CALL Blog Entry 1

1. Why do you think evaluation of CALL courseware, websites, materials etc important?

I believe that such evaluation are important because it helps us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the coursewares, websites, materials etc. This is important especially for those who will be professionally involved in teaching one day as such items should be evaluated thoroughly before being utilized or presented in the classroom before their students.

If such items are not evaluated thoroughly, it may lead to improper conduct by the students, or the content may be misleading or inappropriate for the student's level of proficiency. The content may also be too mature or immature for whatever age the students you are targeting on utilizing the items on.

The authenticity of the items also play a major role as to avoid the items to cause onfusion or misunderstanding among the students. The authenticity can only be verified once you thoroughly evaluate the items. Therefore, for these reasons, it is understandable why evaluation of coursewares, websites, materials etc are important.


2. How do you think Hot Potatoes JCloze may help your students learn English?

I first learnt of Hot Potatoes during this semester, and I wished how I have found out more about it earlier as in before my practicum. There are a lot of things in this semester I wish I had known earlier.

Well, firstly, JCloze is a gap-filling exercise where the students will have to fill in the blanks of a passage which have random blanks. I have always approved of gap-filling exercises because I believed that it helps to generate creative and critical thinking skills among the students. Sometimes the gap could have multiple answers so it provides students an opportunity to think up a variety of correct answers for the gaps.

However, in the prospect of Hot Potatoes, I believe that this software helps to make it even more interesting, fun, and challenging for the students. The benefit of Hot Potatoes is that you can provide hints for them to facilitate the students in figuring out the answers. I find this a very appealing aspect of it. And no doubt, students are always excited in using computers, no matter for what reason they are using it for, especially when it comes to learning as it gives them a change of the usual scenario of sitting in the classroom facing the whiteboard one whole day.

I like how for Hot Potatoes's JCloze, you can customize the cloze passage to make it lok more appealing to the students and o suit the topic or theme you are focusing on. This can help to increase the students' interests in completing the exercise.

Electronic Worksheet (In Class Task 2)

I have designed an electronic worksheet on English Language Grammar where the students have to categorize the jumble of words into Nouns, Adjectives and Verbs by cutting and pasting the words into the boxes.

Click Photo for Larger view

Introduction

My name is Najwa Hanani Kopli and I am from U8B in Bacherlor’s Degree TESL. I was born on 14th March 1987 and hail from the land of hornbills; Kuching, Sarawak.

My knowledge in computers are adequate enough for me to understand certain problem areas of computers, so I would say thatg I am quite a computer savvy person. I am rarely offline and is constantly up to something in the world wide web. I like being up to date with the current softwares (especially the free ones and computer protection programs) and also media sharing/downloads. I am a blogger (though there will be rare updates now that the semester has started) and is constantly updating my layout and widgets, so I have meddled with some html stuff before. It took a lot of practice and trial and error, but I did learn a lot from it. Most of the editing are learnt online, through google search and blogger help.

For my knowledge on computer software, I am not that efficient in that particular area as most of my software are free. Though i do choose the softwares that I use based on user reviews. Softwares that I download are usually for photo editing as I am really into photography and need good softwares for photo-editing. I am not a huge fan of Photoshop as the software is quite heavy and lags my laptop so I have a few free softwares that does the job for me juat as impressive as Photoshop. I am also quite a gamer so I do have computer games that keep me entertained but I have purchased a handheld game console last year as I want to reduce my usage of my computer for playing games. For hardware, i know that certain hardwares would improve my computer; for example, i updated my computer RAM from 512MB to 1GB to improve the speed. I also have purchased an external harddisk to compensate my massive downloads.

Online learning, as mentioned before, I experienced when I did some massive editing on my blogger template's html, thus being quite an amateur in the html-editing area, I went online to search for tips on editing html. For proper education, no, not really.

I did try to incorporate technology into my practicum by teaching 'The Sound Machine' via showing a video that I found from YouTube, acted by American students. The students found it entertaining and was new to the prospect of learning that way. They were able to identify and differentiate between the movie and the short story. In my opinion it was quite a hit with my students.

In my opinion, computer/technology should be incorporated in language teaching. Nowadays students have higher expectation when they walk into the classroom. The students todays are quite literate when it comes to computers and the world wide web. I remember how the students would be discussing about their blogs, their MySpaces and Facebooks. I remember my students asking me on the last day whether I had a blog or MySpace. When I told them that I used Facebook, apparently, the younge generation don't use Facebook. They use MySpace, because it is more hip, and you can edit the layout. Thus, I think that teachers nowadays should not only be inplemented good teaching skills, but also adequate knowledge of computer skills to enhance teaching.

My expectations from this course would be to gain more knowledge on computer usage, especially in terms of web designing skills and html editing. The last time we learnt about web designing was in Computer Literacy class in semester 1 if I'm not mistaken, and I enjoyed it very much. However since that was my first and last time using Microsoft Frontpage, I have become rusty and forgotten the tricks and trade of web designing. So I am hoping that i can refresh my knowledge on the area and gain more tipson the subject matter.