Gratitude

This course has finally come to an end.

There are tons of bittersweet and memorable experience during this course. Time has escaped my attention, it has already been 7 weeks in this short semester. In truth, it is a hectic and crazy semester with so many workloads and all. I can say that it's a worthwhile learning experience. 

"To have a solid foundation of computer's knowledge as well as improving it and have a great time learning this course!"

This was what I wrote 7 weeks earlier while completing the database on my aim for the course. I can gratefully mention that I have achieved my aim. I have improved my knowledge on computer greatly from all the assignments I had completed. Little did I know that I will be learning so much, ranging from survey form, SPSS, database, spreadsheet, courseware et cetera. And I never expect myself using new web-based applications as well as computer software to complete the course. I'm always comfortable with my usual software, but this course has given me opportunity to explore on new programmes. I'm glad to be able to learn something new and to step out from my comfort zone. 

One of the most challenging obstacles I faced throughout the course is time management. Previously, I had difficulties in managing my time wisely. I often found myself slacking behind time because there's just "no time" for me. In the end, I felt extremely exhausted from the amount of workload as I have not completed the previous one. As I pace along this course, I tell myself not to procrastinate any longer and try to finish my work in a given time. It was hard at first but gradually, I am able to finish work in classroom and no more delaying work. Azrul, as an amazing partner, has given me motivation to complete our work on time and for this, I owe him my sincere gratitude.

What I've discovered about learning ICT is that it is not a one-time thing. You learn about ICT, directly or indirectly. Once you acquire basic knowledge in it, little chance that you will forget it. The one thing I like about ICT is that there's always a solution. Even when you fail once, twice or countless times, there is a light at the end of tunnel. There's a way to everything. ICT may be hard for a beginner to handle, but once they get the gist, ICT can be fun and exciting. ICT is all about self-exploration. Whatever steps or theories written in the book is not sufficient to cover the practical part of ICT. ICT is not learned by the book. It is of experiences and experiments. As ICT becomes the working vehicle in today's era, it is important to utilise the skills in bringing in development and changes to the nation.

Before I end this post, I would like to convey my warmest appreciation to:

• Dr. Siti Fatimah Mohd Yassin
• Encik Mohammad Fariduddin Wajdi Anthony
• Ahmad Azrul Afeze bin Ahmad Rosdi
• B. Ed TESL (IPGKS-UKM)

I will never be able to accomplish all these without your guidance and support throughout this course. Everyone has been so amazing and helpful! It's a roller-coaster ride with excitement, anxiety and fun all mixed in together :)

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

La fin~

B. Ed TESL IPGKS-UKM
IPG Kampus Sarawak
Jalan Bakam 98009
Miri

E-mail: barbarakath108@gmail.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/barbara_kath
http://www.facebook.com/barbarakath

Database

Good morning everyone!

After we did spreadsheet this week, we also had to create a database. This database is for student management information using OpenOffice Base. This was my first time creating a database because I have not done anything related to database before. Despite such unfamiliarity, instructions on how to create a database given by our lecturer is comprehensible. I owe my work this time around to our one and only, Mr. Mohammad Fariduddin. He endlessly given support to us and I truly appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.

Included in the weekly instructions, we are supposed to:

1. Tables: Create table in Design view (4 separate tables)

• student table(use student ID as a Primary key)
• parent table (use student ID as a Primary key)
• curriculum table (use student ID as a Primary key)
• co-curriculum table(use student ID as a Primary key)

2. Tool->Relationship: Create relationships between tables by linking

the student ID (That is why not to create student name for other

tables except Student Table!)

3. Use Wizard to Create Form:

• Student Form
• Parent Form
• Curriculum Form
• Co-curriculum Form

4. Data entry using Form (Note: do not use table for data entry)

5. Create several queries from the database

6. Create reports based on the queries

Using these outline to create a database is already sufficient for myself. Though I must say, there has been countless trial and errors in creating reports based on the queries. As the tables were supposed to be separate, I couldn't find a way to merge the data entry into one single table in the report. That means I have four reports based on four queries. Therefore, Azrul made another attempt with a different way, that is combining the tables into one during the table creation. There were only query so, one report was created with all the data on different column. This method differs with the first method of separating the table. 

I've uploaded a copy of the report on my Yahoo! group. 

Link: http://bit.ly/q4QkHS 

In short, creating a database isn't as easy as expected. There were many shortcomings throughout the process but I believe that with efforts, anything is possible. When a certain something is new to us, is is essential that when we try and fail, we should try again until we succeed. It all comes with hard work. 

As of importance in creating database, we possess prior knowledge to it before we move on to something harder in the near future. I'm sure I'll be encountering it again, harder and more complicated. Having basic knowledge on how to create a simple database prepares us for the next challenge.

To conclude, this is our last assignment of this course. But it isn't the last for this blog.

A "Thank You" post is coming right up :)

B. Ed TESL IPGKS-UKM
IPG Kampus Sarawak
Jalan Bakam 98009
Miri

E-mail: barbarakath108@gmail.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/barbara_kath
http://www.facebook.com/barbarakath

Spreadsheet

After an enjoyable week of multimedia, we're moving on to something serious this week. 

It's SPREADSHEET!

So, what's a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet is a table of values arranged in rows and columns. Spreadsheet applications are computer programs that let you create and manipulate spreadsheets electronically. In a spreadsheet application, each value sits in a cell. You can define what type of data is in each cell and how different cells depend on one another. The relationships between cells are called formulas, and the names of the cells are called labels. (Source: Webopedia) Basically, there are numerous spreadsheet application available on the Net and most widely used is Microsoft Excel. OpenOffice Calc is also another application that can be used for spreadsheet.

What did I do this week?
We had to come up with a personal financial management on income and spending. May sounds easy but let's move on to the next instruction. To link the formula between the sheets. I looked up on Google how to link the formula between the sheets since I had little experience in doing spreadsheets. Azrul was the saviour of the day for stumbling into steps on how to link the formula. He showed me on his laptop and more or less, I can comprehend on how to link the formula. The balance from the first month was able to be added to the balance of the next month and consecutively. We created one spreadsheet, ranging from January until December. The balance (income minus spending) of January was added to February and the subsequent months. I am very grateful that we managed to complete the spreadsheet successfully without much hassle. Objective accomplished!

Apart from creating a personal financial management, we also had to plan, create and edit a spreadsheet of
students score and grade analysis. Among the functions we had to utilise is VLOOKUP, STDEV, AVERAGE and COUNTIF. These functions are useful as it allows values of data to be read automatically from the given range. Knowing how to use spreadsheet is valuable because we are going to use them in the future for students' score input. There is no longer a need to insert score and grade manually to the spreadsheet as it can be calculated easily using the functions. Honestly, using Microsoft Excel is so much easier if compared to OpenOffice Calc. The functions button are easily accessible in the navigation bar and a drop down box will appear. One can select whatever functions applicable to calculate certain data.

I've learned so much again this week from spreadsheet. Spreadsheet is not something I'm familiar with since I rarely use it on daily basis. This course has provided me an opportunity to learn something new and thus, I can use these skills in the future. At least next time I encounter spreadsheet, I will not be lost and use the techniques learned wisely.

Happy Spreadsheet-ing!

Links to our spreadsheet: 

1. http://bit.ly/noX4MX
2. http://bit.ly/q7N3KQ 

B. Ed TESL IPGKS-UKM
IPG Kampus Sarawak
Jalan Bakam 98009
Miri

E-mail: barbarakath108@gmail.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/barbara_kath
http://www.facebook.com/barbarakath

Creative Effective Multimedia Production

It's all about MULTIMEDIA this week!

(Source: deviantART)

So we are required to come up with a presentation kit and courseware for Assignment 1. Previously I have installed OpenOffice in my laptop, and it comes in handy again as expected :) Although I was very much contented in using Microsoft Office Powerpoint for presentation, it's a different case this time around. I had to use OpenOffice Impress to create a presentation kit based on Assignment 1. 

I've already predicted that it wasn't easy using Impress and I was so right! Despite it being very minimalistic, I had to double, or maybe triple the effort of creating a presentation kit than using Microsoft Powerpoint. Basically, this presentation kit contains the essence of our chosen topic, which is Internet and Computer Security. A good presentation should always be minimal, compact and possesses good flow. It should not be very wordy (let's say 1000 words) because that totally defeats the idea of a presentation, isn't it? A presentation resembles a thousand words, therefore, the presenter should be well-versed in his/her presentation to get the message across. Bear K.I.S.S (Keep It Straight and Simple) in mind when you're designing a presentation.

Check out this link for awesome tips on presentation: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-tips-for-preparing-a-professional-presentation/

My personal experience of designing a presentation kit? 

Well, every now and then, everyone of us are required to present in class, be it for activity or assignment purpose. At times I enjoyed doing one but when it comes to wordy presentation, I found myself bored and had a hard time compressing the ideas. As an audience, I am most likely to be attached to minimalistic presentation. Visual aids can be a plus, however too much of it automatically condense the entire idea of presentation. It should be used appropriately not, for the sake of adding more slides to it. Also, I really enjoy a realistic presentation. Everything in the presentation should be related, not cluttered ideas all over. A good presentation also lies on a good speaker. A good speaker should not be reading from the slides but "presenting". It can be referred to at times but it should not be used as a reading material. Audiences will be bored since they, too can read from the slides, don't they?

Back to my experience with dealing with Impress, I was frustrated that it wasn't as user-friendly as Microsoft Powerpoint. Diagrams and texts weren't easy to be pasted into the slides. Everything needed a revamp once they were pasted into the slides. It is in contrast with Microsoft Powerpoint. They merge whatever formatting from the original document and we can easily transform it to our desired fonts. It is not the case with Impress. We had to do everything back from basics and it took longer time than it supposed to to design a presentation kit. Impress would be good for a simple presentation without multimedia and audio aids but certainly not for important presentation. Microsoft Powerpoint is the better alternative to presentation. Nevertheless, my pair and I complete the presentation and we upload it on my Google Docs :) Good job again!

For courseware, we had to come up with a video using Movie Maker, a layered graphic/image using GIMP and audio using Audacity. Download links of all programmes will be provided at the end of the post. The courseware is also related to Assignment 1. We used Windows Live Movie Maker to come up with a video. The video contains the bits and pieces of our topic and appropriate images were also inserted. We made sure that we applied transition effects for a more catchy video. It would be bland without any effects. After that, we used Audacity to edit our selected music effects for the video. We applied "Fade In" and "Fade Out" effects as well as trim any unnecessary clips of the audio. We used 4 background songs for our video, the beginning, middle and credits section. The effects are very useful because it creates a smooth flow of songs throughout the video. You would not want the songs to play endlessly without any fading towards the end. It will be a monotonous video and unable to appeal to audiences to watch your video. Audacity is a free programme, therefore it is available for use all year round.

GIMP provides a free alternative of Adobe Photoshop. I've used Photoshop before back in my school days to design banners and brochures. The skills have gone rusty, I must say. Nevertheless, Photoshop is an amazing software for designing and there are JUST SO MUCH to learn from it. On the other hand, GIMP is a simpler programme with similar features (e.g layering). I've utilised this programme in creating buttons for my courseware. The buttons created were nicely designed and they were inserted in my Powerpoint courseware. My verdict for GIMP? It needs to be more user-friendly. The necessary buttons were hard to locate. Once I'd created the button for my courseware, 3 similar files appeared. It takes time to close the remaining unused files. Apart from that, the text inside the buttons were permanent. I couldn't change it and the steps need to be repeated all over again. That's not how it works with Adobe Photoshop unfortunately. Despite being very expensive in the market, I believe it's the best designing software out there that caters to every need. Nonetheless, it's a good software to start off before proceeding with Photoshop. GIMP does not use up so much memory for an advantage.

So that's what I've done this week. So much to learn and so much to experience. It was a good one, though, and I hope to be able to utilise whatever I've learned in the near future. 

Hope everyone had fun exploring and have a great day!

Live Movie Maker: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-movie-maker?os=other

GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

B. Ed TESL IPGKS-UKM
IPG Kampus Sarawak
Jalan Bakam 98009
Miri

E-mail: barbarakath108@gmail.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/barbara_kath
http://www.facebook.com/barbarakath

Difference between Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer and Google Doc

Today, I would be posting on the three Word Processing programmes, namely: Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer and Google Doc. Despite all having similar functions, there are distinct differences in each of the programme. But really, it is up to your need in making choices between these three.

Google Docs 

Google Docs applications are web-based word processor. Rather than residing on hard drive, Google Docs requires Internet connection to access your documents. They don’t use up valuable hard drive space and should you need the files you created online, it can be copied to your PC anytime. The key advantage of using Google Docs is that it can be easily accessed by multiple users. It promotes collaboration among colleagues with just the “Share” button. There is no longer a need to send multiple copies of documents around to various people. The interesting feature that Google Docs has that no other word processors possess is real-time collaboration. Users are able to chat as they work on a document. When other people are working on the same document on them, they will be shown a list of names on the upper right portion of the screen. They can see the changes that people make in real as they type. Each person gets his own colour so the coloured cursor (according to the person’s colour) moves and makes changes. Basically, Google Docs provide easy publishing, communication and collaboration.

OpenOffice Writer 

OpenOffice provides a free alternative to Microsoft Office suites that can burn a hole in your pocket. This software is an example of open-source applications which means it cost nothing. The updates to open-source applications are also free. In generally, both Office 2010 and OpenOffice can create files that can be read by others. For Office 2010, Microsoft has established file standards such as .doc (and .docx) for Word documents and .xls (and .xlsx) for Excel. Those who are running Office 2003 or older versions may need to convert the files Office 2010 creates from the new file formats (.docx) to the older ones (.doc) to be able to open them. On the contrary, OpenOffice uses open standards for its native files, but can both read and write files in Microsoft’s format. The users can opt to change the default setting to save out files in Microsoft 2003 formats. However, if the Word documents contains extensive columns, header formats and embedded images, the file is likely to show up in Writer with minor formatting issues. It can be time consuming for users. For now, it does not have complete support for the new file formats created by Office 2007 and 2010. Formatting issues are likely to happen since these file formats are still new in the market.

Microsoft Word 

Microsoft Word possesses advanced features than OpenOffice Writer is lacking. First is grammar checking. Microsoft Word has a built-in grammar-checking tool. The Open Office community has provided a few add-ons that you could install to provide grammar checking, but they’re generally considered to be less robust than Word’s default options. Second are document-viewing options. The options to view documents are not as powerful in Open Office’s Writer as they are in Word. You can only choose to see a “Web View,” which doesn’t show all the formatting that you’ve included for a printed document, or a full-page layout that shows the entirety of the page including headers, footers, and margins. Word gives you several more choices, including a nice view that preserves the page layout without showing margins or headers. Third, conditional formatting. Both spreadsheet packages offer conditional formatting (the ability to automatically format cells based on the properties of the data within them), but Microsoft offers a lot more flexibility and control in this realm. Lastly, Microsoft Office’s “Smart Art” diagrams. Word, PowerPoint, and Excel all introduced a new feature in the 2007 version: Smart Art, a useful feature that allows you to easily create diagrams in a many common formats (like pyramids, cyclical diagrams, org charts, and more). OpenOffice doesn’t offer anything that comes close to the diagramming power. So if you prefer a collaboration-themed word processor, you can always opt for Google Docs. If you prefer simpler interface and can output to different file formats, OpenOffice Writer is the best for you. For the best feature set, Microsoft Word has its offer for you.

Sources:

• http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175921/Google_Docs_gets_better_but_is_it_ready_to_take_on_Office_?taxonomyId=18&pageNumber=1 
• http://knol.google.com/k/microsoft-word-vs-google-docs#_Toc213646571

There are numerous articles online that provide reviews on these three word processors Do check them out here: http://www.taming-openoffice-org.com/newsite/?page_id=23

Happy Trying!

B. Ed TESL IPGKS-UKM
IPG Kampus Sarawak
Jalan Bakam 98009
Miri

E-mail: barbarakath108@gmail.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/barbara_kath
http://www.facebook.com/barbarakath

Brochure & Booklet

After the heavy workload last week, this week's activity was rather light. Based on Assignment 1, 4 and 5, we were asked to create a set of brochure and booklet to illustrate the basic ideas of our topic. For brochure, we used Microsoft Publisher and booklet, Microsoft Word. I personally am more comfortable working with Microsoft Word, therefore Azrul was assigned to work with the brochure. 

Brochure

Microsoft Publisher is one of the most effective, simplest and easy Do-It-Yourself brochure creating ever. As the program contains many existing templates that can be used, one just needs creativity to invent a whole new concept of a brochure. The existing template can be used for guidance but really, it is up to a person's creativity to work around and come up with an amazing template. The features available in Microsoft Publisher are commendable as well, user-friendly and a lot of interesting things in there. I seldom have the chance to work with Microsoft Publisher so, this time when Azrul is working with our brochure, I can get a simple idea of how to create one. 

One of the disadvantages I found while working with the program is that the program constantly lags. I also find it difficult to move objects (arranging to front and vice versa) because most of the objects overlapped one another. Azrul had a hard time moving the objects around, nevertheless we were pretty satisfied with our lovely work.

Link to brochure: http://bit.ly/poruZ5

Booklet
Personally, I had experience creating booklet before. So there wasn't so much problem arise. I am currently using Microsoft Office 2010, therefore there are slight changes to where the "bookfold" function is in Microsoft Word. After much searching, I could locate it. Most of my coursemates was unable to find the function as well, so they came up to me and I told them where it's hiding :) Knowing how to create a booklet is essential for teacher trainees because there will be a chance in the future to be in-charge of documentation for events in school. These skills are among the basic ones that should be learned by teacher trainees. I can understand the significance behind learning all this, and I actually enjoy doing it rather than learning theories all day long. Theory, I felt is important but what's a theory without practice? There's just one little trick of booklet, printing them. My previous experience was the booklet printing did not turn out to be the way I wanted it to be. I had to rearrange some of the pages so that when I compile it, the pages are subsequent to one another. So before proceeding with any finalisation, it is wise to test printing so that you can get a clear idea of how it turns out to be!

Link to booklet: http://bit.ly/nepX5k

Wishing everyone a great day ahead! :D

B. Ed TESL IPGKS-UKM
IPG Kampus Sarawak
Jalan Bakam 98009
Miri

E-mail: barbarakath108@gmail.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/barbara_kath
http://www.facebook.com/barbarakath