Video editing? Huh Finally....

First, photo editing then audio editing, and now, video editing. The challenge became harder and harder. When I first receive this task, I knew that this would be a tough task since it requires so many things to do. For the task, we were asked to be in group of five. The task was actually divided by three parts: 1st, download an episode of 'So You Think You Can Dance' from 8TV. 2nd, join all the parts (an episode contains some separated parts. ours have four parts) to form a video. 3rd, we had to extract performances from the whole episode, make them separated videos.

The task began with Husna downloaded the video. Alhamdulillah she managed to download them in a short time (one hour plus minus). Some of my friends spent about two hours to download all the parts of their episode. It was tiring.

Then, to join all the parts to form a single video, we need to convert them from FLV files to MPEG or VCD or WMV files so that they could be imported in Windows Movie Maker. All of us surfed the internet to find suitable converter to convert the video but none of us found any. It was diificult since most of the converters were trial and demo application. Using the trial version, the features were limited. We could only convert 50% of the video. Some converters advertise their product on my converted videos. There's so many problems in selecting useful converters. After 2 hours working on it, at last, I found a software which I could convert the video to MPEG file, and I did the converting for the group.

Then, move to the cutting process. At first, from what we understood, we had to extract all the performances, label all the performances, and join them in a single video. Then, we woke up early, met at the early of a morning, worked on it for several hours, but then, at night, we found that we were wrong. We did not have to label and join them in a video. The task just required us to cut and label them. That's all. The task for joining files was another task, not that one. Useless efforts. Huh =(

After finishing our work, we had to upload them in adec. Then came another problem when a person can only upload 3 files. We thought of it and I decided to zip all small size files (cut videos). I put them in respective folders, zipped them and upload them. Luckily at that time, there were three of us. We uploaded three files each and we managed to uploaded all the files after 5 hours. We did sleep at 4a.m.! Huh.. How tiring.

On that morning, all of us went back to home town, far from KL, far from each other, Kelantan, Johore, Kedah, Malacca, and Pahang. Then, I had a call saying that lecturer asked us to burn our work in DVD since most of the students could not upload their work in ADEC. The DVD was supposed to be submitted before Saturday but all of us were not in KL and we could do nothing about it. As the result, we did not manage to submit the DVD on time. Although we did not submit our DVD, we had successfully uploaded all the files in ADEC in time. After holidays, we met the lecturer and explained about it and ALHAMDULILLAH Pn Foziah accepted our work. Thanks for your kindness mam.

Audio Editing

After dealing with lots of photo editing softwares, we moved to harder task which was on audio editing. Frankly speaking, I never thought of doing anything on audio. It is not in my list of interest. Moreover, nothing much can be done on audio compared to photo which I could have mountains of ideas to adjust and edit a single photo.

For this week task, I had chosen a song entitled 'Underneath It All' to be edited. To do the editing, I had to download suitable and meaningful softwares and this had made me tired of selecting useful softwares. I had installed and tried some softwares but all of them seem to be almost the same. They offer the same features. Lastly, I found a software called Expstudio Audio Editor and by using the software, I managed to do some interesting editing.

For my audio editing task, I had chosen the song 'Underneath It All' by No Doubt to be edited. I made some adjustment to the song. I had changed the woman's voice to man's voice, then there was a part where I changed the voice into chipmunk's voice. I used the function of Vibrato to make it vibrate for some seconds. It also offers a feature to change the normal voice to the voice of Zeus, fade in and fade out, and many more.

While doing this editing, I thought about the use of this when teaching later. At first, I did not see any purpose but after thinking about it for another times, I guess I could exploit this when dealing with children later. Using this, I could produce interesting audios and musics, for them. I could play an audio where a chipmunk is reading a text or telling a story for them for my listening tasks maybe. By having this, teachers may attract their attention to focus on the recording thus, increase the learning effects in class. Feel free to try this out k.! Happy editing =)

Photo Editing

It was a great time for me to learn about photo editing. Actually, I have experienced some softwares on photo editing before. I like to play with photos. I add frames, add noise and effects, crop, resize, add texts, and many more. To do all those, I used Paint, Ulead PhotoImpact, and FrameFun.

After attended the class, I was able to know other softwares which could be used to edit photos like Adobe Photoshop, ACDSee, Turbo Photo, and many more. My friends also introduced some other interesting softwares to be used. Now, i can explore mnay softwares and I could improve my photo editing skills. I'm happy about that.

For the weekend, we were given a task to edit a photo and upload it in photobucket.com and I managed to do it on time. have a look at my picture =)


Actually, I spent not more than one hour to edit this picture. I copied other photo, pasted it on another photo, added vignette effect, and lastly added text. It was a simple editing. It just a warm up session for the future tasks which was said to be more difficult than this. Hope I manage to acquire required skills for the next tasks and be able to complete all my assignments successfully.

Working with Young Learners

For this week, we learned about some unique characteristics of children which everyone of us should know in order to be good teachers. Pn Foziah had given us her lecture notes and we were asked to present in front of the class after discussing about them in groups.

Working with Young Learners
1. Children's ability to grasp meaning
2. Children's creative use of limited language resources
3. Childrens' capacity for indirect learning
4. Children's instinct for play and fun
5. The role of imagination
6. The instinct for interaction and talk

Children have their own special abilities when dealing with language.

First, they are able to process what is said to them although they don't understand individual words. They interpret other's gestures, intonation and expression when interacting with others.

Second, their mother tongue help them a lot in interpreting messages. So teachers have to give some space for the use of mother tongue in their learning process.

Third, teachers have to know that children's learning process is divided by two which are conscious and unconscious. Conscious learning is about accuracy and unconscious learning is about fluency and spontaneity. When teachers know about this, teachers might be able to determine what kind of strategies to be used to achieve the intended goals as well as develop both accuracy and fluency in children.

Fourth, fun and play elements are important in children life. Teachers have to provide space for them to play while learning since it brings powerful contribution to their learning. When they are playing, unconsciously they use the language and this will improve their language proficiency.

Fifth, teachers may exploit their imagination to the maximum when they could be asked to make up their own stories about something they dream of, create their own pets, or any other things which require them to imagine. Using imagination, they could play with words creatively.

Sixth, we should know that children like are very talkative. So teachers should let them talk and interact with each other to maximize language use among them. They will acquire the language out of their conscious.

In conclusion, teachers have to be aware of these special characteristics of the children thus take this opportunity to develop their language as well as increase the effectiveness of strategies used in the teaching and learning process.