Use of Camtasia 

A vital equipment to be used in one of our projects was Camtasia Studio. It was very convenient and manageable tool actually. If teachers have the skills of handling it then it is really going to rock their teaching life. For teachers, in particular, we can use Camtasia to create tutorials and video lessons on any subject areas to help and guide our children. In the near future when our education services are well improved and developed many of the good lessons can be created and publish on the web. This is going to be great help to our learners because our children can always visit webs and browse them whenever they want. The internet facility is improving and I believe it is going to be a major change in our education system. Everything is getting digitized.

Camtasia Studio can be used to record videos.  And the plus point is that we can also record our voices with clarity. This is helpful if we ever want to explain things along with the videos. Another useful feature I found in this tool is the ability to edit captured video. We can edit our clips, the audio track, titles, and enhance video quality with transitions and captions. There are lot more features available but lack of skill and knowledge is hampering its usage.

However, I managed to pull up and down with trial and error method. I wished it was an individual activity so that I could work all alone on it. Being a group task made it challenging. Sharing and discussing with friends with poor internet access ate our brains. But at the end I realized that the task offered us a greater opportunity to explore more internet facility. We are now happy that we did some of the new things we have never done before. It gave us a greater satisfaction.

Wonder Share quiz creator 

It was a real wonder. Our group made use of wiki extensively for this project. The topic discussion took place there in wiki. We shared everything about our Quiz task there. In the process it made us expert in using the wiki facility. The job was not easy at the beginning though. The sharing was great. We worked on different questions individually. Then we posted in group wiki. I prepared one set of quiz questions and posted for reference. The others did the same. And in that journey we had a good laugh. One of our friends even posted Dzongkha quiz because she said that the language is not specified. That added variety but the group did not like it due to the fact that we are not very good in Dzongkha. And we thought it was not suitable for the subject as well.

The Wonder Quiz Share has a variety of question types. That made us easy to have a variety in question patterns too. Each time we handle something it was a new experience. I personally liked it very much though I felt some burden at the beginning. Our group members worked hard on this very cooperatively. We enjoyed working together. However, if we look at it generally, I felt that this kind of group task is not very favorable. This is because some people are not even accessible to internet facility. For majority, working in poor network areas does not allow them to work on such a strong work requiring high quality network. For some it becomes a frustration and hinders learning. I was lucky that I have the facility and enjoyed working.

Ten useful sites

One of the residential assignments was to explore ten useful educational websites for teachers. I was thoroughly confused. My effort in trying to get help from friends confused me more. Each gave me a different meaning. Some said URL is a website. Some clarified if there is .com at the end it is a website. I was asking the difference between webpage and website. Some even stated that web address is the web site. Finally I asked one of our tutors and he gave me a clear picture of it. Searching for a standard definition from the internet, it states that it is a group of World Wide Web pages usually containing hyperlinks to each other and made available online.

 This activity gave us an opportunity to explore useful educational sites. I was more than happy because I could get into websites not known to me. My focus was more on the teachers’ websites because deep down my conscience tells me those are going to help me. Most of them are related to my work and my subjects. From the various websites we can get inspiring and valuable ideas that are related to our profession. The materials are abundant and they are really going to save time. Knowing the right websites is more than important as it will lead us to the right thing we are looking for. Thus I must assure here that this activity was really enriching and I am going to share this little knowledge with other friends who do not know it. Looking for information from the trusted websites gives us authentic information. They take us to something we never know about it. Making use of them can really enhance our teaching and learning. Let us all make use of them, explore better websites and share with one another.  

Blog experiences

Maintaining a blog was another task that consumed a lot of energy and time. Writing a reflection required a good amount of time. From my personal blogging experiences, I have realized that there are armfuls of advantages. It promotes ones thinking and analytical skills. Constant blogging will also definitely promote our writing and reading habits. It requires a lot of quality writings. The writing process has to be practiced and yes we will be able to improve writing pieces. We can share our writings to the larger audience. And the great advantage is that the writings can be edited or commented. This is again helping in taking our writing quality to a greater height. Criticisms or comments will help us improve our writings.

At this hour we are simply learning how to maintain blogs. We are not really serious about our writings. We are just learning how to use blogs with the reflection. But in the future, once we are comfortable with using blogs, I think we can maintain a quality blog and have many people follow us. It can be used for professional as well as personal growth. Personal writings can be shared. This will keep us engaged and help us become good writers. Professional matters can be posted and get comments. There can be a great sharing on educational related topics. I foresee a greater benefit for the students as well. They can use blogs to share subject related concerns and interact with teachers. It is going to be a real fun! But for now, we are worried about the marks. I get no comments because the blog is not familiar. My close friends do not have facility – the internet.  The criteria are set and I am sure to lose 3 marks. But I am determined that I have learned a lot and would like to maintain my personal blog very soon. This keeps me going ahead!!! 

Creating Google Forms

A Google Form is used to gather information. One way of gathering information is through the survey. Surveys can be created and done online through google form. But, it is important that we know how to create them. I remember the steps in creating google forms from one of our sessions in the residential classes. They are as mentioned below:

a)     Go to docs.google.com and sign in using ID and password.

b)    Look for ‘create New’ button and select ‘Form’

c)     There will be two text boxes. Enter the title and a description for the form we are creating.

d)    Type the first question into the ‘Question Title’ box.

e)     Select question option from the ‘Question type’ drop- down menu. There are options like text, paragraph text, open ended question, multiple choice, true/false and rating questions.

f)      If we want all to respond to our questions click the checkbox ‘Make this a required question’ then click done.

g)     To add additional questions click the ‘Add item’ button.

h)    Click the "Theme" button to adjust the color scheme and appearance of our survey.

i)       Click "More Actions," then select "Edit Confirmation" to update the text that is displayed when a person completes our form.

j)       Click "More Actions" and select "Embed" to copy the HTML code needed to embed the form into our website.

k)    Click "See Responses," then select "Summary" or "Spreadsheet" to view data collected using the form.

Critical Analysis

Knowing the steps in creating a google form is critical. This is because if we do not know how to create, using the form is out of question. In the current world everything is transforming. The educational plans and the implementation strategies are transforming. With these changes, the requirements do change. Teachers’ qualification and the work ethics need change. That is why we see that up-gradation is the key core of all the developments.  We are encouraged to carry out action research on topics related to our work so that we perform better. Action research means a lot of data collection work. Therefore google forms can help us get the things done easily and faster. Therefore knowing how to create and make use of them is very vital. Distance Education is really serving the purpose of up gradation because it is taking us to the level where we should be in this fast developing environment. It is making us grow each day.

                               Google Docs

What are the components of google docs? The following are the important ones.

Ø Presentations – It is like a power point presentation. We can make power point presentations in many different ways as much as we want.

Ø Spreadsheets – It is an alternative to excel. Google excel does the same things that excel does. We can make use of them anytime and anywhere.

Ø Form – Google Forms is a tool that allows collecting information from users via a personalized survey or quiz. The information is then collected and automatically connected to a spreadsheet with the same name. Teachers need to develop lots of questionnaires for finding out information that is factual regarding teaching and learning. Google form can solve our problem. There are more than enough free templates to be used for the style as well. That is another plus point.

Ø Drawing – If we are looking for some simple drawings we may take help of google drawing. Google Drawings can be used to work together in creating, sharing, and editing images or drawings. It can be used for creating charts, diagrams, designs, and flow-charts.

Some Benefits of Google Docs

Google docs have ample benefits. The three top most benefits are shared under:

·        Browser-based – Google docs is a browser based. We can work on our task on any desktops, laptop, tablet or mobiles devices.

·        Google secure – sharing work on a network keeps the documents secure. We do not have to worry about losing or tampering them. We do not have to worry about updating or having strong antivirus.

·        Online collaboration – Many people can work on the same document. The writers can work on the same document at the same time and see each other working. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users.      

Wiki experiences

The residential classes in Samtse were joyful as always. ICT classes in particular were more preferred due to the fact that we were in front of the Desktop for practical lessons. And everything we were offered were all new for us. That increased our enthusiasm. Our tutor, highly respected by the DE candidates, was kind enough to give us group projects because that is something we can challenge.

One of the project tasks is creating our own wiki page. I followed the instructions and started to create the wiki page. The job was not that easy! I had to watch the video tutorial for a good number of times. I had to call my friends often. With much struggle I have done that part. Later I found it was very easy. It is just that when you do not know, everything seems to be such a big challenge. But once you know, you feel that is the easiest job in the whole wide world!

I had the next challenge. How do I make sure that my group members see my wiki page? I called my friends to check. They informed me that they can’t view my page. I asked how they did it. They had no answers for that. Then I had no other options. I explored and yes I was able to do it. My friends told me that they could see my page and edit it. And you may guess how relieved I was!!!

Next we took the step of quiz discussion. Sharing Quiz questions then became easy. We commented on the good things about our quiz and the changes to be made. We shared files too. This allowed us to use wiki page actively. Now we have acquired basic concepts on the functions of wiki page. This is a good achievement. We were able to create group quiz successfully and this gave me a great satisfaction personally. 

Google drive and docs

Google drive 

The lesson on google drive and google docs was a real success. We were taken through topic that we never knew. Personally, I liked it very much because I knew it is going to be very useful. I never had the experience of using them.

Google Drive is an online office suite that includes a word processor (Google Docs), spreadsheet program (Sheets), and presentation tool (Slides). Google Drive includes storage space, which can be used to store information. It keeps our stuff in one place secure and up to date. We can access to the information on drive from anywhere and anytime.  Google drive can be also used for sharing documents and files. We can share photos, documents and presentations from different places. This can help us work with friends on the same thing at the same time. The other good thing is that our friends can edit, view and comment on our documents.

May be I can mention here what we can do with file on google drive. We can drag files into and out of the folder. We can rename files. The files and folders can be moved around. We can edit and save files. The unwanted files can be moved to trash. And one good advantage is that we can access our files even when we are not connected to the internet.

The practical hands-on experience on creating google drive was an eye opener.  This was more efficient than listening because it provided us an opportunity to really work with creating google drive online. This cleared our confusions.  I still remember the steps and know how to create it. We had the opportunity not only to create google drive but also how to use them. We practiced how to save our documents, how to delete them, how to transfer files, and how to work on the same files with other friends. This was a great experience.

Critical Analysis

I am getting this curious feeling now. Why do we have to wait for a formal training, workshops or classes to learn anything? We have the required facilities – the lap tops and the internet. Still why are we so ignorant? I remember we misplace important documents. At times we are far from our documents and we don’t have them when we want them. We try to call everyone and land up in frustration when things turned out to be ugly. We waste our resources. Why didn’t we explore all these facilities on internet? Do we really need to wait for formal classes? Had we known earlier that files can be saved on google drive; our work would have been much easier and lighter.

Now, I have realized that exploration is the key to learning. People have the intelligence to create things and it is sad that we do not have the intelligence to make use of them. We must be taught by someone else! We wait for someone to push up! Exploration is vital because it is going to make us discover something new in life. Everything can’t happen in workshops, classes and seminars. May be I can pass this message to our friends that let’s keep on exploring because that is going to bring out success and comfort in one’s life. I am proud that I have realized this through this particular session!!!

Truncation and wild cards

In one of our residential classes we had the discussion on the use of truncation and wild cards as tools for effective searching. A very useful technique for expanding our search results is to search by the root word. If we get very few results, we can use truncation to widen our search to get more results. In truncation the end word is cut off and replaced with asterisk symbol. This is useful in finding alternative word endings based on the root of a word. For instance, if we enter ‘bake *’ we might get results for baked, bakes, bakery, and baker. This will not only save our time but also help in obtaining good results by doing just one search instead of many searches.

Critical analysis/Future commitment

I am still confused whether truncation and wild cards are same or not. I understood truncation very well but bit confused with wild cards if they are different. This is because some sources say that substituting a character as a stand in for any word or letter in a search phrase is called wild cards. It is said that it is useful if a word is spelled in different ways but still has the same meaning. The examples could be like man and men, color and colour. However, some explained that wild cards also focus on the root word like truncation.

The use of truncation   is indeed going to help us search effectively. It is going to really save our time and the resources by obtaining more search results. My future commitment here would be to clarify on the two terms by asking the known and exploring examples. Till now, I take truncation and wild cards as same and they take the same process for the search. And in the process of reading this I hope our tutor and friends would clarify on this.

Session II (Second day)

                                  

                                     THE WEB RESEARCH 

The second day’s lesson was on the web research. Under this the three main topics covered for our wisdom were on the use of google scholar, Boolean operators, and the use of search smarter.

The focus here will be on google scholar and the use of search smarter since the Boolean operators had been already discussed and posted earlier. What is google scholar? It is a reliable search tool that indexes the full text of scholarly literature in varying publishing formats. It allows us to search across a wide range of academic literature.  The features of google scholar I retrieved on 25^th August present the following:

•  Search all scholarly literature from one convenient place.
• Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications.
•  Locate the complete document through the web.
•  Keep up with recent developments in any area of research.

The above features clearly tell us that there are many advantages in using google scholar.

The next is --- What is search smarter, search faster? I watched the video tutorial and got some insights on this. When we are working on any research topic, we need to refer to different journal articles. There may be hundreds of articles discussing on the same theme. But each one may have used different key words. We must think of how to search our databases. One idea here is to arrange the search format by grouping similar words from each of the articles.  Then we can connect them by using OR for similar terms and using AND to connect words together to create a search. This will cut down our search time and improve the search results.

In the process there was also clarification on the difference between web browser and search engine. Web browser is like chrome and Mozilla Firefox. They display information. Search engine are like yahoo and google. They retrieve information. Some of the participants were not clear on the difference between search bar and the address bar. Tutor was kind enough to elaborate on this. Address bar can be used when we have the complete address otherwise we make use of the search bar.

Critical Analysis/ future commitment

To be honest, I gained some knowledge on google scholar and search faster. This was possible through three ways. Firstly by attending classes during residential hours. Watching the video tutorial then added to my comprehension. And browsing net for more information broadened my understanding.  I know the difference. I know what they mean. But let me confess here that I may not be in a position to make use of them in my field of study. And the reason is that I need some practical hands on experience. We did not have that opportunity during class hours due to time.

My strong commitment here will be to learn how to make use of them. I know both the tools are important and handy. I will have to have practical learning from the IT teachers. I am lucky that there are enough IT experts in the place where I work. With google scholar we can have access to many of the open literature. It provides access to unique content that are not in other search tools. This is going to make our work easy and also get more information. In the present world, life and work is full of research. Thus knowing the tools would be vital.

Residential class - Day I

Day I

Boolean opertors

A brief summary

Boolean operator is a tool to help us search library card catalog on internet faster and with more precision. The most common Boolean operators are AND, OR, and NOT. 

AND narrows or limits search by telling the database that all keywords used must be found in an article. AND search for two or more concepts by combining descriptive key words

Or broadens a search by telling the database that any of the words it connects are acceptable. It is helpful when we are searching for synonyms. I like to share one example from the internet here. For instance, if we type “death penalty” or “capital punishment” the results will include articles with either term.

NOT narrows our search by telling the database to exclude the information we do not want. This is useful when we are interested in a very specific task or information. It is also useful when we want to exclude a certain type of article.

Critical Analysis

I remembered the old famous saying “little knowledge is dangerous". I have no idea of any of the tools. I was actually taking a lot of time in getting information. In order to look for one kind of information on the net, I get thousands of results. I just keep on clicking one after another and at the end I land up getting so many stuff. Many of the stuff are usually unwanted and unnecessary. This wasted my time and resources. It took me so long to sort things out. Simple tool like Boolean operators makes the work easy and efficient. It saves time because we can look for things we want using this tool quite fast.

Future Commitment

The new knowledge on the use of the above tool will assist me henceforth. I may not waste my time and the resources which are precious. Using AND, OR, and NOT will guide my search on the web. I can also guide our colleagues because I know many do not have this idea. Thanks for the new idea!!!

MY ANGELS

Desires are really unlimited!!! They have no boundaries, no limits and no ends. They go on and on and on. Papa and mama wanted sons when they have daughters. Your neighbor complains of having only girls in her luck because she desperately needed a son. Your friends come up with a conversation topic …. Why do I have only sons……Why do I have only daughters!!!  Some even go up to blaming god….. Why are you not granting me mixed children?

And I sit back on my couch thinking so hard. Why are people not happy with what they have? I tell my close people to appreciate life. Everything is precious. I have two daughters but no sons. That doesn’t bother me in any way. I have my girls, perfect.  I love them. I value them. I feel for them. I do not wish for other substitute. They are the best!!!  At least for mummy.

I call them my ANGLES because they run my life.  I breathe because of them. I live because of them. They do have unique characters. Azhim is different from the younger one.  Very confident in things she does. She cares her sister like any other precious elder siblings on earth.

Chungku is bit pampered. This is because she remains an apple of her mom’s eyes. She knows how to handle mom’s emotions. I like that. I will make a note here that I do not miss sons. My girls give me everything needed in life!!!

An SBIP ...A new experience

AN SBIP FEELING

My English HOD came smiling during one of my free periods.  “Madam, you are selected as one of the members to attend tomorrow’s SBIP.  The chances are all given to the seniors. It is an important one and you are requested not to miss it.”  Tomorrow was then 1^st August. I was more than excited by the way my HOD expressed it.  Later I came to know that the SBIP was on GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION.

The arrangement aroused my curiosity and I liked it. The groups were divided and visibly pasted on the door. We were not allowed to enter the room unless the permission was granted. I browsed my members. Yes, there were six of us. A wise and a good distribution –teacher, office assistant, student….different background.  

Once inside, I read a card on our table loud enough. It read ….PEACE. This added another joy and excitement. The facilitators were more confident. They really worked hard and the planning well done. Thumps up for that!!!

The SBIP began with the introduction. It wasn’t a normal introduction. There was a purpose and with it some values attached.  The core values of global citizenship were neatly hung in front. The person introducing must choose one of them and have reasons to explain.  Principal started his introduction followed by others. Many preferred LOVE but everyone had different reasons.

The turn came to PEACE group. Time was precious so all did not get the opportunity. We chose madam Deki. She stood and walked in front with full confidence. We were wondering about her choice. Inside I was guessing she would go with LOVE. But NO!!! She chose HONESTY.

The reasons threw me to the air. I appreciated it….VERY MUCH. It was really analyzed and critically thought.  

She explained, “I am going with HONESTY. I have my own reasons unlike yours. The TRUTH, the LOVE, the PEACE, the NON-VOILENCE---They are all conditional. If it favors you will follow it. If it doesn’t there will be hatred in place of love, lies in place of truth, and violence in place of non-violence. But HONESTY is unconditional. It doesn’t matter in what state you are, it will be there with oneself. So, I choose HONESTY.”  I was more happy for the reasons she explained. It took me to another level of thinking. Human BRAINS are a real magic. You can think of what others can’t. And all I could do was just appreciate it!!!