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Smart Learning Discourse

11/8/2020

Another sharing session with other great speakers on smart learning & teaching plan for students and faculty! Unfortunately, due to a specific, personal reason I couldn't make it that day :(
Anyways, I had several participants connected to me via Swapcard as well as LinkedIn. I hope you enjoyed the session and I am sure there are a lot of key things for you to take away!

Active Learning in Online Teacing & Learning Workshop

8/20/2020

Alhamdulillah, another sharing session took place via Microsoft Teams. Thanks to my fellow colleagues from the Faculty of Information Science & Technology for joining me in this session!

Edutech Phillipines

8/18/2020

I am so glad to be part of this great event - Edutech Phillipines - a virtual conference for educators from K-12 and Higher Education Institutions. Together with me in the Townhall session were fellow experts from Phillipines - Jeffrey and Giged (Floydeth somehow couldn't make it today) and our excellent moderator - Brent Reodica. We talked about the assessment strategies for HEIs in the time of pandemic and related issues.

There are many ways to do assessment and there are many great tools available online for assessments. But the utmost important thing to bear in mind should be - why do we conduct an assessment? This 'why' question is vital for all educators to reflect on as this 'why' will guide us in determining what kind of assessments suitable to be conducted.

I would like to express my thanks to all the panelists for your insightful sharing. What a joyful afternoon it was! :)

More Tips and Tools for Online Assessment

6/19/2020

In this new normal era, educators have a lot to catch up; from creating and curating learning materials, designing learning activities, disseminating or providing sufficient learning material to students, to planning and assessing learning activities.

I was invited to an online sharing session Assessment by HITeL UiTM Perak to talk about Tips and Tools for Online. In this session, I had additional material that focused on more tips on how to plan and design learning assessment effectively.

Apparently, the tips are not something new. However, the stress is on how educators align the learning outcomes with the assessments that they plan. In this era, where everything is conducted via online, we need to consider variation in the level of internet access among our students as well. Therefore, negotiation and flexibility come into place here. Do not be too rigid - make sure that the time given to students to complete the tasks is achievable. Make sure to spare additional time if needed so that all we get from students are something that they produced with a full effort and satisfaction.

I also talked about alternative assessment as an alternative :)
I also shared the actual evidence of how I conducted an alternative assessment with my students. What I like most about this kind of assessment is that is allows me to evaluate my students' capacity more holistically. Through a single project given, the evaluation is not focused on what they had learned alone, rather, more importantly, what they can do, team work and collaborative skills, leadership, management, diligence as well as resilience ( just to name a few).

Friends, please also remember to provide a scaffolding support to your students. If you expect them to produce an assignment / task, give them the rubrics that you would use to score their work. Students will appreciate the rubrics as it will help them to focus on the elements in the rubrics and in other words, it will help them to be more focused and how to fulfil the expectation. Every assignment has to come with a clear instruction and details about what will be assessed.

Last but not least, my heartfelt thanks to UiTM Perak for this invitation :)

Virtual Background in Zoom

6/6/2020

I know, it can be a frustrating experience when you realised that your computer didn't support a virtual background feature in Zoom! And what is more intimidating is when the virtual background appeared on your face instead! Who has this similar problem (raise your hand hahaha!) Well, there is a simple solution. All you need is just a green cloth or green screen on your back. Watch the tutorial below. I hope you will find this one to be helpful!
#greenscreen #zoom #hack #unsupportedcomputer

Creating Website using Weebly

6/5/2020

It has been in my planning to create such tutorials but time was always my enemy! Thanks to MCO, when all of us are working from home, I managed to (finally) complete this dream. I had been using Weebly since 6 years ago, started with a small, humbled website right after I finished my PhD study leave. I have never imagined that I would still loyal to this website provider until now - 2020.

What I love about Weebly is the fact that it is user friendly, but at the same time the easiness of it doesn't limit our creativity to do / design our website content and layout. Dragging and dropping elements in Weebly makes it more effective to any users. For those who are beginners in website development, I would definitely recommend using Weebly. And until you are fully convinced with its features, stay with a free account. You may want to upgrade to a pro version once you get used to Weebly and are comfortable with the whole process.

So here I present you my humble tutorials on how to create a website using Weebly - but sorry, the explanation is in Malay language :)
Please drop me a line - should you have any questions!

Cheerio! xoxo

Edittng videos in YouTube

6/5/2020

Screencasting Using Filmora 9

6/5/2020

Green Screen Technique

6/5/2020

The Pandemic's Impact on Me as an 'Edutuber '

5/22/2020

Everybody's life has been changed due to COVID 19 crisis, which forces us to stay at home and stay safe. In higher institutions, lecturers have to cope with shifting their teaching and learning from face to face to fully online. Is was a sudden decision that everybody has to take, whether they like it or not.

And suddenly, Zoom, Webex, and Google Hangout become so visible, and everybody is trying to cope with it to handle online classes. I think I am lucky enough, as using these online platforms for synchronous meetings or class sessions has started long before the pandemic. Soon after the MCO was announced, I instantly offered online classes via Zoom. I could still remember how chaotic it was for the majority of our faculty members when they learned that all classes have to be conducted online - and they didn't know how to start using it.

Taking it as my responsibility, (I used to be an e-learning coordinator for my beloved faculty), I then created a simple screencasted video to show them how to use Zoom for online class. It was 2300 hr when I finished recording at one go and directly uploaded the video to my YouTube channel - with the only intention, i.e., to help my colleagues and to ensure everybody is not left behind.

Never in my mind that the video would go far. A few days after I posted the video, my niece, who is a teacher in Kemaman, sent me a picture of my Zoom tutorial via WhatsApp - telling me that the video was shared among their teachers' group. I also received information from my master students who saw my video on Zoom being shared by others. My feeling? Far from proud, I was actually feeling grateful that it benefitted more than my primarily targeted audience. Up to this very moment, the video has been viewed more than 5.8K.

Since then, I had my perception changed. It's about how technology can be a blessing if we used it in a proper, reasonable manner. It's about how a sincere work can grant you the satisfaction that no others can give. Since I am still working from home, I started to produce more videos, hoping that it would reach whoever in need.

This very sentimental time at home also gives me a chance to explore and experiment with new things. In my latest video, I used a green screen technique to enhance the video's quality and make it look more interesting. Not bad, I would say heheheh. If not because of the pandemic, I might not have time to explore the potentials of my video editing skills, let alone produce numbers of other tutorials. If not because of the pandemic, I might not have learned about what it takes to be a YouTuber ( I will share what I learned in other entries insha-Allah). Or oh, should I say Edutuber?

This is a trailer for my YouTube channel. If you happened to read this entry, please subscribe to it. Thanking you in advance!

Dr. F
xoxo