Week 7 Reflection

The seventh class began with the presentation of an e-book sample made by the lecturer’s past students, which in my opinion gave us a rough idea of what to be expected of our work and as a basic foundation for us to be even more creative in the completion of our very own version of the e-book. From the presentation, I could feel that there were important details that appear to have positive impacts on the betterment of learners learning in class. The first one was the use of colourful pictures which was present each time a sentence appeared on the screen, for instance when the sentence goes as ‘’Ali brush his teeth’’, with the accompaniment of a boy brushing his teeth. The second was the use of the fonts themselves, which I believe should be of ‘Comic Sans MS’ where the style of writing appears very much like the pupils writings and also must be in big font sizes. These are all important criteria for ensuring that learners get the best opportunity to academically benefit from the teaching and learning experience.

The pictures were wonderfully illustrated to complement for learners visual needs (as suggested by Jean Piaget) and all but I feel that there is a certain element that is missing which could make the presentation better in a way. The element was to have moving pictures like animation of what a picture is doing, for example a picture of a boy who is actually brushing his teeth by moving the tooth brush up and down in a repeating manner. I guess learners would be more interested if such addition were to be implemented. Luckily, the lecturer had already thought of a similar idea and introduced us with two new websites that offers free access to animated pictures like Bluementals and Gickr. We can actually make a picture look ‘alive’ or ‘move’ by placing different pictures in a successive order. Interesting... but I guess there is going to be another exploration job for me if I wish to successfully develop a creative and exciting e-book product at the end.

In addition, we were also burdened with assignment two which was accessing and manipulating videos for the ESL classroom. The idea was to download a video entitled Michael Jackson ‘Earth song’, divide it into separate parts like audios, pictures and so forth. Frankly, I am still quite confused with the lecturer’s explanation since it seemed to be mixed up with other tasks and other assignments as well... Fortunately, I have friends who have comprehended all the tasks and assignments and can help me get a clearer understanding as they have too. All in all, the learning situation in this subject has becoming ever more challenging and difficult to tackle, hence I have to get my work started A.S.A.P...! :O (as soon as possible)