Last Entry: Reflection on blogging and this PBEY3102 course

I have been blogging for almost two years and until now I still continue blogging. What make me fall in love with blogging are the the platform it provides to pour my thoughts and declaration and the connection it provides among the bloggers. Through blogging I can share whatever information, daily happenings and events which I think interesting and contains of 'infotainment' element to be put forward. I can also join and follow other bloggers' blogs and gain some more information and update my knowledge about certain things. Moreover, I can also give my feedbacks and comments to the entries that I read. So, we (bloggers) can learn from each other. As in this course, blogs are used to reflect on our learning. This is superior to alert what we have learnt from week to week and at the same time revising and critically examining what we have learned from these weeks.

However, apart from that, this kind of web 2.o medium gives no privacy to the bloggers. Once a particular person noted a particular blogger's URL, then that person can serve to the web whenever he/she likes. This will give hesitation to bloggers to write whatever they like in thier spaces (blogs) as all people can serve the web. Moreover, it will also cause harm in terms of the content portrayed in certain blogs. For example, nowadays teenagers or even children are getting used with this technology. Sometimes, they get influenced with the harmful and explicit content embedded in the blogs.

Apart form the harmfulness of blogging, I have added up my language skills and critical thinking skills. This is through posting the each entry whereby I need to write comprehensibly and impresively to attract bloggers to read my blog. Then, in the mean of doing that, I have to critically think of the appropriate content and things to be portrayed in the blogs in order to make it interesting. Other, I also sharpen my thinking skills through reading and giving comments to others' blogs.

What do I like about this course is the opportunity that it provides for me to experience and prepare varieties of technology teaching aids which is really useful for us as teachers-to-be. Moreover, it also provides us with skills and knowledge to edit and make some teaching aids interesting and suits with a particular topic. For example, audio editing and photo editing has enlightened us a lot in preparing teaching aids. The same credit should be given to other modules like internet skills, video editing, software for ELT and E-book.

However, what I do not like about this course is the redundancy of tasks. For example, sometimes, we have done this task in this module, then for another module, we have to do the same task as in the previous module. However, i belief that there must be reasons behind this.

Like I said before, via this course, I have expanded my skills and knowledge. There are loads of new things that I have learned for example editing audios, videos and photos. Apart from that I also learned on the consideration to make a good quality of e-book and preparing teaching aids using Microsoft Publisher. All of these modules learned, made me mature in this line of using and developing resources in primary ESL classrooms as suited with the name of this course itself.

I never expected that I would learn how to make videos and thick portfolio as part of our assignments. Apart from that, I expected that in this course I will use the teaching aids that we made for microteachings/simulated teachings. However, there were none have been planned for this.

Like I said before, one thing that I would like to change in this course is to integrate simulated teaching/microteaching as we can use the teaching aids and lesson plan prepared for the assignments so that we can improve our skills as teachers-to-be. This would add up to our holistic development as teachers.

Last but not least, On a scale of 1 – 10 , I would rate my computing and technological skills from 4 (before undergoing this course) to 9 (after undergoing this course). Thank you to Puan Foziah for guiding and helping me improve in terms of my computing and technological skills which would enrich me in this line of teaching and learning in primary schools.