Week 7 Audio Editing

week 7

Have to edit a song and some recordings in a week time? ‘That’s a lot!’. This was the first thought which flushed together with blood into my brain. While taking a deep breath, I told myself.
Convert bad news to good news.
Bill Gates
After changing my mind set, I started working on them.

For the individual task, I was very confused on which song to edit because i hardly have any English songs in my collection. After thinking for an hour, I finally got the idea. I planned to edit the song which annoyed me very much a year ago with its chorus, the song sung by AKON by the title ‘Lonely’. Then, went to a website which I found when I was doing my tutorials for internet skills and downloaded the song before I started editing it. I would say that I had a great time editing it especially when I was exploring the software and when I was in my ‘trial and error’ stage. I tried to insert a few numbers into the ‘percentage change’ but the pitch went higher and higher until at one point I felt like giving up.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turnJust as the quote says, an idea struck my mind and I managed to accomplish my attempt. I tried using a ‘–‘ sign before the number and it worked. Success!!!


On Monday, I started working on my group task. It took hours for me to download all the three videos assigned on my shoulder and that really put me into boredom. Once I got all the recording downloaded, I started working on them. I managed to enhance the clarity of the recording by boosting the bass but even though I tried hard, I did not manage to remove some of the noise which existed in the recording. Until now, I could not find the solution for that problem.

While I was waiting for the recording to be downloaded, I spent a few minutes pondering on the usefulness of learning this skill to my future career as a teacher. I realised that learning this skill will empower me with the knowledge to edit the audio teaching materials which I might want to use in class. I may want to add some learning points into, throw some irrelevant and unsuitable content from and enhance the clarity of my audio. Besides that, this skill also will help me to bring in more authentic materials into classroom which will be very helpful for children in learning their oral communication skills and are of children’s interest. Therefore, I strongly believe that every teacher especially who is teaching the 21st century kids should be exposed to this

Week 6 Photo Editing

Photo editing is something completely new to me. Even in using Paint in my laptop, I used ask hundred and one question to my friends especially Haziq and Gowrey.
Hence, I have been struggling in exploring the software especially Adobe Photoshop CS3 and juggling in learning the skills. After many trials and errors, I think I managed to get hold of it. Here is a work of mine using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and FxFoto softwares.


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I enjoyed doing these but I would prefer to be given more time to explore the software and a brief lecture on what the functions are in and how to use the software.
Until we are told to make a power-point presentation for our E-Book, I did not see the importance of me learning the photo editing skills. When we were asked for a storyboard, ambitiously i came up with a story rooted on the theme of patriotism. Only when started to think about putting the pictures on slides after I got back home, I realised my ‘mistake’. As the saying goes, ‘there is no point crying over the split milk’ so I continued thinking of means to make my presentation a success. When I was about to give up, an idea stroked my mind. That is to design animation on Goanimate webpage and to use Photoscape software to print screen slides. After doing that, I cropped the pictures using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and make many other amendments using pen tool, brush tool, blush tool and eraser tool before I came up with those fine pictures on my slides. Only after that, I realised how useful these skills would be for me as a future teacher to teach. this is because I have experienced situations whereby I dropped some of my teaching points and ideas because I could not get the visual aids I wanted from the net. After learning these skills, I do not think I will face such situations anymore because I can edit what I got to be what I want. As people always say, "I have learn from my 'mistake'". Thank you for teaching this, ma'am.

Week 5 Teaching aid

In most of the classrooms in schools in Malaysia, we have average of 35-45 pupils. As teachers, we need to know how to control our pupils so that we can impart the knowledge we intend to successfully. One of the strategies you can use is by knowing your pupils respond to various kinds of teaching and learning activities. As teachers, we need to identify activities which stir and settle our pupils. The best way to identify is by trying and making a list. We also can categorise the activities into stir and settle by looking at form of responds it requires, either written or spoken. Identifying the types of involvement each activity requires would be the third mean. An activity may require mental engagement or actual occupation. Mental engagement activity requires thinking and involves emotion. An example would be guessing. Actual occupation activities are those which require concentration and involve physical. Once a teacher managed to identify the effect of each activity, the teacher should adapt the activities he/she has planned according to the pupils’ emotional state. For an example, pupils will be highly active after Physical Education. Therefore, if a teacher has planned an activity which has a stir effect, he/she should adapt it to a settle activity in order to control the class and get the kids into learning. On contrast, teachers should choose an activity that encourages pupils in a dull class. As teachers, we should not have the guilt of breaking our plans because no activity or particular sequence of activities is good if it is in the wrong place in terms of human reaction to the lesson.
Here are several tips for good classroom management:
1 Combine stir and settle activities
2. Combine mental engagement and actual occupation activity
3. Vary your activities for the same topics move systematically according to
skills
4. Take into account ‘fun’
5. Keep the lesson simple
6. Reuse material
7. Reuse ideas.

Week 4 Identifying priorities

I entered for the fourth week lecture with full of expectations t learn something new but ‘Kwang! Kwang! Kwang!’ the server was down and we could not assess internet. So, we were asked to read chapter 2, 3 and 4 and do PowerPoint presentations on them. Hurmmm!
Chapter 2 is about identifying priorities and their implication. The writer suggests that primary schooling should place more importance on achieving primary goals rather than on content goals.
She identifies pleasures and confidence in using language, willingness to have ‘a go’ and daringness to communicate as attitude goals which are different from usual language teaching goals which are content goals such and structure, topics and functions. The writer also emphasises on authenticity and interactive of task whereby she believes that language teaching should provide room for children to observe, analyse and fit into language use. Therefore, she proposes that language should be used for real communication and for genuinely giving and receiving real messages. Pupils in most second language seem to uphold a wrong conception that they need to understand every word used in order to learn the language because of teachers’ emphases on it. In reality, children only need to understand the gist as we are dealing more on whole message. Therefore, teachers should stop emphasizing on discrete language teaching. Instead they should check the overall idea and pupils’ facial expression to judge pupils’ understanding. Teachers also should know how to treat pupils’ mistake without causing any humiliation to pupils. This is because young learners are vulnerable to criticism and it might kill their positive self concept and confidence to learn and use the language. Language teaching can be done in two ways namely language exercises into real exchange and language lessons through the medium of the target language itself. For the first mean, a teacher need to combine real communication and restricted materials to teach language whereas in the second mean, teacher need to use simple language, facial expression, translating method and demonstration strategy. As a whole, this chapter talks about teaching objective and methods, assessment strategies and correct error correcting ways.