That One Person...

The adventures of the know-it-alls

I realize in every seminar or workshop I attend, there would be this ONE person (well maybe 3 or 4) who craves attention. They would talk a lot, too much, unaware of the fact that people would doze off 20 seconds after they start blabbering. I don't get it. Why must these events be that place where you vent your anger about the education system and won't let go of that microphone once given?

Everytime... I mean EVERYTIME the facilitator opens up a Q&A session, these Mr and Mrs know-it-all would be jumping towards the microphone... Not to ask questions, but to make a long ass speech of how they feel about everything. It gets boring and lame in time...

 These people would never just "Shhh...!!!"

Sometimes I feel like no matter how old you are... there's always a point in your life where you'd feel just like in high school.

Love,
Ms Anne

Exploring another side of INTERNET...

I welcomed internet into my life in 1998 where cyber cafes were a "thing" in my hometown. Those days, we had to type out long URLs written in entertainment magazines. Photos of celebrities were hard to find, thus making it a trend to save those JPGs and Gifs into a 1.44MB disc, producing series and later, boxes of colourful discs we called "disket". mIRC and ICQs were the main source of outside communication, along with Yahoo! as the best search engine and Hotmail as the main e-mail host. We also had to learn http to create personal websites.

Fast forward to the future, Social Websites took over the internet. Almost everyone above 15 had either a Myspace or Friendster (maybe both?) account. Old friends were found, reunions were organized as easily as sleeping and wedding invitations became stingily cheap. Then came Facebook and google, who managed to take over the internet.

Attending an Interactive Learning Circle Training course, I realized there are more to internet than gossip and memes. I was introduced to a humongous list of teaching tools I never thought of finding or using. I am more motivated to apply these tools (provided, a strong internet line) to impress and attract my students. The only thing that worries me if whether I'll get the response i expected.

Web 2.0 tools proved that the internet is more than just Facebook. With collaboration tools such as Padlet, Todaysmeet, Piratepad and Voicethread as well as storyboards such as Blendspace, Storify and Wordpress, class discussion would be made easier. All that's missing is superspeed internet.