpoint slides before. For all this while, I have been fully dependent on Microsoft Powerpoint. Well I guessed that was a good effort by Dr. Siti Fatimah, our course coordinator for assigning us to use Open Office Impress. For me, it was not burdening. Instead, it gave me a good experience to improve my ICT skills. As a teacher, I must not merely have a sound knowledge of my major but also the other areas such as ICT.

I explored the application of Open Office Impress as much as I afford to. The assignment was not really hard to do. It was just pretty time-consuming for I have to import, adapt and simplify the information in our report to for the slides.  To fulfill the criteria of good presentation slides, I added few relevant pictures into my slides. Besides, I also employed some of the basic shapes available and customized animation for selected pictures and graphic organizer. After a few hours of exploration and skills application, I managed to complete a powerpoint presentation of 20 slides all together. After that, when it was well browsed and edited by me and my partner, I then uploaded the document to Google Docs for sharing with course mates.

Nonetheless, for Assignment 7b we were assigned to create a video based on our first assignment by utilizing Windows Movie Maker. But before that, we were earlier on being taught by Mr. Fariduddin on audio editing using software known as Audacity. The software was downloaded from the internet for free. During lecture, he taught us on how to cut the audio, make variety in pitch and frequency and a few more skills. The edited audio was then being used as the background music for the video. It was challenging but seriously fun. The skills gained are precious. With the skills, I am sure that I will be able to make my lesson more exciting and heart capturing in the future.

*Happy reading*

Mini Research

* This actually should come before my reflection for Week 5. However, I could not upload it on time due to some constraints. Hope to be noted by all..Thank you.

It was such a momentous experience to carry out a mini research when we are still so call freshie.  It may seem too early for some but personally I think it is not. Time does not matter. The most precious thing is the experienced we gained.

The mini research was conducted as a part of our assignment. It was the combination of the surveys that we have done before based on the same topic as our previous assignments; Web 2.0 in educations.  As what was being required, the survey was done anonymously and randomly via online and also manually distributed questionnaire. The data collected was recorded in SPSS.

For it was the very first time we conducted a mini research, it was kind of hard to be done by us. Fortunately we were working in pairs. So that lightened the burden. Special thanks to my partner Vanessa Cordilia for the full cooperation and commitment in managing the task. 

The report was to be written in journal format. We were kind of choking to death to see the list of the things to be written in the report. There were the abstract, introduction, literature review, research method, findings, discussion, recommendation and conclusion. Since we were working in pair, we divided the task equally among us. The first four were to be done by Vanessa and the next four were my responsibility.

It really took me days to complete the parts of mine. Findings and discussion were the hardest parts to be done. I got dizzy over the charts, tables and graphs. But slowly over the time, I successfully managed to make it done.

Even though it was undeniably tough, I am personally glad that my working partner and I managed to write a complete and informative report for our mini research. Our aims and objectives were generally achieved. Sincerely, I can say that we are very fortunate to be given such an early exposure to carry out research and write a report of in a journal format. This is very helpful to prepare us for the bigger research to be done for our thesis later. Special gratitude addresses to our lecturer, Mr.Fariduddin for the supportive guidance given.

The full report of the mini research can be accessed at: http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/0ARGTpsqsZZWs33E5aR7F5NoTiDC5ZcdmHqDrU526SVin4rVBQ-SLH76Wru3IxfAGjgVGK2oXcX8Y88TE9GlNw/Week%204/Mini%20research%20report.pdf

*Happy reading*

Reflection Week 5

Every passing weeks marks new beginnings for me and definitely there is more knowledge to be swallowed and digested. Again this time I would like to restate that our hectic life seems to be endless. The busy schedule is well-blended with me and seems to be in an endless continuum. The semester is coming to its end, the exam is just around the corner and still there are tons of assignments that are yet to be done. Auspiciously, the assignments given for this week was not as tough as the previous. Personally I think that the previous assignment on Mini Research was the toughest in the list. For this week onwards, we were instructed to design a brochure (Assignment 6a) as well as a booklet (Assignment 6b) related to the topic that we have chosen for Assignment 1, 4 and 5. Fuh! At least it was not as tough as what we had for the previous week. So, there should be no problem for us to make it done in just a day or the most two days as we were again working in pairs.

The brochure to be planned, designed and created was to be done in Microsoft Publisher. For I have ever created few brochures using Microsoft Publisher before, I faced no obscurity to manage the task. Plus, I was assisted by my loyal working partner; Vanessa Cordilia, things got lighter. Within less than one hour, a simple, attractive and informative brochure has been produced by the two of us. The content of the brochure was roughly about the gist of what we have done for the previous assignments focusing on the topic Web 2.0.  

Without further ado, we proceeded to the next task that was to plan, design and create a booklet the moment we have done with our brochure. As what has been instructed, the booklet was to be created using book fold function in Microsoft Word. Perhaps, this task was a bit challenging than creating a brochure for I have zero experience in creating one before. So do my partner Vanessa. Not to make that as an excuse for us to delay the task, we seek assistance from peers and also Mr. Fariduddin, our lecturer. After a few moments of briefing and guidance, we managed to proceed with the booklet planning and designing independently. For the booklet, the content was actually more or less the same as what we had done in our brochure. It was just the amount of information to be included that distinguished it from brochure. Our booklet was just nice in length. It was not too long and not too short. It was just nice to be flipped through and read as well.

Not to be missed out sharing with all of you, before we proceeded with the given assignments, we were exposed to various kinds of applications available for graphic designed. First of all, we were introduced to the learning about 2D graphic types such as bitmap and vector images. Besides that, we were exposed to the various kinds of image file format. There were JPEG, GIFF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, WMF and etcetera. A few links were given by Dr. Siti Fatimah for further reading and exploration about all those applications. Not only that, we were asked to explore the drawing facilities such as shapes and SmartArt in Microsoft Powerpoint and to come up with graphic drawings which would be used later in our brochure and booklet design.

Graphics applications available are very interesting and fun to be explored. It might be trifles to some but for designers, graphics cherish their life of designing. And I would say that I am very lucky to be given chance to explore those things in hands on my own. Even though I am not an ICT-savvy person but I take all the obscurities in learning ICT as a challenge for me to get better. That is what we call the process of learning. No regrets of spending my time exploring for I could empower my knowledge and enhance my skills in ICT. Teachers should be versatile. Am I right?

*Happy reading* 

Reflection Week 4

Our hectic life seems to be endless. So sad that we just have the chance to breathe freely for a few hours then we were showered again by another weekly assignment. The 5^th assignment was being e-mailed by Dr. Siti Fatimah, our course coordinator on Monday. Frankly speaking, we were all kind of lost in the mist after reading the instruction. Everything mentioned was new things to us. Oh yes, before it is too late to be mentioned, actually for the fourth week, we were doing to tasks at a time. In the PDF document that are being uploaded in GE1155 Yahoo!Groups, the assignments were labeled as Week 3b and Week 4. These two assignments were closely related to each other. So, regarding those two tasks, we were required to designed questionnaires allied to our initial topic chosen at the first place that was Web 2.0 in education.

            Before we moved further into the assignments, we were instructed to sign up for Survey Monkey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/ for the purpose of doing our Pilot Test which will be distributed to the course mates in IPGKS. The result for the survey was not recorded because it was to get us familiar with survey forms, methods to carry it out and how to get people to respond. These were all to prepare us for the next bigger and more challenging task in assignment Week 4. For the questionnaire in the Survey Monkey, we were only required to design 10 multi choice questions based on the topic Web 2.0 in education.

            After that, we were to design questionnaire in the Google Docs spreadsheet; checkboxes, multiple choice and scale questions. Not to be denied, it was very challenging to design questionnaire in Google Docs spreadsheet because we need to do it one by one. All we need was full cooperation as we were working in pairs and also endless patience. Done with designing the questions, then it was time to share the questionnaire with course mates in IPGKS as well as in IPGKDRI. Truly speaking, it did take us a few days to get the responses from them. The late respond was not to be put as a blame on them because we understand that each and everyone of us was very busy to get ours done first. Late respond was not a big deal to us. In fact, we appreciated their time and energy spent to respond to our questionnaires. Besides distributing the questionnaires to course mates via e-mail, we also made 10 printed copies of it and distributed them to 10 respondents in the institute. And for this, I should grand a million of thanks to our 10 juniors from TESL 1 and TESL 2 for willingly answering the questions.   

            The next step for this assignment was to collect all the responses, and key in the data in SPSS. Seriously I was lost at the first place for I have never used SPSS before. I just didn’t have any ideas on how to use the application. Fortunately, Mr. Fariduddin was never giving up in guiding us. For the analysis in the Google Docs spreadsheet, it was pretty easy for the reason that we could download the table from Google Docs and open it in Microsoft excel with merely a few clicks. After saving the excel thingy, we could open the converted data in SPSS. It was a real satisfaction in me for I am now able to apply the skills taught by Mr. Fariduddin independently.