Week 2's Reflection: ABCD: This is Another New Beginning in My Teaching Experience

There is a saying, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail". I think this statement is undebatable when I connect it with my learning experience. I just realize that I have never made very good learning objectives for my classes which can cover all aspects from cognitive, affective, psychomotoric, and other elements. After reading the link given by Donna, my super supportive professor, about Pennsylvania State University's ABCD style (Audience-Behavior-Condition-Degree), I said this is what I've been looking for. I need to create a learning objective in one sentence that can cover all aspects of learning. 

source: http://www.colourbox.com/image/abcd-roses-flower-alphabet-isolated-on-white-image-2064020

Here is what I made from the ABCD concept:

Description:
My students are first year university students majoring in Law, Business and Economics, and Engineering who are second language speakers of English. They are joining classes and degree courses run in English called International Program. They are studying English and academic skills such as academic writing, reading, presentation, and public speaking eight hours a week.

ABCD Objective:
After discussing about the good ways to write English sentences and quotation based on APA referencing style (C), the students (A) are expected to write paragraph with good grammatical range and accuracy, coherence and cohesion, and lexical resourc (B) for at least 250 words.
Quoted from: http://www.nicenet.org/ICA/class/conf_topic_show.cfm?topic_id=878266

I just realize that I good planning will help me to have good processs, assessment, and outcome.
I think I will keep doing ABCD for any future classes that I will have.

Week 2: The World is More than Just about Google

One of the biggest wake-up call I had after joining the webskills course in the second week is that Google is not the only search engine that can help you in the learning process. After reading the article from www.noodletools.com, I found that there so many kinds of search engines for different purposes. Although I have used many facilities from the Google such as Google Scholar, Google Book, Google Image, and many others, I still find that I need more search engines that help me to do my tasks in teaching.

Source: http://www.secondeffort.com/seo_search_engine_optimization_faq.html

It is true that search engines are not only limited to Google, Yahoo, Bing, or others only. Search engines are various and they can be used for special needs to make the learning and teaching process run effectively. Specific search engine can be used for specific needs such as for debating class use pro-cons website, for discussion about current issues we can use surfwax.com or other similar sites.  In addition, The validity and reliability of your sources is very crucial. Therefore, using reliable search engine such as infomine, iseek, intute, and similar sites can support the validity of our research. Like Donna, my learning facilitator said, "use anything other than Google". Learn something new, and discover new treasure.