EDT 1303 WEBSITE EVALUATION

www.tutor.com.my

Portal utusan is a popular educational website among Malaysian students and teachers, especially for candidates of main public examinations like UPSR, PMR, SPM and STPM. This website is organized by Utusan Malaysia, with the mission to assist students’ in academic achievement in their examination. At home page of this website, we can see some news related to education, advertisement on educational program or workshop, educational caricature, and also options of examinations’ subjects.

There is also e-tuition where contains some analysis of questions regarding certain chapters in a particular subject. In this session, it is such an extra exercise for students to get immersed with the subject they have learned in class by answering questions provided in e-tuition. Besides, if they want to check the answer or have done mistake or don’t know how to answer the question, there is a button to click on “Answer & Comment”. However, this “Answer & Comment” also can be disadvantage for this website when it become misused by certain students who don’t want to answer properly, at the same time only want to see the answer. By doing this, those students might not get any benefit in challenging his understanding and thinking skills since they already get to know how to answer the question without trying it first. Therefore, the guideline and supervision by teachers or parents are encouraged to ensure students try to answer it first before check to the “Answer & Comment” section.

In addition, this website also has Questions Bank, where students are able to download sets of questions, where they are based on real examination’s format. Basically, the questions sets are contributed by this portal’s visitors and it will be able to be downloaded in PDF format. The questions came from many backgrounds of schools and also sometimes the questions provided are quoted from sets of questions made by Jabatan Pendidikan Negeri or Pejabat Pendidikan Daerah. Therefore, students have wider opportunities to explore many kinds of questions that might come up in real examination.

Moreover, there is also a section that is called as “Bilik Guru” or also known as Teacher’s Room, which is very beneficial to assist teachers in preparing them to teach students in certain subject. In this section, it provides Lesson Plan for throughout the year, Modules for English for teaching in Sciences and Mathematics (ETeMS), Mathematics and Sciences teaching script, and also modules for Application of Information and Communication Technology in Teaching and Learning process. These contents are truly useful to be guidelines for teachers in enhancing their teaching’s effectiveness in class. Besides, to ensure teachers who visit this website become alert with Ministry of Education’s website news and latest issues, it provides a link to the official Ministry website under “Bilik Guru” part.

Besides, this website also provides “Interaktif” sections which contains forum for the visitors to share ideas and interacts each other. Under this part, the visitors also can spend time chatting with others. Moreover it is interesting for students and teachers to click on “E-Makmal” or e-laboratory, where they can learn science through illustrations, graphics and descriptions which are clearly explaining the subject. However, the disadvantage of this E-Laboratory section is some of them have no content after we click on it. For instance, after we click on “Jadual Berkala”, then the results is “Tiada Bahan” or No Content. Under “Interaktif” part, there are also educational games provided for children. After trying some of them, I found that WordLab game is quite attractive and effective to encourage students to enhance their English vocabulary. For example, they provide clue before giving us 5 times chance to try guessing the word that they mean. After finishing this game, there is also button to play again which make students feel enjoy trying again, and at the same time learning and playing simultaneously. There is also an educational caricature section under the “Interaktif” part, called “Usik-usik”. Nevertheless, at the bottom of the “Interaktif” menu options, “Cikgu Muna” part is blank and only a title “Cikgu Muna” and its archives appeared on the screen and cannot go forward. This condition might lead the visitors to be confused to guess what the website is trying to explain.

Additionally, the website also provide link to other educational websites under “Komuniti” option. It contains link to schools’ websites, motivational program websites, and also utusan online. This is a good approach taken by the website designer to provide more options to visitors to explore and get information to communities and get access to latest issues and educational programs.

Finally, we found that the Web Map provided under name “Peta Laman”, it is very useful guideline for visitors to see the general overview of this website, especially for the Questions sets, and Teaching & Learning plans, where the students and teachers always looking for these two contents in this website.

In conclusion, we found that the website is very useful for educational purpose, regardless students or teachers or parents. It has so many advantages rather than its disadvantages. It is also an appropriate website to encourage interactive learning among students.

TEXTBOOK EVALUATION

This is a textbook evaluation, which we have evaluated a book named “Living Psychology”, written by Karen Huffman, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in United States of America, in the year 2005. In this textbook evaluation, we will discussed about the book in term of three aspects, organization, content, and physical aspect.

Firstly, from we would like to evaluate the organization of this book. From our observation, it provides a useful table of contents, glossary and index, where they are mentioned in detail. Especially, we can see how the table of contents has mentioned the sub-chapters clearly in every chapter and organized in a good order. Absolutely, the table of content shows a logical arrangement and development of subject, where the book introduce psychology first in term of its meaning, history and research methods used in psychology before they proceed with discussion in other following chapters. Besides, this textbook is also uniform in appearance and content layout throughout the book as well as within each chapter. For instance, each chapter of this book has its similarity in term of it contains a description on applying psychology to work, or to student life, or to everyday life. In term of references, bibliography, and other resources, this book provides useful and sufficient information since they are written in very detail. In this book, we found that chapters are provided with clear and comprehensive introduction and summaries. As evidence, each chapter contains a section named “Check & Review”, where it summarized the chapter by highlighting the key term and main concept of the chapter. Moreover, we also found all pages of this book are numbered.

Secondly, from the content aspect, we found that this book meets local and international standards since it is written and used by many universities in several countries as standardized textbook for psychology subject and absolutely the content of it is accurate and up-to-date since it is discussed psychology subject in current settings. Besides, absolutely this book’s content is supported by other textbooks that students have or will use since it describes psychology from general areas, and need to be supported by other textbook which cover a specific area of psychology. For instance, it requires support information by books of personality psychology in order to gain in depth information regarding a sub-chapter which discuss about personality psychology subject. This textbook provides appropriate use of language for its intended group, which is undergraduate students, and certainly it is grammatically correct. It also contains age appropriate reading level, and also has end-of-lesson quizzes through “Assessment” section in each section. Besides, these textbook lessons’ are also linked with other subject areas. For instance, for the discussion on social psychology, it is also somehow related to sociology subject, where the scope is about what are the roles or psychology in sociological aspects and so on. Furthermore, we ought to say the activities in this textbook can engage students in active learning and they are appealing to a wide range of abilities and interests. Since the textbook covers “study of soul”, which is the literal meaning of psychology, the students will be interested to study more and become active in their learning progress due to it is practical to apply in their everyday life. Moreover, this book also encourages higher level of thinking by giving questions in “Application: Try this yourself”. Certainly, I agree to say this textbook could be used for several years from now, for at least until 5 years to go, since it contains the comprehensive explanation of current information and latest findings in psychology areas.

Finally, for the physical aspects evaluation, we found that the book size is quite big and heavy for students to carry or to use it. However, the advantage of the textbook is the font and style age is appropriate and the bindings, pages and cover are certainly durable. Based on its physical aspects which are interesting and attractive, we ought to say it will appeal to the students. Furthermore, the page layout is uncluttered and balanced. Besides, this textbook also provides appropriate use of illustrations, graphs in order to represents age, ethnicity, sex, physical or mental ability. For instance, when explaining the chapter of “Neuroscience and Biological Foundations”, the textbook presents the function and process of any biological system by using effective and clear illustrations and descriptions. Therefore, we might conclude that the textbook illustrations, graphs, tables, and charts are really relevant and functional accordingly in assisting students’ understanding towards the subject.

CAREER AS A LIFE-LONG PROGRESS, EVEN SINCE WE WERE SMALL!

In my opinion, Career is a life-long progress. The beginning of career development is since we were small. As this stage, since a small child does not know their self-concept and their state of self-efficacy, hence they might say any kin of profession they are interested in as their ambition. My assumption is, this circumstance happens when they are becoming attracted and conditioned with a particular profession based on pleasure principle or through the interest that they develop through modeling.

Firstly, I say it is based on pleasure principle because it is nature as a child, they do not know their capacity and aptitude to meet the requirements that particular profession. Furthermore, they are still naïve about the nature and qualification of the profession. Therefore, from time to time, when they are growing up, their interest towards the profession might change, not even once, not even twice, but sometimes they might change their interest and career path several times in their life. This thing occur due to they somehow realize they are not comfortable with world of the profession after analyzing and considering their qualifications in term of interest, educational level, aptitudes, and attitudes and so on. With right guidance, this kind of people might make right decision in undergoing their career path. In contrary, if wrong guidance or there is no guideline at all, these people might suffer a job-hopping habit. It is hard to see these people enjoy and success in their life if job-hopping still becomes a practice to them as a proverb tells us, “Rolling Stone Gathered No Moss”. Since at first they changed interest and ambition due to no concrete reason, as well as “just for fun” or “try and error” attitude become their force during childhood, someone should help and guide them to be matured in analyzing and understanding their self-concept, self-efficacy and also understanding how to respond to the current situation of world of work.

However, there are also some child insist with their ambition and try to develop their attitude, aptitude, and educational qualifications in order to ensure they are still on the right track. In my point of view, this thing by reason of getting right guideline by environment and also through they themselves who have iron will at the bottom of their hearts.

Secondly, my assumption about how children develop starts become interested in certain profession is due to modeling. For instance, sometimes a child might say he/she wants to be a doctor due to his father or mother or any family member is a doctor too. It might happen through that child admires to see the style of his family member based on several reasons, such as that family member’s looks smart in the profession’s dress code, or his/her positive attitude like caring, loving, and brave, or that family already establish that profession as their traditional profession. Therefore, in this case, sometimes we can see a stereotype profession in a family. The best example I can give is our former Prime Ministers, Tun Hussein Onn, Tun Mahathir, and Tun Razak, all of them have their sons in Malaysian political field today. Same thing happens to our DAP Member of Parliament (MP), Karpal Singh, who is a lawyer and MP, and his son, Gobind Singh also exactly follows his footstep. Hence, in my own conclusion is the early stage of our career path is basically based on pleasure principle and through modeling.