E-BOOK

E-book? Another new knowledge that I will be learning in this course. Honestly, I did not really familiar with e-book before and I did not know how to do it.

What is e-book? That was the big question lingering in my mind before I entered the class that day. Well, "an e-book (for electronic book: also ebook: also ecobook) is the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book. Such documents are usually read on personal computers, or on dedicated hardware devices known as e-book readers or e-book devices." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book)

After I knew the meaning of e-book, I personally think that it might bring positive points in developing and using resources in primary classroom. It integrates with the use of technology, user-friendly, creative and practical to be used as teaching aids for teaching and learning in primary classroom.

Thank God Mdm Foziah had shown us some examples of e-book that her students did for their assignments because I did not manage to find examples of e-book from the internet. At first, I thought it was very complicated to design or create an e-book. However, after viewing examples of e-book shown by the lecturer, I found that it was actually not that difficult to create an e-book. They only used Microsoft Power Point to design their e-book. So simple. In my opinion, their e-books are very practical and suitable to be used in primary classrooms. We need to consider some factors in designing an e-book. For example, use colourful pictures to attract pupils’ attention, use simple language that suits pupils’ level of proficiency, repetition as the reinforcement of learning to pupils and fun.

However, I was wondering how far it can help pupils in their learning? Is it an effective tool in teaching and learning after all? And how can a teacher ensure that?

Uploading Pair Work Video

Unfortunately, the problem of uploading video in ADEC happened again. It happened to my partner and I. I had spent two days to send the video to my partner, Mu’min and another two days to upload it in Youtube. It made my holiday not a ‘holiday’ anymore. Yes, that’s what we call this as sacrifice as a student. It’s okay, Faizah. Let’s think positive about this.


Throughout publishing the video entitled “LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST!”, I had gained a very meaningful lesson of friendship, faith, cooperation and most importantly, PASSION. Thankfully, my friends were always there for me when I need help and they even recommended my partner and I some options to overcome our problem. Thank you Hafiz, Iman, Fikri, Yana and Komathi. You’ve been really helpful.


Our first problem was that I couldn’t send the video to my partner, Mu’min, through Yahoo Messenger or E-mail. This is because the size of the video was too big, which was 824mb in AVi format! After being advised by my friend, Yana, I managed to save the video in a smaller size in mpg format that made it into only 39.9mb from Power Director (the software that I used to make the video). Lucklily, the video had been sent successfully to my partner and he managed to upload it in Youtube that Thursday night. However, another problem occurred when the video that we had uploaded can only be played for 8 seconds!


Both of us did not know what else we should do to overcome this problem. Thank God Hafiz was there to help us. He suggested me to save the video into wmv format since it will make the video size even smaller. Then, I need to upload the video in 4shared.com for Mu’min to download it in his laptop so that he can upload the video in Youtube since the internet connection at my house was so slow (dial-up).


I wished for a better day on the following day, which was Friday. The day of the pair work video submission! I decided to go to the cyber café to upload the video in Youtube. Both of us had tried many times to upload our video in Youtube and finally at 4.10 p.m, the awaited moment of all, we managed to upload it in Youtube successfully! Phew! What a relief! I was so grateful that we managed to upload it before midnight..

VIDEO EDITING

Our task for this week was 'VIDEO EDITING'. I was quite relieved when our lecturer, Mdm Foziah said that video editing was easier than audio editing.

However, the task for this topic was quite different from before since we were given two tasks on 'Video Editing'. The first task must be done in group of fives. Each group was given different episode of 'SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE' that need to be edited. My group, (Wai, Dila,Zarne and Mu'min) had to edit episode 7 of 'SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE'. The episode contains 4 parts and we need to join the parts and make it as one video. Sounds interesting, right?

On the other hand,the second task must be done in pairs (a lady and a gentleman). We were required to make a 4-minutes video that can arouse 'happiness' among the viewers. The video will be published in Youtube. I found that this task is more interesting than the first task because it is simpler and we can do anything that we like using our own creativity to publish a great video. I'm doing the task with my friend, Mu'min. After discussion, we decided to make a video with the theme of 'PEACE'. However, our ideas had been rejected by our lecturer because the theme was common and it talks about something that people already knew. So, she suggested us to do a video based on the theme of happiness. Finally, we agreed to do a video with the theme of 'LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST! which is basically on happiness.

Luckily, Mdm Foziah showed us two examples of video editing done by our senior Cohort 1 (miss them). It gave us some ideas of making a nice video. Their videos were simple but they managed to arouse my interest to watch them from the beginning till the end. Congratulations seniors for the great job!
I wish I can do that for my video!

To all my friends. good luck for your video editing and enjoy yourselves doing it!

AUDIO EDITING..another new knowledge that I am going to learn in this course.
It sounds very interesting to me as I am a music lover, but I have zero knowledge about audio editing. Never mind, it’s ok. This is the time for me to gain as much knowledge as I can to learn something that is very new for me. Besides, it is beneficial for me, as future teacher to learn this skill, as teachers should be creative, flexible and versatile.

However, I was wondering how audio editing can help teachers in their teaching and learning. Is it really important for teachers to do audio editing since there are many children songs that are already suitable for children and do not need to be edited. After having a deep thought over it, I believe that teachers should do audio editing only if the song that they choose for teaching and learning is not suitable enough for children. For example, a song with some rapping in it. So, teachers should do some audio editing on it.

What do you think?

My problem in doing audio editing is that I do not know which software that I can use to edit songs. Thank you, Ma’am Foziah for providing us notes in ADEC about audio editing. At least it gives me some ideas about this audio editing.

This is the free sound editor website:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

This is the link to audio editing software : http://audacity.sourceforge.net/


Actually, we can do many things by audio editing. We can edit voice, consonant, background music (for example, drums), audio recording and others. Sounds interesting, right?

There is also shareware software designed to record streaming audio from online web based radio stations and audio sources. For instance,

AudioSpin Streaming Media Recorder

WMA/MP3 Recorder Professional

and Easy Hi-Q Recorder

So, to all my friends good luck for your audio editing.

FINALLY...

This is my very first attempt in doing photo editing. At first, I found it difficult to do photo editing using Adobe Photoshop as I had never explored it before. But as I was learning and exploring the software, I realized that we can actually do loads of things using Adobe Photoshop. Thanks Khairil for teaching me the basic functions and application in Adobe Photoshop.

Actually, doing this photo editing took me hours and it requires PASSION. Lot of PASSION, especially using the magnetic lassoo tool. I tried many times to crop the photos using magnetic lasso tool and I mostly spend my photo editing doing that! That was quite tiring..but towards the end of it, I began to love doing the photo editing. It was actually fun.

After doing the photo editing, I was excited to do more photo editing and start to search for photos that I can edit and create a new story behind it. I bet it's going to be fun!

Hope I can edit more photos and make my own collection of photo editing..but most importantly, I need to really explore Adobe Photoshop so that I can do wonderful touch on the photos.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial Links

I came across these websites that I found very useful to learn more adobe photoshop:

-->http://www.adobephotoshoptutorials.com/free/index.php?cat=14

-->http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/10/adobe-photoshop-tutorials-best-of/

-->http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tutorials/jennifer/tips-cs2-type-tools.html

-->http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Photoshop/Effects/1

>http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshopcs2lessons/Photoshop_CS2_Basics_Online_Course_Index_of_Lessons.htm

Photo Editing

Photo editing..it is something new for me as I had never experienced doing it before. I knew about it before but I haven't really tried to explore the software especially Adobe Photoshop and I regretted now. However, after listening to Puan Foziah's lecture today, I realized that I need to learn lots of things especially in editing photos. That's what I love about this course..gaining new knowledge and developing myself to be a more technology-literate person. Thank you, ma'am for delivering the knowledge to us.

I love the examples shown to us on photo editing. It was creative and had really caught my eyes. I was wondering how they could do such a wonderful touch on the photos. It can influence the perspectives of people about the photos. So, that is what photo editing can do! As a saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words". I wish I could master doing photo editing at the end of this course.

Before this, I was wondering the importance of learning photo editing in this course. I feel like taking a technology course, not TESL course since most of the courses offerred here are mainly related with technology. But now, I realized that this is actually really important for us, as future teachers since we are living in modern era. So, teachers in future are expected to make full use of the technology in their teaching and learning process to expose students with the technology and create a condusive learning environment for learning. There might be less use of traditional display sheet, flashcards and others in future teaching and learning. Photo editing will be the main instrument to design modern and meaningful resources in future teaching.

Finally, the task for this week is photo editing. It is something new for me but I will take this as a challenge. Hope that I can make a good beginning in photo editing.