Monday, July 9, 2012

This Week's Reflection (2/7-8/7)

This week, we started off with doing our commentaries with a activity where we had to match a section of commentary to the questions being careful to ensure each section was correct. In my opinion, it was a break from the norm and it helped give us an idea on how each section of the commentary should be structured and answered. After that, we began writing our commentaries which was quite a manageable task given that we had the questions to guide us through which I found to be highly useful.

Other than that matching activity, Miss Abena also read and showed us the children's book called The Gruffallo. Having the book read to me was quite an experience as books were rarely read to me but with Miss Abena's dramatic reading tone plus the animation that she showed us, it was quite an enjoyable week and just hopefully this reading session may happen again! 

Monday, June 25, 2012

This Week's Reflection (18/6-24/6)


Due to the fact that I was away on the IA trip, I was unable to post this till this point in time. This week, we worked on improving our essaies. In a pair with Syahirah, we worked together to recognized how well our structure of our essay was, Syahirah said that my essay's structure was ok and she couldn't find any major mistakes or flaws which was good but I had to get confirmation from Miss Abena first. We also did exercises on coherence and correlation went Miss Abena wasn't here, this exercise did help me understand how points in my essay were supposed to relate to each other, after checking my essay, I felt that the various supporting sentences supported the related topic setencenes but I could only be sure after checking with Miss Abena.

After completing a few exercises on how to write a good essay, I approached Miss Abena to write my essay and after some discussion with her, there were some major flaws in the essay. The major flaw that I thought was most critical that my essay was almost like an encyclopedia, I needed to interact with my reader more instead of spouting fact after fact. To improve this, I need to introduce my personal perspective to show that I have engagement with the essay.

Overall, my essay just requires some tweaking, but with some major improvements, I'll feel much more confident with my essay.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

This Week's Reflection (7/5-13/5)

After what Miss Abena commented on how we did our reflections, it finally hit me that the reflection wasn't some place were we would say: "Oh I did this today, I thought it was good but I could us some improvement." It's about questioning and looking back upon your work as questioning why you did it? what have you learned from it? etc. So I will need to change how I am doing my reflections.

This week as me and Nazrel continued working on the project "Using Easybib and Evernote" I was quite frustrated with Nazrel as somehow I ended up doing most of the project while he sat there twiddling his thumbs, but eventually he did produce some good quality work after much nagging and pushing. We decided to finish up the voice recording at home and tidy up the presentation on Wednesday but Miss Abena postponed the presentation till Tuesday, so there might be time for extra improvements, I am quite happy with the Imovie I produced and I hope i can achieved the personal target on the rubric that I have set.

Also I've learned quite an interesting thing this week, Miss Abena showed us how to make our own Google site, It was almost overwhelming at first as this was my very first website, thoughts like How should I design the page? How should I organize it all? were rushing through my head. Google sites in my opinion are quite easy to set up, edit and manage, so it won't really be much of a hassle when it comes to looking back at what articles, pages or notes that I've put on the website when revison time comes around.

Monday, May 7, 2012

This week's reflection (30/4-6/5)


This week since there was a holiday, we didn't really do much in class. Firstly we did morphemes which were confusing to understand at first but eventually I got the concept that it was a word that coud be broken down into a smaller unit of word such as "re" which means to do again and "create" which is to make "recreate" means to make again. Then we did this activity that asked us to make notes on morphemes and recreate them in our on words, there were 10 marks in total and grammar, punctuation and spelling counted in them, This helped me improve my proofreading skills, I feel this activity is quite useful as it makes you double and triple check all the spelling grammer and punctuation, I wouldn't really mind if we had this activity again.


Also, we were assigned pair work and I was with Nazrel, our topic was how to use search engines effectively which was a pretty good topic, we decided to use Prezi as our medium for our presentation. In my opinion, I feel that the workload for this pair is quite one sided, so I require some way to encourage and motivate the pair as a whole to do what they should do and do it well. I perform best in individual work, because sometimes I feel that I place my expectation on how well people should produce their work and would sometimes get out of control and do all the work myself.But as the days progress I understand the value of working in a group, it helps ease the work process and fresh ideas and concepts can be introduced into the group. I still feel some unease when I work in a group but maybe I'm just stuck in my old ways.



I'm actually not very proud of anything I have done this week, as well there's wasn't really anything outstanding that I feel requires to to say, overall it was a good week, but nothing much to shout about. Although what do with some improvement this week is that I could possibly be using prompts and completing reflections on time, as this is the second time I've being called back to finish a poor reflection. Also, I feel that my group trust skills could use a bit of brushing up, I ned to tell myself that people are just as capable of producing top notch work and the sooner I adopt that mantra the better. How I would try to improve of those two problems are I would most likely give myself a constant remainder that reflections must be finished before the next monday, also with the group trust problem, I could give them a small task to do at first, and maybe grow on that if the work they produce is up to snuff.


Tuesday, May 1, 2012

This Week's Reflection (23/4-29/4)

This week, we did more upon heroes and we watched a few videos about stopping racism and discrimination that were cleverly presented like a Sims game, this brought new light to me about how how severe the problem is in the world and if we don't stop it soon enough, the problem will become overwhelming.

Also we did a web hunt on the My Hero website, which frankly speaking wasn't a good activity. I didn't really learn much from the activity, I would suggest maybe a better way to teach other people about the My Hero website. Also, we discussed about who we would write as a hero and very surprising most of the people in my class didn't have a hero, including me, I suppose not many people have inspired me in my life, after some consideration, I decided to write on either Amelia Earhart, Scott Joplin or Steven Spielberg, I'm quiet eager to do Scott Joplin as he is one of my favorite pianist, but i'm having some trouble to find some hero qualities in him.

So I am currently trying to find some resources on Scott Joplin , but I'm having a bit of trouble. My question is, becoming the King Of Ragtime as a black pianist while all the other famous pianist are white men in any form a hero's quality maybe with a bit of thought and consideration, I'll find out

Understanding Morphemes

Words are composed of morphemes; they are parts of words that can be broken down. When combined they make more complex words. For example, "create" means to make. It is a base word. "Re" is a prefix which means to do again. When combined, they form recreate which is to make again, other examples include redo or remake. Their origins are said to be from Greek or Latin.By understanding morphemes, we can understand more complicated words. If we focus on mastering morphology, we can improve our reading and writing skills and increase our vocabulary.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Reflection (Holocaust Memorial Day)

Today we watched five video about Holocaust Memorial Day, most of the videos were about cases of racism and discrimination. When I saw the video, I was slightly shocked that racism and discrimination was this severe in this world of ours, such as the video where the islamic woman was not allowed into a school just because she was wearing a veil and the black guy who was beaten to death just for being black. In my mind, I was still happy that some people such as that old woman who intervened when two girls were bullying a Jewish girl, if people don't intervene when racism around them happen, our world will be a dark and cruel place, as people think one race or religion is better or worst than another.

If the people acted differently in the video such as the principal allowing the Islamic woman to enter, the woman helping the boy who's father was arrested since he was a Jew, maybe they would have done a little more goodness into this world of ours. Racism in our world now, isn't a very tough problem to solve, is we just dimiss any speculation and low our barriers and embrace each religion as it's own, we can make this world a much better place for this generation and the next.