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.