Week 10: Full of anticipation

Hi! Today was another fun-filling and exciting day. Exciting as I think most of us are heading towards our home sweet home soon. As for today's lecture, we had presented the articles which were assigned to us last week. From the presentions, I've really gained a lot of in-depth insights on the importance of preservice teachers to equip ourselves with the knowledge of technology and how they should integrate it into the lesson. In these 9 weeks, I realised that technology can really do wonders in teaching as there are many educational softwares, websites or programmes that can be explored to enhance and motivate pupils' interest to learn. I found that the presentations done by Doreen's group was very clear and informational as they had shown vivid examples as to how technology can be brought into the classroom, and they also explained in detail on how technology can improve pupils' listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Now, I have more ideas on how to integrate technology into language teaching. For example, I deem that blogging is one of the ways to motivate pupils to write, as young children generally dislike traditional method of teaching, and the use of technology would definitely capture the attention of these active, bubbly and fun-seeking young learners.
For the second part of the lesson, Ma'am showed us a short advertisement entitled "recycle". I was flabbergasted upon watching this awesome video. Although it was a very short video, which was merely 30 seconds, the idea was marvelous and catchy. The producer managed to deliver the message "it's never too young to start recycling" within 30 seconds. This video featured a boy who sends a question to one of the girls, asking her whether she loves him or not, but the girl rejects him. Then he erases the message and resends the question to another girl. Wow, the idea behind that was simply marvelous! To those who have missed this cute video, you can watch it here.

Before the class ended, Ma'am also commented on some of our storyboards for our video editing assignment. My pair, Aizat and I managed to come out with our story board too, but we didn't have sufficient time to show it to Ma'am. Basically, our video's topic is "It's never too late to express your love". Our video focuses on love towards our family and friends. As we realised that nowadays, people find it hard or awkward to express or show their love, and the word "love" is seldom uttered to people who care for us, especially our parents. So, with this video, we hope that it will bring a sense of awareness especially to youngsters to show their love towards their parents, and also their friends, God, and their loved ones. In our video, we will insert some children's opinions about love. We've found a few quotatios, and we found that they are very meaningful. With this, we hope that we will get our message accrossed. To those who are also in the midst of producing their videos, all the best ya!
Lastly, I would like to wish all my fellow friends and lecturers happy holiday and Selamat Hari Raya! Enjoy your holiday!

Video editing here we come!

Hi there. Today's lecture was yet another "eye-opener" session for me. This week, our assignment is to produce a video! Video, I thought, not again, we had just finished producing one video for our technology assignment! However, as Ma'am revealed one of her all time favourite 'ella and wu chun's' video clip, I was totally impressed by the video edited by their fans! The video managed to capture our attention, and upon seeing their work, I am fully motivated to create one as well!

Besides that, Ma'am also showed us some video editing softwares that can be utilised for this assignment. One of them was one true media. Before this, I only know windows movie maker, power director and photostory. This time around I am going to try something new! Sounds interesting and challenging isn't it?
As I browsed through the net, I found one particular fan made video which had captured my attention. It is a video created by the fan of some hong kong drama series. They had merged some scenes in a few dramas and combined into one short meaningful video. The song that they chose really goes well with the video. Maybe this is not the best video, but the efforts that they have put in deserve a thumbs up! You can watch the video that I've attached below.
Besides that, we were also asked to work in pairs of different gender. So, this time I'm no longer working with my sweet female partner, but I'm working with a new partner from different gender. Luckily, I managed to find one partner, who is Aizat. I have worked with him previously and he is a nice partner to work with! So, I hope we can produce a good video!
So far, we have brainstormed some ideas and we found that creating a video isn't an easy job. So, we will try to squeeze some creative juice out of our little brains and hopefully we can produce a video which can really inspire our audience. Really look forward to start this assignment.
I believe strongly that 'with great determination, nothing is impossible!' So, best of luck, my friends! Enjoy watching the video! :)

Week 8=housekeeping!

Today's lecture was all about housekeeping. We've finally handed in our assignments. So far, everything is going smoothly, and I'm glad that all of us managed to complete the tasks on time! However, some of us did not follow the instructions given by Ma'am when handing in assignment, thus we had to spend the whole lecture arranging and sorting things back to order.
As for this assignment, I've really gained a lot of hands-on experience on how to edit audio. Indeed, I found that this assignment was quite fun. I think we are half way to become professional audio editors now.Haha! So far, I've learnt to use Audacity and music editing master. I found that these softwares are quite user friendly and we can basically edit all sorts of audio files. They are quite easy to use and they have all the tools we need to enhance the quality of audio files. It also enables us to merge two songs and add effects to the songs. Quite cool isn't it?
So for next week, we will be learning video editing. Wow, we are gonna be all-rounded teachers! I really look forward to the lecture next week and hopefully we can gain something new and useful. Okay, that's all for now and have a nice day!