ZAHIDAH'S BLOG

I had a rocky beginning for my Powtoon. The story began with me trying to create Powtoon and do my part. For the first half an hour, it was good. I managed to do almost half of it until the WiFi starting to slow. Too slow up to a point where I couldn’t even load the homepage. I asked my group mates if they encountered the same problem as me, and most of them said they do. After that, I gave up trying to load the page and went to sleep and just pray that all my work has been auto-saved. The next day, I logged in to my account and thank the lords of auto-save, my project is still there!!!!!! When we told Madam Azida about our issues with the Powtoon, she told us that most probably it occurred because we have to ensure it was auto-saved every time we made the changes. This is because if we did not do it every now and then, the server might crash due to it trying to save a lot of info at the same time resulting it to crash and the webpage couldn’t be loaded. On that day, w...

Greetings earthlings! So this is the first time I didn’t go to class for degree because I’m down with fever. But I got bored after only one day. But luckily I didn’t miss much since this week is mostly about our educational video assignment. For this assignment, we are required to create an educational video about any topic. It can be about grammar, tips and also animals! In order to create the video, we have to use Powtoon. I can’t remember the last time I used Powtoon. Maybe during diploma for a presentation (I think). I can’t remember. Anyway, a lot has change! I remembered the last I used it, Powtoon didn’t have storyboard or template. We have to create everything from scratch and it is a pain in the ass. I guess I am getting older since a lot has changed since then. Lol. So my group consists of 4 person (Aisyah, Balqis, Nur and yours truly). Each of us came up with a topic for our educational video. We had several ideas for the video such as teaching simple pr...

Seriously, I do feel like a DJ when I have to record and edit my own podcast😁😁😁😁 Hello everyone and welcome back~ So this week  we learned about podcasting. Basically a podcast is an audio or video file (mp3, mp4 etc) that is published or "broadcast" on the internet and thus gaining the term "podcast". As expected, not everyone in the class knew about podcast. I think it happened because they are not aware of  its existence (unintentionally) even though we have used podcasts on the internet as teaching materials for our micro teaching and practicum (videos, lectures etc).  As for me, I am excited to talk about podcast since I like listening to audiobooks as I find it interesting to listen to someone who has really good pronunciation and enunciation to narrate my favourite books such as the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and classic novels such as Jane Austen's novels (Pride and Prejudice, Emma etc)  and Louisa May Alcott's novels (Lit...

Hello again! When it comes to creating a meaningful lesson in order to maximize the acquisition of knowledge and skill, we have to figure out the needs of the learner, define the learning objectives and create some intervention to achieve our objectives. In order to do that with CALL, we have to combine the behaviorist and constructivist learning theory. There are three things that we have to look into before we create any content/instructional design for the students: 1.     LEARNERS’ NEEDS ·         Learners’ needs is the gap between what the learners want to gain at the end of the day and the learner’s current skill or knowledge ·          In order to find out what are the needs of a student, needs analysis has to be conducted with the syllabus, conducting survey, free writing and public records ·     It is done to gain better understanding about the student ...

Selamat hari raya!!!! Sorry for the late entry with the raya celebrations, open house and what not. So let’s get back to business. This week we learned about Computer Mediated Communication and ESL. Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) is any form of communication or interaction between two or more people via separate computers through network of communication. Simply put, CMC is like a platform for people to interact or communicate over the net by using a computer, It is like the social media that we use in our daily life from Facebook to Twitter and emails. CMC has been used in education since the late 80s and 90s with the introduction of CALL. As we learned in the previous chapter, CALL started off as an ideology that turned into reality with the advancement of technology. Incorporating CMC into CALL became widespread with the use of Emails and forums. Internet Chat Rooms (ICR) allowed direct and simultaneous communications for information exchange and this allow...

Hello again. So this week we learned about these two topics which are the evolution of CALL and the search engines and online database. And we are going to start with the evolution of CALL first.  At first I thought CALL is just, well...CALL. Apparently it started with the first stage of CALL which is the behavioristic CALL. Behavioristic CALL or BC was developed from the behavioristic learning theory that focuses on drilling and repetitive learning. And after receiving some backlashes from experts regarding BC in which it was claimed to resemble animal training, communicative CALL happened. Communicative CALL or CC which focuses on students' fluency on the language rather than grammar. In other words, teacher uses CC to focus on their speech rather than writing or learn the technical part of a language which is grammar. I think it is a good move since I noticed that students who are learning second language cannot speak fluently even though they understand the grammar r...

HELLLLLLOOOOOOOOO PEOPLE OF THE DARK WEB! My name is Zahidah Husna Binti Zulkifli and I just turn 24 years old a few days ago😊😊😊 So basically this week is the first official class for Internet Technologies for Language Learning (ESP6013). Basically I am going to write about my first impression towards this class in general (the introduction part) and CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). My first impression to this class is it is going to revolve around language and technologies and how to incorporate both of the elements into one. But it turns out to be true in a way (I think). Basically form my understanding about this course is it is about how we as an educator can use technologies such as the Internet, soft wares, social media in teaching language. With the advancement of technologies nowadays, I think incorporating both language and technology into language learning is a good move. This is because  students nowadays are adept when it comes to technologi...