Reflection on Assignment 1: Lesson Plan

When we were assigned to a task given by our respective lecturer, we were dumbfounded at first. The assignment is to design a lesson plan. That was never exposed to us before. Teaching and learning are two very different things and we are used to the latter.

Nevertheless, we did our research by asking students who are taught how to do this lesson before and they gave us very good pointers. Moreover, we went and consult our lovely Dr. Maimunah Kadir to get a clearer picture of how to manage the task.

The skill that we chose is writing skill. This is because we feel the need to implement some very good tricks to how a student can improve their writing skill that we got through our learning years in IIUM.

We selected intermediary level students because it is much easier for us to relate to. We can recall our experiences of being in a writing class during our foundation years as well as reexamine what problems we had in those years and try to solve it with our lesson plan.

The lesson plan that we need to design is within a 1 hour and a half period of time and that's a real challenge to squeeze all the idea that we have into that short amount of time.

The part that we find the hardest is when we are asked to choose an application to help associate with our lesson plan. From many programs available, we have to test one by one to choose the best. We came out with Ginger and The Brain.

Ginger is a program that allows you to check on sentences that you wrote. It allows user to view the mistakes as well as explaining what it is that the user did wrong. Also, it provides an online tutor to help you in your writing. That includes the 'paraphrasing' function which the users can use to vary their sentences.
In short, it is an extended version to grammar checker in Microsoft Words.

The Brain is a program that helps drafting ideas for the easier. It provides a efficient ways for the students to express their thought.

By the end of our presentation, we got some positive feedback from our classmates and respective lecturer. One of the constructive criticism that we got is that our choice of application is rather inconvenience. The Brain software is considered quite difficult to use by our classmates.

The points put forward are taken into serious consideration and we thank them for the support. We amended our lesson plan and later put it into this blog for public view.