2019/2020 LE blogs

    Today, we did our final presentations. Personally, I think I did better than my previous presentations. For this presentation, I included more data from reliable references that I found when I was writing my individual essay. Last time, I only used two references for my part, so it didn't sound very persuasive but I think this time, the presentation was more credible and persuasive. Also, I deleted or unified some slides to make the presentation shorter and compact. This is because saying all the references that I have researched took a lot of time (about five to six minutes).     In today's presentation, I thought I was more confident than before. I walked in front of the slide naturally and I looked at people's faces. Last time, I forgot to look at the people at the back, so I have improved on that point. However, I made mistakes too. For example, I talked for too long, although I have shortened the slides. Also, there were problems with the timing of changing...

I got the feedback on my individual essay today. Luckily there weren't any huge mistakes; I only had some small mistakes such as having only two thesis statements and lacking some key points for the summary. There were only two thesis statements because I thought the problems with the desks and chairs were the same so I thought I could put them together. On the other hand, I didn't realize that I only had one key point mentioned in the summary part. I'm regretting that because I should have realized it and fixed it before handing it in.  Overall, I thought that it wasn't bad. From now on, I will continue to improve my slides and brochure with my teammates.

    Today some of the students' essays were shown on the screen. Then Mr.Paterson pointed out many points for improvement. For example, the line spacing should be double in order for the old fashioned teachers to put comments in the margin. At first, I thought that made the essay difficult to read, but the perfect essay of the university student was also in double spacing so I now understand that it's a good thing.     There were some small things that I missed out too. For example, I didn't put a semicolon before the second title. I didn't know that the word size of the first and the second title was the same and "chairs and desks" and "desks and chairs" were mixed so I had to unify them. I think that these small things are really important for the essay to read well.

    Today, I finished my individual essay. Actually, I already finished writing the paragraphs beforehand but I completely forgot about the title. Using alliteration for the title is an effective method to attract readers, so I came up with a title: "Suggesting social classrooms for students’ studies". Honestly, I think this is a good title but "classroom" doesn't alliterate with the other words so I want to consider that.

Today Mr.Paterson showed us two essays written by university students; an excellent essay and a poor quality essay. The excellent essay included everything that Mr.Paterson had taught us but the bad one didn't.  This means that we can use what we are learning from Mr.Paterson at university too. I realized again that we are learning very useful skills in Mr.Paterson's class. We learned the importance of good quality references. I was surprised that university students had to use over ten references in a single essay. I have only used three references in my essay, so I have to find more references for chairs and desks. My concern is that even though there is a lot of research about the arrangement of the desks and its relationship with the students learning, there isn't much research about the quality of the desks and chairs.

When I used Zotero, I thought that Zotero was a very advanced software. I’ve been using citation machine (a web application that cites just by inputting the URL etc.) for citation but I needed to input the reference URL each time one by one so it was somewhat troublesome. Using Zotero, I was able to make citations fast so it allowed me to reference efficiently. Furthermore, it supports numerous citation styles and just by pressing an icon.  It also detects a lot of information about the references so I thought it could be used in a variety of papers. Also, I like the feature that saves references. This is because sometimes when I want to look back at what references I have used for a project or assignment in the past, I can't find them because I didn't write them down. The only problem is I'm using a Windows PC so the controls were a little different. When I looked at the number of users of Zotero connector, it said there were two million users so why isn't Zotero fam...

Today was the first LE lesson of the third term. We were told to write an individual academic essay which talks about a topic (in this case, chairs and desks in the International Understanding Room). Mr.Paterson said that we can copy & paste the body paragraphs from the brochure, but the introduction & conclusion has to be altered. However, when I looked at my team's introduction & conclusion, it didn't need to be altered much; I only had to delete a few lines. Currently, the essay's introduction & conclusion uses the phrase "learning environment" a lot so perhaps, I should change that into a more chairs and desks related phrase.