Week 2 Reflection!

 It has been two weeks since we started our classes. A lot of fun activities have been taking place on campus keeping all of us on our toes. It has been a very hectic but fun two weeks indeed.  For our second lesson with Dr. Lina, she divided us into groups based on the wheel. I like how Dr. Lina incorporates technology in her lessons. Her lessons are very technology based, which was rather difficult to comprehend at first but I got the hang of it after several trials with the help of my group members. When I was assigned with new group mates, I was anxious but they were welcoming and had a good sense of humour which reassured me. Dr. Lina then began her lesson by introducing the 50 strategies such as Vygotsky's social cultural theory, Mediation theory, The Zone of Proximal Development theory, Cognition and Metacognition theory, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and more. after giving a quick rundown on these strategies, we were assigned to do a quick micro-teaching session. We were given time to discuss and choose a strategy from the list to base our micro-teaching on. After having a discussion session with the group member and going through several strategies, we decided to go with a strategy called the communication game. 

                        

Communication games are activities and exercises that improve teammates' ability to exchange information effectively. It also strengthens verbal and non verbal conversation skills. There are varieties of  communication games such as telephone where participants gather in a circle, One individual will whisper  a message to the person next to them. Then, the message is passed around in a circle. Then the last person will announce what they heard in the end. Another games is called Pictionary. It is a drawing game, where players must convey words or phrases without verbally communicating it. It enhances critical thinking skills and non-verbal communication skills. After deciding on out strategy, we diligently gave tasks to each team mates and got on with our presentation slides. We did not have enough time to prepare the slides and ourselves for the presentation. Our slides were incomplete and we weren't prepared but we mustered up our courage and presented in front our peers.

 We executed with the Pictionary game where we had prepared 2 random words which were Atlantis and population. We used Dr. Lina's wheels to select our participants. The wheel had chosen Sitao and Wyai Hon. We whispered the words to them and they took awhile to come up with the drawings. Everyone had a good laugh and it was a fun activity. All the peers actively participated in guessing the mystery words and they got it! Dr. Lina also played a song called Five Hundred Miles which was related to the lesson which we all enjoyed singing together. Although we were not as good as the other groups, I was glad to have completed the presentation. Reflecting back on our presentation, there were a few elements from the dialog patterns that we had not incorporated in our presentation due to the time restriction and we were too focused on picking a good strategy. In my opinion, our presentation was disorganised. I wish we had more time to be well prepared, but we will learn from this experience and work more efficiently in the future. 

References : 

Guo, Lina. (2023 October 13th)  Teaching and Learning Strategies week 2 [PowerPoint Slides], Faculty of Education. University of Nottingham Malaysia. https://moodle.nottingham.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=143315

Dewi, R. S., Kultsum, U., & Armadi, A. (2017). Using Communicative Games in Improving Students’ Speaking Skills. English Language Teaching, 10(1), 63–71. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1124241