Booklet.

Hi guys! Like I told you in the previous entry, I will explain to you on steps to create a booklet using Microsoft Word in this entry. Well then, let's not waste our time ;)

Firstly, after you click on Microsoft Word on your desktop, your screen will appear like below,

Following the picture above, you need to click on 'File' ---> 'New' to start creating a booklet. And after that, as usual, you have to choose a template for your booklet. So, you need to search for 'Newsletter' and click on it.

Many templates will appear on your screen. And all that you have to do after that is search for one that suits well with the topic of your booklet. You also need to have an internet connection to download a template as all of the templates are imported from the internet.

After you are done choosing a template, click on it, and it will start downloading the template. After that, you can start writing for your booklet!

Isn't it easy? Well, it is! ;) I have not done with my booklet yet, so I can't share it with you here. But I will try my best to complete it as soon as possible and I will definitely posted it here.

So, have fun trying it out guys! Bye ^^

Eleventh Week Task.

For this week, we were needed to create a brochure using Microsoft Publisher and a booklet using Microsoft Word. And the content must be related to the topic that we have chosen in which my group mate, Yen Yen and I chose 'Web 2.0 in Education'.

To create a brochure using Microsoft Publisher, you need to search for Microsoft Publisher first, for sure.

Your screen will appear like the picture above. And after that, you need to click on 'Brochures' (in the red box in the picture).

You may choose your own template for your brochure. And there you go, you may now create your own brochure.

The tools in the red box from the picture above is very helpful for you to beautify your brochure according to your own creativity.  Explore it wisely ;)

And here is the example of a brochure that is made by me:

Isn't it easy to create our own brochure? Yes, it is :) you should try creating one for you too.

I'll explain on how to create a booklet using Microsoft Word in the next entry. Stay tuned guys! ;)

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), Google Draw and OpenOffice Draw

GIMP is a software that has tools used for retouching and editing, free-form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo-montages, converting between different image formats, and more specialised tasks. GIMP is like Photoshop but they are different in some cases depend on the needs of the user.

To use GIMP, you need to download it first and it is free! Feel free to have a visit to its website, http://www.gimp.org/.

You may also make a drawing using Google Doc. Go to docs.google.com and sign in with your google account. And then, click on Create ---> Drawing just like in the picture below.

Your screen will appear like this:

And you may now proceed with your drawings. You may use the drawing tools (in the red box in the picture above) to draw using your own creativity.

I have done with my drawing. What about yours? ;)

And the last 2D Graphic Editing Software is OpenOffice.

To use this software, you need to install it first. And it is free, just like GIMP. You may install it here, http://www.openoffice.org/download/.

OpenOffice is a software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages.

Well, now, you may choose which software that you prefer the most to edit your graphics. And as for me, I would prefer Microsoft Paint more as it is easier and more interesting. You have your own view ;)

Till we meet again on the next entry. Happy reading guys!

Shapes / SmartArt Powerpoint

1. Search for Microsoft PowerPoint in your desktop (look at the arrow below). If you could not found Microsoft PowerPoint at your desktop, you may find it by clicking on 'All Programs' ---> Microsoft Office ---> Microsoft PowerPoint.

2. Click on Insert ---> Shapes, to draw using shapes.

3. You will find many types of shapes that could be used to create an object. This is the drawing that I have done:

4. Using Microsoft PowerPoint, you may also draw using SmartArt. Click on Insert ---> SmartArt. But basically, we use SmartArt to draw something that sort of mind map.

5. After that, a window will appear just like below. You may choose any shapes of mind map that you like.

6. You may also change the colour or the themes based on your interest. The arrow below shows the buttons that you could use to beautify your drawing.

All of you need to know that all of the graphics in Microsoft PowerPoint are vector graphics. But they will be bitmap graphics when you save them as jpg, bmp and etc.

Microsoft Paint

1. You will always find Microsoft Paint in any laptop, computer or even notebook. Go to 'All Programs' in your desktop and search for 'Accessories'. You will find Microsoft Paint there.

2. Your screen will appear just like the image below. You will find many buttons on top that will help you with your drawings. There will be many types of brushes, shapes, colours and many more. Have fun drawing guys! :)

3. This is my drawing. What about yours? ;)

Tenth Week Task.

For this week, we learnt about 2D Graphic Editing Software, in which they are:

• Microsoft Paint / Paint Brush
• Shapes / Smart Art Powerpoint
• GIMPS (OSS)
• Online - google draw (collaborative drawing)
• OpenOffice Draw (OSS)

There are two types of 2D graphic that we should know and they are bitmap images and vector images.

Bitmap images, or also known as raster images, are made up of pixels in a grid. Pixels are picture elements; tiny dots of individual color that make up what you see on your screen. All these tiny dots of color come together to form the images you see. And the common image file format for bitmap images are BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPG, PNG, PICT (Macintosh), PCX, TIFF and PSD (Adobe Photoshop).

While vector images are made up of many individual, scalable objects. Objects may consist of lines, curves, and shapes with editable attributes such as color, fill, and outline. Because they're scalable, vector-based images are resolution independent. They always render at the highest quality. You can increase and decrease the size of vector images to any degree and your lines will remain crisp and sharp, both on screen and in print. Fonts are a type of vector object. Common vector formats include AI (Adobe Illustrator), CDR (CorelDRAW), CMX (Corel Exchange), CGM Computer Graphics Metafile, DXF AutoCAD and WMF Windows Metafile.

For more understanding on these two types of 2D graphics, you may read on this article, 'Two Types of 2D Graphics Vector and Bitmap Images'.

And now, let us proceed to the colour systems. There are Red-Green-Blue (RGB) colour system and Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black (CYMK) colour system.

RGB colour system applies only to devices employing light, such as computer monitors and television sets, while CYMK colour system are used in the print industry.

To have a clearer view on the colour systems, please click here.

In the next entry, I will explain more on the 2D Graphic Editing Software that I have listed above. Happy reading guys! ;D

More links for Steps to Use SPSS.

I have found these links and I find it easier to understand. It is a guide made by a student of Special Education and Sports and Recreation. They have done well in explaining the steps to use SPSS. You might want to refer to their blogs for more information.

Blog 1 : Nursya Julia - Pendidikan Khas

Blog 2 : Muhammad Fitri Mohd Sham - Sukan dan Rekreasi

Eight and Ninth Week Task

Hi everyone :)

For these two weeks task, we were asked to make a mini research on the survey that we created last week based on the topic that we chose, in which my group mate, Yen Yen and I chose 'Web 2.0 in Education'.

We managed to get 26 respondents to enable us to proceed with this mini research. We need to make this mini research using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS), in which we have to use the survey made using Google doc in the previous week.

The steps to make this mini research using SPSS is quite complex and complicated for me. So, here I provide you with a link showing you the steps on how to analyze data from the survey that we made using SPSS.

How to Use SPSS?

It is complicated, isn't it? I don't really enjoy doing this task as it makes me a little bit stressful. But we managed to make it done and we are now trying our best to write a report of this mini research. I will update that report on the next entry after we have done working on it.

That would be all for this entry. Thanks for reading ;)

Sixth and Seventh Week Task

Hi everybody! It has been a while since I posted anything here. So, today I would like to write and share about what my classmates and I have done in Computer in Education class during the sixth and seventh week.

We were asked to create our own online questionnaire using www.surveymonkey.com for survey research on the topic that we have chosen in the previous week in which my group mate, Yen Yen and I chose 'Web 2.0 in education'.

We tried exploring surveymonkey first by creating a random questionnaire and I created one on music. Well, feel free to answer this :)

Music

And after we have done exploring how to create an online questionnaire using surveymonkey, we moved on with creating another survey regarding the topic that we have chosen before. We did the questionnaire using both surveymonkey and Google doc. Here, I provide you with the link of questionnaire on 'Web 2.0 in Education' using surveymonkey:

Web 2.0 in Education : surveymonkey

And this is the one using Google doc:

Web 2.0 In Education : Google doc

As for now, we have not gained many respondents yet. But we are trying to search for more. Feel free to answer all of the questionnaires to help us with the mini research that will be done next week.

From my point of view, I would prefer using surveymonkey more as it is easier for me to create a questionnaire. But creating one using Google doc could ease us in gaining the result. It depends on the main objective of creating the questionnaire. And I think, that would be all for now.

See you guys on the next entry ;)

Forth and Fifth Week Task

Hi everyone ^^

For the next task in another week, we were required to choose a topic out of seven and discuss about it in our own Facebook group. So, Yen Yen and I decided to discuss on "Web 2.0 in Education".

I shared some of the information in my Facebook group and here it is.

Web 2.0 technologies provide teachers with new ways to engage students, and even allow student participation on a global level. However, children raised exclusively in the era of new media technologies are less patient with activities such as completion of worksheets and classroom lectures. Decreased participation in a traditional classroom may be due to better feedback received online.

Will Richardson stated in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web tools for the Classrooms, 3rd Edition that, "The Web has the potential to radically change what we assume about teaching and learning, and it presents us with important questions to ponder: What needs to change about our curriculum when our students have the ability to reach audiences far beyond our classroom walls?" Web 2.0 tools are needed in the classroom to prepare both students and teachers for the shift in learning that Collins and Halverson describe. According to Collins and Halverson, the self-publishing aspects as well as the speed with which their work becomes available for consumption allows teachers to give students the control they need over their learning. This control is the preparation students will need to be successful as learning expands beyond the classroom."

By allowing students to use the technology tools of Web 2.0, teachers are giving students the opportunity to share what they learn with peers. Some are concerned that these technologies could hinder the personal interaction of students: "Social networking sites have worried many educators (and parents) because they often bring with them outcomes that are not positive: narcissism, gossip, wasted time, 'friending', hurt feelings, ruined reputations, and sometimes unsavory, even dangerous activities".

Web 2.0 calls for major shifts in the way education is provided for students. One of the biggest shifts that Will Richardson points out in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms is the fact that education should be collaboratively constructed. This means that students, in a Web 2.0 classroom, are expected to collaborate with their peers. By making the shift to a Web 2.0 classroom, teachers are creating a more open atmosphere where students are expected to stay engaged and participate in class discussions. In fact, there are many ways for educators to use Web 2.0 technologies in their classrooms.

"Weblogs are not built on static chunks of content. Instead they are comprised of reflections and conversations that in many cases are updated every day [...] they demand interaction." Will Richardson's observation of the essence of weblogs speaks directly to why blogs are so well suited to discussion based classrooms. As long as the students are invested in the project, weblogs give students a public space to interact with one another and the content of the class.

For example, Laura Rochette implemented the use of blogs in her American History class and noted that in addition to an overall improvement in quality, the use of the blogs as an assignment demonstrated synthesis level activity from her students. In her experience, asking students to conduct their learning in the digital world meant asking students "to write, upload images, and articulate the relationship between these images and the broader concepts of the course, [in turn] demonstrating that they can be thoughtful about the world around them."

And I would also like to share a short video titled "Web 2.0 and Education" in hoping that this might help you to understand more on Web 2.0 in education.

To be short, Web 2.0 includes Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and other social networking that we used nowadays. The used of Web 2.0 is for us to share and also for others to give some feedback and opinion. It is very useful in education for example, just like what we are doing right now. I am sharing information about Web 2.0 in education and you will be giving me your comment and point of view about it. Get it?

That is all for this week's entry. Thanks for reading guys :)

Third Week Task

Hello people. Nice meeting all of you again :)

In Computers in Education class yesterday, we learned to write a report using Google doc. Do all of you familiar with Google doc? If you are not, well, same as me. This is my first time using Google doc to write a report. And from my opinion, I would prefer Microsoft Word more than Google doc. Because Google doc can only be used with internet connection. While we can use Microsoft Word anytime without any internet connection. But at least I have learned something new today about technology.

To surf through Google doc,  click here and your screen will show this,

All you need to do is sign in with your own e-mail and password in the purple box. If you don't have any gmail, yahoo or hotmail account, you should definitely sign up first. And after you have signed in, this will appear on your screen,

To start writing a report, you need to click on "CREATE" button in the red box on your left and choose "Document". And there you go, you can now write your report and share it with your friends and lecturers.

From the proforma given, we were required to write a report on Course Management System (CMS) and Learning Management System (LMS). I did write a short and simple report on CMS and LMS. Please have a view on this link, Course and Learning Management Sytem.

After that, we need to create a folder in our own Dropbox account that we have created last week and share the report in it.

That is all that we have learned this week and we are hoping for another new knowledge to be learned in the next class. Till we meet again later ^^

First and Second Week Task

Hi everyone!

Welcome to my new blog and please be glad to read my very first entry for this blog. I do actually have a blog before but it might be informal and might not suits well with the subject that we learned right now which is Computers in Education.

I have been into the class last week with the classmates in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) programme from Faculty of Education, The National University of Malaysia. I did not get the chance to finish the tasks during the 3 hours class as I haven't get a computer for myself in the lab so I decided to do the tasks by myself and here I am, almost done with the first week's task.

We have learned about creating our own Yahoo group, Facebook group, registering ourselves in Dropbox and also here in Blogger.

Having my own Yahoo and Facebook groups are actually my very first experience in having it as me, myself as the creator. I usually joined my friend's groups and sometimes I joined them without even care about the activities or contents of the groups. And creating it by myself has taught me that the groups could ease us in delivering messages or information to our friends or other people.

Dropbox is actually new for me. I haven't heard it before and knowing it in the class has made me a little bit excited. Dropbox acts similarly like a thumb drive or a hard disk. But we may misplace the thumb drive or the hard disk because of their size. So, Dropbox is our best choice to save all of the files, documents and stuff like that. I have registered myself and installed it in my laptop. And you should try it yourself too here.

Last but not least, Blogger is quite common for me as I have another blog before this, like I told you before. Having a blog helps me a lot in expressing my ideas and also sharing my feelings. Blogs give us the chance to share with others about our opinions and also giving them the opportunity to give their comments and ideas.

I do expect lots of things from this course as I am not really good in computing and teaching online stuff. I might get useful knowledge that could be used for teaching tools later on when the right time comes. A lot of guidance from the lecturers, coordinators and friends are much appreciated. Thank you everyone. And let's enjoy and have fun together in our next class ^^

Assalamualaikum and have a nice day everyone.