Weekly Reflection (Wk 11)

In today's lesson, I learned about the following:
1) Students as Designer: Project-based Learning
2) Hands-on activity using MASH (Microsoft Agent Script Helper)

From point no.1, I learned about the following:
1) Students are good designers of learning themselves. They can decide on how much they want to learn and how extensive the involvement is. This can be achieved by allowing students to engage in Project-based Learning (PBL).
2) When guiding students to engage in Project-based Learning, we should:
a) Focus on the central concepts and principles of a discipline.
b) Involve students in problem-solving investigations and other meaningful tasks and allowing them to work autonomously to construct their own knowledge.
c) Inform students that the end products of the project must be realistic.
d) Encourage collaboration between students and let them take control over their own learning/work (When students embark on a project, they assumed the role of professionals such as experts or scholars).
e) Focus, in depth, on central ideas and salient issues and ensure that the Content is authentic and relevant to students’ lives.

We learned that just having information does not solve a problem. It is more difficult that that. If we simply just provide information to students, there is no difference from asking them to read a textbook. We learned that Problem-based Learning is not the same as Project-based Learning; the former focuses on a real problem that affects content syllabus and takes a longer time to complete, while the latter emphasizes on investigating a phenomenon and takes a shorter time to complete. In Project-based Learning, very often students discover that there are a few partial solutions to an issue. These solutions are to be discussed, analyzed, and evaluated. Students are to find the most feasible solution through discussion (Social Constructivism).

Scene is also related to Project-based Learning. When using Scene, we can use one Scene to portray the problem background, and use another to show the essence of the solutions (what these solutions meant to solve). There must be implications in the Scene. A trigger event should be present and it must be real e.g. how does a five-day work week affect students’ activity. This issue has a direct implication on students. We should then come out with problems that relate to students’ learning e.g. calculate the number of hours spent in 5-day work compared to last time. We should also provide scaffolding for students in their project.

We then have hands-on activities in using MASH. In this lesson, we learned how to add a pop-up window showing a GIF file to the script. The script is as follow:

Set Win1=window.open ("image1.gif", "f1", "menubar=no, toolbar=no, left=300, top=100, width=500, height=300")

To close the window, we can add "win1.close" to the script.

Mr. Woo also talked about some technical issues. The reason why we use VBSCRIPT is that there is a default debugger in Windows XP. We will be able to know where the script goes wrong by using the debugger.

What I learned most from this lesson: the problems we presented to students must be real and related to their lives.

Weekly Reflection (Wk 10)

In today's lesson, I learned about the following:
1) Teacher as Designer: using the model ADDIE as the guiding framework for the MS Agent
Project
2) Hands-on activity using MASH (Microsoft Agent Script Helper)
From point no.1, I learned about the different stages of ADDIE:
1) A = Analyze. This included analyzing the students whom we are going to teach. As teachers, we should understand students' needs and their background knowledge / level of proficiency. We should be able to explain why we need to use this web-based learning and not other alternatives.
2) D = Design (the lesson plan). In this stage, we take into considerations the type of learning theories and the technologies used to support the learning process.
3) D = Develop. We should pick the kind of course which students are most interested in. A contingency plan should be put in place. If ever we find the course too demanding, we should make adjustments to it. In our MS Agent Project, the Scene must be short. Between Scene I and II, there should be activities for students to do (cannot have a Scene which last more than 10 minutes). There should also be a feedback channel for checking students’ progress.
4) I = Implement. Before we implement the course, we should decide the strategies we use to help students learn. We learned about the differences between Internalization and appropriation; the former emphasized more on learning from conversation while the latter is more on skill-based learning (non-verbal interactions, such as gestures in manual work or in sports).
5) E = Evaluate. We should ensure that we are able to take a step (or steps) back to improve the course, if anything went wrong in the stages as mentioned above. We should run the course a few times and evaluate the results (collecting feedback along with the progress of the course).
We then had hands-on activity using MASH. Some technical issues brought up by Mr. Woo: 1) Possible problems when using older OSes: If we were using WIN98, we would need to manually install the Agent characters. 2) The default speech engine used by the software is American English. We could also install a British speech engine. There is no Chinese speech engine yet as input using Chinese is difficult (however, it is in the developing stages as the Chinese market is huge). 3) We should always save our project as a MSH file, as once we save it in html format, we cannot make any more amendments to it. 4) Best resolution to display the MS Agent Project is 1024 x 768.

Mr. Woo also reminded us the importance of Storyboarding. Storyboarding gives us an idea of how the sequence of actions and conversations of the characters would run. An example of Storyboarding given by Mr. Woo:

Peedy : Appear (X, Y)
Greet
Rest pose
Speak ( )
Gesture left
Merlin: Show (X, Y)
Greet
Rest pose
Speak ( )

We were taught how to edit the html script in Notepad. We also learned how to add in manually the background color to the script.

What I learned most from this lesson: the ADDIE model is a useful guide for us to plan the MS Agent project. There must be careful planning when we draft our Lesson Plan.