You can see this as a shout-out to Prof Dato' Dr Mohamed Amin Embi...
One
of the qualities I admire about him is his hard work and dedication in the
teaching field, in going the extra mile to give the best for all the educators
out there. For your information, I joined his online course, Rethinking
Teaching; Redesigning Learning, which is offered in Openlearning.com, in June 2016
and completed the course in December 2016 (7 months). As an online learner, it
is truly amazing to see how committed and passionate he is when it comes to
teaching and learning. He does not mind sharing his valuable knowledge and
useful educational online resources for free; most of his own works are
published in Scribd and Slideshare where educators from all over the world are
able to access them. He also introduces various free online tools that can be
utilised by educators in making a difference in the way teaching and learning
can be carried out.
The
course that he has designed has led me to reflect and rethink of my own
teaching and the lessons I carried out in class. It gets me to identify and
explore different ideas and perspectives in the process of teaching and
learning by looking at various possibilities of engaging learners in meaningful
learning activities. His creative and innovative touch in designing and
presenting the contents in the course modules drives me to find out and explore
more on my own. It is really interesting and fun to explore the online tools
that he recommends which come with selected quality videos on how to use them. He
also inspires and motivates his online learners (educators) to keep on learning
and relearning. Even though he has a big number of online students from
different countries, he is able to get each of his learners enchanted and hooked
on learning as he consistently maintains his interactions with them. I
personally felt motivated and engaged throughout the completion of the course
because of his prompt reply to the comments I made and the selective likes or
kudos I got.
As
an English language teacher with 15 years of teaching experience and teaching
English language for Malaysian University English Test (MUET) (from 2010
onwards), I have already started the transformation in my teaching approach
while I was doing the course and also after I have completed the online course.
I tried blended learning approach by integrating online and traditional
learning as suggested by Prof Amin. This is because there were some
shortcomings when I only relied on the conventional way in teaching the English
language for MUET. One of the main problems I had to face was students’ lack of
interest in my lessons. After I changed my approach in teaching I could see
great improvement in my students’ learning attitude as they were more
interested and engaged in the learning process. In addition, their MUET results
improved. You can see some
snapshots of my own virtual classroom and some of the online tools that I have
utilised to design my own online lessons in 2017 (Four components in MUET-
Listening, Speaking, Reading & Writing) and some of the activities I have
conducted with my students to further illustrate the impacts of Rethinking
Teaching; Redesigning Learning have on me as a professional educator. I am
still learning and although I have already completed the online course in 2016, I keep going back to the course modules for reference until now as they
are really useful.
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| My profile page in Schoology |
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My first posting early this year to my students
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My listening modules
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TEDEd lesson linked to my listening module
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My Speaking modules
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Sharing the use of Vocaroo as online recording tool
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Teacher’s response
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Some of my reading modules
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| The contents in one of the reading modules |
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Snapshot of my YouTube channel where I uploaded MUET Speaking
recordings and Reading Project Presentation of 6PAUKM students
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Snapshot of my first recording using Screencast-O-Matic published
on YouTube
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Gamication of lesson- Kahoot in 21st
Century Classroom
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One of the snapshots of my students’ feedback on my Padlet wall
last year
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