Reflection - week 10

              This is week ten and we continue our lecture with Miss Amreet as usual. She is a very responsible person because she always came to the class on time. I admired Miss Amreet because of her work, she prepared everything before she come to the class. In this week, she gave a lecture on the topic best practise for writing for the web. She was using power point slide on her lecture. It is all about the style of writing.

            First thing first if we want to write we need to write succinctly. It means our writing must be clear, clean and the sentence should be active sentences. Plus, it should be crisp, snappy sentences that can attract and hold our reader’s attention. They will keep on going to read our writing then. The most important thing is we need to make our readers to stay focused. Not only that, we as a writer should be positive. Means that we need to write only the positive statements.

            To sum up, we need to eliminate excess words; we need to use bullets in writing and remove redundancies, means that we keep saying the same thing. As a writer we supposedly can use the right and better words to be used in our writing. 

            Other guidelines that we should follow when we want to do writing for multimedia and the web are we need to keep the sentence and also the paragraph short, chunk the information, use the correct way to write the title and subtitle and last but not least we need to set the right tone. It is important and if we did not follow the right way to write, it will give an impact to the readers.   

            Before she ended our class on that day, she reminded us about all the assignments. She asked all of us whether we have finished our assignments or not.  

Reflection - week 9

As usual, we have class on Monday for three hours lecture. It is already week nine and it means final is just around the corner. To be honest, I am quite nervous and I am not ready yet to sit for the final because I have not made any preparations. For this time, I have a lot of assignments to do and I need to finish it all first. For Miss Amreet’s assignments, I still have not completed for my Homepage because I still need to edit and check whether there is any mistakes or errors. For the digital storytelling, we are still in progress to finish it. We need to do it as soon as possible because we need to submit it on week twelve.

On this week, what we have done is just we got a lecture from Miss Amreet about the important styles for informative websites.

We have several manuals of style for academic, technical and scientific writing. The first is MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (Modern Language Association), APA (American Psychological Association), The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press) and last but not least is Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual Format for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (The Style Manual Committee of the Council of Biology Editors). But mostly, universities in Malaysia including my university itself are using APA style to do the citation.

In formal studious mood, it included academic, journal format and abstract section in front matter should be including in paragraph. For an example, explaining the journal contain. Next is GEMA online, which is a journal of language studies.

I learnt something new which is there are two types of research that we have to know; quantitative and qualitative, and results are being used in quantitative.  

Not only that, she also has explained about the differences between references and bibliographies. For us, it is just the same thing and often we used it synonymously but actually there is a difference in meaning between them and it is totally a different thing. References mean the items you have read and specifically what you had referred to in your assignment and your list of sources at the end the assignment will be headed. Bibliographies means a list of source materials that are used or consulted in the preparation of a work or that are referred to the text. After that, Miss Amreet had given several examples of English words borrowed from foreign language.

In a nut shell, like the other week before I am happy to have a Writing for Multimedia and The Web with my beloved lecturer, Miss Amreet and all my fellow classmates. 

Reflection - week 8

For this week, it was the first week after the hari raya holiday and it seems like everyone still in their raya mood including myself. To be honest, I still wanted to continue my holiday and if I could I wanted to stay at home just for a few days more. However, we have to back to the reality as we are a student. Student life – Go to class, do assignment, presentations, quizzes and sit for final exam. As usual, our class on Monday will be started at 4.00 pm until 7.00 pm. It’s quite a tiring day because we have classes the whole day.

Once Miss Amreet entered the class, everybody started to quite and focus on what she wanted to talk. Before anything and before she started with the lecture, she informed us that starting from this week, which mean week eight, it will be the monitoring weeks for the lecturers. It means that all the lecturers need to monitor their students’ progress in their assignment and also the attendance to the lecture. She also warned that she will issue a warning letter to those who are absent and those who are not managed to come to her class without any valid reasons or letter before and after this.

She even called for those who are absent to her lecture without any valid reasons and letters. I am one of the person who did not came to her class. I did not come to her class because I went back to my home and because of that, I cannot give her any valid reasons or even a letter. She called us as a reminder for us because we are in risk of getting a warning letter. She said to us that for the first warning, it will be just a verbal warning, but if we are absent again, we will get a second warning, a letter from the department. She said again, if we absent again, we will be bearing from the exam, means that we cannot sit for the final and we have to take this course again next semester. I talked to myself that I cannot fail to come to her lecture again. If not, I am dead.

Later on, she continued with her lecture. In the class, she asked us to find or browse for three good websites and three bad websites. The purpose of this task is to make sure that we can differentiate and recognised which websites are good and which are not. Good websites means the websites that followed the correct style of writing for the web which Miss Amreet has explained to us last week while the bad websites are those who not followed the correct format of writing for the web. She did not a limit to find any kind of websites that we want. It does not matter whether it is a personal blog, blog or even a business blog. It is up to us. I do this task as a pair work with Nurul Aidawate bt Abd Abha because she did not brought laptop that day, so we need to share. We have problems during finding the bad websites because all the websites we were found was the good websites. But at the end, we managed to find three bad websites too. These are the links:

Good websites:

http://www.examenglish.com/PTE/pte_general_level1_listening_part1.htm

http://www.zalora.com.my/

http://www.jessmarksphotography.com.au/

Bad websites:

http://www.wrdaonline.org/

http://www.goetzskyvu.com/GOETZ_THEATRE/GOETZ_SHOW_&_TIMES.html

http://www.bombshell201x.com/

Then, after we had found all the good and bad websites, she asked us to post the links in wikispace.com where she has created a section for her students to post the list of the websites that they found online. Once we have done that, Miss Amreet called one by one to explain about their websites. Unfortunately, Nurul Aidawate and I are not being called to explain about our websites that we found. We considered the websites are bad because of some mistakes such as the fonts, background, languages such as grammar and swear words.

Not only that, later she called the leader for digital story telling assignment to ask about the progress for the assignment. I am in the same group with Sue Chin, Jayson and Calvin, so Calvin and Jayson had met her in front. Unfortunately, none of us had started the work. Thus, Miss Amreet told us to come up with title, theme, plot and also the story line for our story by this week and she will be meeting us again by next week as we just meet her once in a week just to know about the progress. I know that we do not have much time left and we still have to present our digital story telling assignment in week 13.

In next session, Miss Amreet let us to continue with our homepage assignment. This task is a pair work and my partner is Lim Sue Chin. She also showed to us few examples of homepage. I know it was a reminder for us to work on our homepage as soon as possible as we need to submit it on week 10, it means two weeks left. After that, Miss Amreet also gave her lecture on Commercial Styles such as business style, database style and marketing style.

Descriptive Essay - My New Teacher

            I still remember when I was in my secondary school, I have one favourite teacher and she was my English teacher. Her name is Madam Yanti. But she had been transferred to another school. So my classmates and I would be getting a new teacher. It would be hard to take over Madam Yanti’s place. She was thoroughly organized and he had the syllabus down to what she would teach on each day, with all the key points on handouts. Plus, she was very caring and patient person. She also often entertained us with her jokes. We all love her and we would never forget her.

            One week later, we have been informed that we will get a new teacher to replace Madam Yanti’s place. When she walked into the classroom, I heard a few girls giggling. Miss Sarah, the new teacher and she looked very ordinary. In fact, she was rather thin, short and young. Some of the girls commented that she did not wear make-up at all. On her first day, Miss Sarah introduced herself briefly and explained how she would approach teaching English Literature. She told us that she wanted it to be a “living” subject because human life is complex and wonderful. Indeed, we could all learn about life from the stories written by great writers. She knew that many people do not like to learn literature because it is bored.  So she wanted us to change our mind set about boring literature.

            She also asked us to write on a piece of paper a short description of what we each like and dislike, and what we want our lives to be. I have no idea what actually she wanted to do. When we handed it back to her, first of all I thought that this exercise would end up like the others before. Usually, it would be forgotten by us as well as by the teacher. But, she proved me wrong. Each time when she talked to us outside the class, Miss Sarah seemed to remember the details we wrote and showed concern about our interest and expectation of life. She tried to make a conversation with us based on how what we have wrote before.

She told us to enjoy reading, we have to imagine that our mind is like multi-dimensional television set. When we read, we do not realize that actually we create pictures and images in our mind. If the book is the good one, we can also feel the emotions that the characters in the book are going through. Reading a book is an imaginative experience that cannot be duplicated by any technology. Nowadays, people prefer to play with their gadget rather than reading a book.

            Miss Sarah would often ask us to give our interpretations or views the overall of the book. She always considered our opinions carefully and never used the word ‘wrong’, in this kind of way, many of us lost our fear of literature. She is a very calm and patient teacher. In fact, we enjoyed offering our views and we looked forward to her interpretations which she explained in a clear manner.

Whenever we had covered the lessons and had some free moments before the class ended, Miss Sarah would tell us about her study. She studied in University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and also worked as a teacher at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Bukit Damansara, Kuala Lumpur. Her journey of life had taught her that there are many universal emotions and needs that unite people all around the globe. That is why we can learn to enjoy literature written by a writer of any race or from any period of history.

On the last day of class, Miss Sarah gave us a list of books which we might want to read during the holidays. She promised to all of us that we would enjoy reading them. Our class gave her a book “A Great Teacher.” We thanked to her for making us enjoy and love to learn a subject which many of us had considered dull or difficult.

What she said was true. That time, I was enjoyed reading the books. Until now, reading has become my hobby. This hobby gave me a lot of advantages. It is not often that we get a teacher, who not only teaches to prepare us well for the examinations, but she is the person who also cares for us as individuals and she was like my mom. 

Reflection - week 7

It is already week 7 and I am presented my Prezi presentation in this week. Yarmine became the first presenter for that day and she presented on the topic of weird culture & traditions in many ethnics.

            The second presenter is me. I presented about the Halloween. I gave the introduction about the origin of Halloween and then I told them about the activities and the traditions that they do during the Halloween such as pumpkins carving, wearing costumes & masks, trick or treat, lighting bonfire and apple bobbing. Actually there are many activities more during the Halloween but I cannot present all because of the duration time of the presentation. There is a limit.

            Next is, Ummil Atiqah. She presented about borage. Borage is a kind of a herbaceous plan with bright blue flowers and hairy leaves, used medically and as a salad green that has the unique name of it. She explained to us what is actually borage is.

            The person who will be the last presenter for that day and the last presenter for present Prezi is Wani. She presented on the topic Cyber Bullying. As we all know, cyber bullying is the use of electronic communication such as cell phones, computer and many more to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature.

            After all the presentation is done, Ms. Amreet gave some words to us and she thanked to all because manage to present well during the presentation. The she reminded us about the other assignments. She told that we need to put URL of our personal blog and also for the advertisement at the web that she has provided because during the holiday, she wants to evaluate the work and give the mark. Lim Sue Chin is my partner for the pair work so we decided to show Ms. Amreet our web advertisement. We came in front of the class and showed her our web advertisement. Overall, she said it was okay and everything is fine. We were so relieved because our work is accepted without any wrong.