Saturday, October 19, 2013

Week 2 - Summary

This week has passed so quickly, with so many things to experience and learn. Due to my trip, I had to manage to read the materials for the class on-the-go, often while having a cup of coffee at the train station somewhere between Aachen and Cologne.

What matters is that I did it. Or at least I hope I did.
First, there was a Noodletools website that provided a list of search engines, most of which, I must admit, I had never heard of before. I went through a number of these, realizing how narrow and limited my cyber-world-search has been so far.
I chose
  1.  http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/  - Newsnow.com,  
  2. http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx - Pressdisplay.com and
  3.  http://www.newseum.com/  - Newsuem.com.
In order to show their strengths and/or weaknesses, I used as the keyword  “cloning”. 

To my great surprise, the site which provided no information was Newseum.com. The second I used was Newsnow.co.uk, which gives you a list of newspaper articles from all over the world that deal with the searched topic, starting from the latest published one. At Pressdisplay.com site you can filter your search by narrowing your search to particular country, language in which it was published, author of the article, the relevance, etc.
After I had explored these, I wanted to try some other websites. I found http://www.academicinfo.net/ - Academicinfo.net quite useful, giving a variety of relevant links.

Next to learn this week was writing  learning objectives using ABCD framework. The most useful when doing the task of writing my own class objective was the slide show that relates to using ABCD model with achieving an IT goal. http://www.slideshare.net/ashleytan/writing-specific-instructionallearning-objectives-presentation .


According to  ABCD method this is an excellent starting point for writing objectives. In this system, "A" is for audience, "B" is for behavior, "C" for conditions and "D" for degree of mastery needed.
1.     Audience (A) – Who? Who are your learners?
2.    Behavior (B) – What? What do you expect them to be able to do? This should be an overt,    observable behavior, even if the actual behavior is covert or mental in nature. If you can't see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it, you can't be sure your audience really learned it.
3.    Condition (C) – How? Under what circumstances or context will the learning occur? What will the student be given or already be expected to know to accomplish the learning?
4.     Degree (D) – How much? How much will be accomplished, how well will the behavior need to be performed, and to what level? Do you want total mastery (100%), do you want them to respond correctly 80% of the time, etc. A common (and totally non-scientific) setting is 80% of the time.

2 comments:

  1. Dear Maida,
    I enjoyed reading your blog and it was like revising this week's tasks with you.
    It brought quite some work and kept all of us alert whole through the week.
    I really liked the slide show about writing objectives.
    Wish you luck!
    Yusra Anwar

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  2. Dear Yusra,
    Thank you so much for a positive feedback on the post. Just like you said, we've been constantly busy with the amount of work in this course, but it really seems worth it. I personally have learned so much in the past three weeks and I wonder what other new and challenging things are ahead of us. I look forward to visiting your blog.
    Best of luck to you, too and keep up the good work!

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