Reflection Week 10

Today (27 April 2013) is the tenth lesson of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. I have learnt how to use Microsoft Office Excel to organize the score of students by using certain formula. 

       This application helps teachers to simplify and summarize the achievement of the students in test and examination.

       However, the weakness of Microsoft Office Excel is there are so many different equations that excel knows, it is easy to insert an incorrect equation, thus inserting completely erroneous information onto the spreadsheet.

   To overcome this weakness, it is advisable to have another Microsoft Office Excel session.

Reflection Week 9

Reflection Week 8

Today (13 April 2013) is the eighth lesson of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. I have learnt two software applications today which are Prezi and Advanced Microsoft Office PowerPoint. 

       Prezi’s aim is to give people the tools to publish creative presentations, rather than the traditional and common bland and boring ones. Prezi was officially launched in. The advantages of Prezi are:

• Presentations are made on the internet, therefore you are not limited to working on one computer, or having to save your work on portable memory.
• The presentations have the opportunity to be more creative
• It is more engaging to the audience compared to Powerpoint
• You can make your presentations public if you want people to view your presentation they can do it in their own time.
• Can be used to share information

       The disadvantage is Basic Prezi is free. To use more tools and create better presentations a cost is involved.

      We usually use Microsoft Office PowerPoint to display slides show during presentations. Most of the teachers in school also familiar with the application of Microsoft Office PowerPoint. But today, we are learning the advanced Microsoft Office PowerPoint. Advanced Microsoft Office PowerPoint can create a slides show with more interactive features such as cross words puzzle and multiple choices question. The weakness of the Advanced Microsoft Office PowerPoint is a bit complicated.

       However, Prezi and Microsoft Office PowerPoint are great tools to create a creative presentations.

Reflection Week 7

Today (6 April 2013) is the seventh lesson of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. My group, Group 7 is present about the application of Microsoft Office OneNote. In addtions, there is another group how us to use Window Movie Maker.

       Microsoft Office OneNote is a place for gathering, organizing, searching, and sharing notes, clippings, thoughts, reference materials, and other information. All the teacher's teaching plan, notes and exercises can be organized by notebooks, sections, and pages. Besides that, teacher can use drawing tool from Microsoft Office OneNote to draw electron arrangement of an atom.

       Another free software application that I have learnt today is Window Movie Maker. 

The advantages of Windows Movie Maker are:

• It is available free on any windows operating system
• It is easy to learn
• It is pretty straight forward
• You do not need film editing experience in order to use windows media player
• There are over 130 effects, transitions, titles, and credits available
• After capture, any clip can be dragged and dropped anywhere on the timeline

The disadvantages of Windows Movie Maker are:

• The program is known for suffering from frequent crashes

• The program freezes quite often

• Can not do complex editing using a windows movie maker

       However, Window Movie Maker is a useful tools to create a meaningful video clip.

Reflection Week 6

Today (30 Mac 2013) is the sixth lesson of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. I have learnt two free software applications which are Microsoft Office Publisher and Chemsketch today.

       I can use Microsoft Office Publisher to produce flyer, greeting card, calender, brochure and etc. Below is a flyer which created by using Microsoft Office Publisher.

The advantages of Microsoft Office Publisher are :

• Easy and simple to use
• Graphic is easily imported and formatted
• Numerous Templated
• Professional printing and publishing options

The disavantages of Microsoft Office Publisher are : 

• Not particular formats
• Not very suitable for creating teaching and learning material

       To overcome the weaknesses of Microsoft Office Publisher, we could use alternative software to create teaching and learning material such as Chemsketch.

      

       Besides that, I have also learnt to draw structure of molecule, draw set-up apparatus and write chemical equation by using Chemsketch. There are several advantages of Chemsketch application, which are:

• Draw and view structures in 2D, or render in 3D to view from any angle

• Draw reactions and reaction schemes, and calculate reactant quantities

• Generate structures from InChI and SMILES strings

• Generate IUPAC systematic names for molecules of up to 50 atoms and 3 ring structures

• Predict logP for individual structures

• Search for structures in the built-in dictionary of over 165,000 systematic, trivial, and trade names

• Visualize chemical structures in 2D or 3D to gain more insight into spatial configurations, and relationships to molecular properties

• Create professional reports, working with structures, text, and graphics simultaneously

       In short, Chemsketch is a very good tools to create teaching and learning materials and tools. Below is the example of complexes drawn by using Chemsketch.

My Teaching Philosophy

Teachers are like gardeners and students are like flowers. Each student is different and with the right nurturing, nourishing and care, they can flourish into what they were destined to be.

A chemistry teacher’s mission is to initiate a student’s interest to learn chemistry and fall in love into the subject of chemistry.

Reflection Week 5

Today (23 Mac 2013) is the fifth lesson of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. The lesson started with the application of PICASA 3. Picasa is a free program from Google that you can use to organize and edit your digital photographs. By using PICASA 3, we could edit our digital photo and create video from photos. The video and photo can help us in preparing the teaching material.

       Here is an example of editing a digital photo by using PICASA 3. Left photo is the original and right photo is the edited.

Below is the video that created by using photos.

       The facilitators so good and helpful. I would like to say thank you to Mohamad Fariz B Ahmad, Mohd Akhmal Bin R.Azmi, Mohd Taufik Bin Abd Hamid and Zainudin Bin Abdul Razak. 

       Besides that, there is a link to show how to use PICASA, http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Picasa.

Reflection Week 4

Today (16 Mac 2013) is the forth lesson of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. I continue to complete our blog by adding gadget. I am creating the down down menu by using the layout template from the website  http://pixopoint.com/products/suckerfish_css/. 

       What is a drop down menu? Drop down menus are one of the most important and integral features of a website. Scripting allows you to add a menu bar with attached drop down menus to the top of your website which helps in website navigation.

       In the website above, I choose our favourite design such as font size and colour. Afterthat I submit the design, CSS code will be given and I copy the CSS code into the layout. The advantages of websites using a drop down menu are as following:

• A drop down menu is useful because it reveals the contents of a website simply by placing the cursor over the main menu navigation bar. When this happens, the pages below the main sections appear dynamically and third tier pages are also revealed when one goes further down. It enables the visitor to click on any of these links and go straight to these pages.
• Drop down menus makes sure that navigating a website is extremely simple.
• The menu acts like a dynamic site map that provides navigation.
• Search engines can index the site using the menu structure and can then provide a structured search result.

       The weakness of the procedure of creating down down menu is too complicated. But it could be overcome by the help and guidance of group 1 members. Again, I would like to say Thank you so much to Group 1, Wan Mohd Faizal Bin Wan Mohd Nasir, Ezrul Helmi Bin Muhamad Razal, Durairaj S/O Ehambron and Thanabalan A/L Munuswamy.

My Career Development Plan

I am a teacher in SMK Seri Gombak. I have been teaching for 3 years in this school. I love to be a teacher especially chemistry teacher. I am doing Post-graduate Program in Chemistry Education to improve myself and my teaching skills to help my students in school. My career development plan is very simple. I wish I could become a great Chemistry teacher and all my students love the subject of Chemistry.

Reflection Week 3

Today (9 Mac 2013) is the third lesson of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. At the beginning of the lesson, we started create a blog and create the drop down menu. Very interesting and fun! I could put all the information and the website links in my blog. In future, my students could visit my blog to learn chemistry.

       The facilitators are so good and helpful. They are willing to help us to solve any problem in creating our blog. Thank you so much to Group 1, Wan Mohd Faizal Bin Wan Mohd Nasir, Ezrul Helmi Bin Muhamad Razal, Durairaj S/O Ehambron and Thanabalan A/L Munuswamy.

       There is a problem arise during the lesson. The problem is the internet access is so limited due to all of us in the class are using the internet access at the same time. Therefore, the progress of creating blog is slow. In order to solve the problem, we need to bring own broadband to smooth the lesson.

       After three hours of the lesson, I just finished to add the drop down menu. The lesson has to be dismissed, so we continue to add more gadgets on the next lesson. 

Reflection Week 2

Today (2 Mac 2013) is the second lesson of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. Ms Asmayati, the lecturer introduces a useful website, which is called Khan Academy. There are various videos that related to the chemistry and other subjects in the website of Khan Academy. The videos in the Khan Academy could help teacher and students to understand chemistry concepts. Teacher could use the Khan Academy as teaching aid. Meanwhile, teacher could introduce the Khan Academy to students to encourage self organizing learning.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/chemistry/introduction-to-the-atom/v/introduction-to-the-atom

       Besides that, there will be the session of peer teaching along the course of Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Chemistry. Each group will responsible in teaching peers of application of free software that could help us in the teaching and learning of chemistry class in school. For example, blogger, Picasa, advanced Microsoft power point, Chem sketch and so on. A lot of new information can learnt from the peers. I am so willing for the next lesson.

     The strength of today lesson is the introduction of Khan Academy which give teacher an alternative teaching aid in teaching and learning Chemistry. However, the weakness of today lesson is we encounter problem of  wireless internet access. To solve this problem, we are going to bring own broadband.

My group members, Dila, Mawar, Lee and me