2019/2020 LE blogs

Today Mr.Paterson introduced us to a web app called Flipgrid. This is an app that allows students and teachers to upload videos for educational purposes. The app was developed by Microsoft.  There are some issues that made using the app inconvenient. For example, I have to login each time I reload the tab, so that was annoying. Also, when I wanted to record a video, it took about three minutes to load and that was frustrating. However, it was easy to record, decorate and reply to the videos. I don’t use a lot of SNS, so unlike other classmates, I didn’t know how to decorate my videos, though it was still fun using the feature. I think this feature was added to engage young students. I don’t have experience in using videos to submit assignments, so I think it’s going to be a little difficult in the beginning.  I think using Flipgrid will be a great opportunity to practice speaking English.

    Today we checked our feedback for our academic book review. My grade for the essay was not bad, but a little disappointing because I spent a long time working on it. I think the reason for this is because I used a lot of personal pronouns and had consecutively used words. We were taught that using first-person singular pronouns (e.g. I, my) is fine because the essay is about our opinion, but we aren't speaking for other people, so we can't use "we" or "us". I wasn't aware of these problems when I was writing the essay, and this is bad because Mr.Paterson pointed out the same thing for the last essay assignment. It was easy to fix these problems.  There are also other things that I need to change. Firstly my introduction/conclusion paragraphs are too short, and the summary/critique paragraphs are too long. I wrote a short summary in the introduction paragraph, so if I exclude that part, my introduction paragraph will only be 11 lines (which is about 1...

The due date for our slides was postponed to Friday, so today we had a free hour of finishing our slides, however, I've already finished it so I had nothing to do. Therefore I checked other people's slides so I could improve mine. I realized that my background was monotonous. So I inserted images from Pixabay to make my slides more interesting.

Today I increased my ARL to 11.19 from 10.82. This was easy because I just had to connect two sentences into one. However, because I increased my word count, my academic word rate decreased to 5.04 from 5.29. After I fixed my readability, I submitted my essay on Turnitin. I changed the parts I was plagiarising (without realizing), but I still had some parts that were picked up by Turnitin. However, I think I can ignore these parts because it's a common phrase. For example "Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit", "J.R.R Tolkien was a", "specializing in Old and Middle English" and "famous for writing 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit'". These sentences are very common. In regard to the last sentence, it is a little long, but I think it is common too.

Today we were introduced to a new web app called Turnitin. Turnitin is a plagiarism checker app, and it's used in almost every western university. Turnitin allows students to check which part of their paper was plagiarised. The app checks through every article and essay on the Internet and checks if more than three words in a row were the same. The teachers can give feedback using text or voice mail. I had some issues creating an account, and I couldn't use my main Gmail address. Therefore I had to use a different one. My essays' similarity rate was 11%. Some parts were totally fine, for example, I wrote "written by J.R.R Tolkien" but this is a common phrase so I don't have to change this part. Also, the references part got caught in the plagiarism checker but that is OK too. However, there were some parts which I didn't even know I was plagiarising. I don't want people to misunderstand that I plagiarised other people's papers so I will change thos...

Today I worked on my presentation. I was thinking of a good hook, for example asking questions or saying interesting facts. However I couldn’t think of a good hook. During the next class, I want to come up with a good hook and also increase my readability level of my academic book review. 

    Today we learned that there are many other writings tools to check our book review. For example, Word Counter has many features such as word count, reading level, speaking time and many other features. Storytoolz helps us create fictional stories. Rewordify converts difficult words into easier words. I want to use this site when I have to do research on difficult topics. I wish there was a software that converts easier words/phrases into academic words. Then, using academic words would be so much easier. Mr.Paterson told us that there were many writing centres that teach us how to write good essays.