Day V 9th July 2015

Today’s class was practical session on using Google Drive, Docs and Google Forms. Since I was familiar with Google Drive and Docs, I didn't have much difficulty in creating them again. Taking the opportunity of time, while my colleagues where still having practical session on Drive and Docs, I engaged myself in practicing the usage of Google Forms because I was wanted to more about it.

I regretted not having known this application before, had I known the benefits of this application I would have presented my past project work much more professionally.

With the detail explanation and demonstration I was still not very confident to carry out the activity. Having little idea on this application we were assign with an assignment which carried 10% weight-age of the module.

During the time of submission of this assignment I was very much sure that I had done it correctly, but to my utter surprise the following were the comments I got.

With little resources and Idea I was determined to learn the making of questionnaires using the Google Forms to the perfection as possible. Most of the participant as I seen had similar kind of comments given by our tutor and therefore,  I was very much worried where did we all go wrong.     

Since this activity is much needed for our further studies and might be useful for some I would like to revisit the making of questionnaires once again in detail. I would like to request my readers kindly correct me where possible. After selecting the Google Form I added Title to my questionnaires.  

After choosing background to make it look professional I start filling up the form. Providing my your questions and then choose   type of questions I wanted to use. I wanted to use add page break. While doing thi,s I really had to concentrate on what I am doing because this procedure was were I lost major chunk of marks for the assignment.   When I was done with writing of question for add page break I followed the following procedure;

I needed to customize the confirmation message by either :

·         Choosing link to submit another response

·         Publish and show a link to the results of this         form

·         Allow respondents to edit answers after responding

To share your form you have three options :

·         Share a direct link to your form with others

·         Share your form on social media websites 
     ( Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus)

·         Share your form via email

·         Or embed it in your classroom blog or         
      website

Thanks 

Day IV 8th July 2015

It seems like a lifetime away, but it is been only about five years ago that I have completed similar task of learning ICT and its components. Although I had carried out today’s activities during my online course as I have mentioned earlier, it was a lesson that enhanced my little idea on; Co constructive tools, Google Drive, Google Doc and Google Forms. Unlike my online course I had opportunity to interact with my tutors Mr. Chenga Dorji and Tandin Wangchuk who were available to us almost entire residential class.

The usage of computers in our country is still young, yet we are trying to cope up with financial difficulties and accessibility of computers for all the schools for our country. Having had limited knowledge and accessibility to computer world, we teachers are trying equip our self in helping our young generation compete with other world.

Co constructive tool

The computer are used for manipulating information, visualizing others understanding and creating new ideas. The computer itself is a machine where we are allowed to present our ideas in attractive forms using various application software installed in it. Making use of constructive tools we can corporately construct  and share our understanding of new ideas. We and also use these tools as green board where anyone authorized can co edit the same documents without having to meet individual.

Google Drive:

Without knowing that this as constructive tools I had been making use of this application as I created my Google account since 2009. Our tutor explained and demonstrated how we can keep our documents and important files in this drive and open them at any place at any time.  Making use of this device to work from our desktop was new knowledge to me, I didn't knew this application can be lunched from our desktop and could be directly save in our drive.  The participants were also demonstrated on how we can open Word, Excel and PowerPoint which is stored in this Drive, then save any changes back to drive once we are done with it.

Working with this application is very useful especially for sharing files with items or for accessing our files while getting the benefit from the security and convenience of this Google drive.

Google Doc.

We do not need any kind of software to create this docs, we can create and edit text documents as we browse internet. Many people can work at the same time and changes are made automatically. By creating this documents we can import our desktop documents to make changeable and editable, convert our work to pdf, ppp, html format. One of the interesting thing that this application has is, we can track changes made to our documents and undo anything we wanted. Original files are always stored for future use.    

Google forms.

I am sure this application was there itself when I had my account created but never thought of using it. With today’s lesson we were made familiarized in using this application too.  Our tutor demonstrated on how to go about it in detail. This application helps us in creating survey forms and questionnaires which automatically analyze our data in Google sheet.

The application also provides Select from multiple question types, drag-and-drop to reorder questions and customize values as easily as pasting a list. By using this application we can send professional looking surveys questionnaires to our friends and clients.

After the demonstration and explanation we were asked to create survey form of our choice and share with our tutor. This constructive tool in fact would be very useful for teachers like us when every we wanted to conduct a simple survey and research activities. I therefore, will be making best use of this tools if I ever had to conduct a research or a survey. 

Blog Links:

Let us look at interesting blog maintained by my friends. Since we share the same ship there are lots of things we can learn together.

1. Sangay Dema: http://demasangay.blogspot.com
2. Phub Dem:  http://phubchun.blogspot.com
3. Sonam Choden : http://sonamc56.blogspot.com  
4. Karma Wangmo : http://kartshesonob.blogspot.com
5.  Sonam Wangdi: http://sowandee.blogspot.com   
6. Tashi Zangmo:  http://tzamsompey.blogspot.com   

Day III 7th July 2015

The lesson began with the introduction of “Web Search” whereby participants were familiarized with its benefits and how to go about web searching and what is all about Web search.

My understanding as per our tutors presentation on web search was looking for information on internet that helps us in particular use. He also explained that among many search engines most popular search engines used today are  Google, Bing and Yahoo. The results displayed are typically prioritized by relevance, so those who search the Web can quickly find material that is relevant to their needs. Without a search engine, finding information and resources on the Internet is very difficult, especially when specific servers and domains containing desired information are unknown.

What is internet?

Search engines are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. A search engine is really a general class of programs, however, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

Since different search engines use different methods to search for the result we were, therefore, introduced with different kinds of “Operators” they were;

• Use of Boolean Operators

• Using AND operator

• Truncation

• Wildcards

• File type

• Site

Boolean Operators 

They are simple words (AND, OR, NOT or AND NOT) used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search, resulting in more focused and productive results. This should save time and effort by eliminating inappropriate hits that must be scanned before discarding.

Using AND operators The AND & OR operators are used to filter records based on more than one condition. The AND operator displays a record if both the first condition AND the second condition are true.

Truncation

Truncation, also called stemming, is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings. To use truncation, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end. Examples: 

child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood

genetic* = genetic, genetics, genetically

Truncation symbols may vary by database; common symbols include: *, !, ?, or #

Wildcards:

Similar to truncation, wildcards substitute a symbol for one letter of a word. This is useful if a word is spelled in different ways, but still has the same meaning.

Examples: 

wom!n = woman, women

colo?r = color, colour

Restricting your search using site operators

We can search within a site or a domain by adding the site: operator followed by a site’s domain name to your query. For example, you could search for archaeology site: www.une.edu.au.

To conduct a comprehensive search of all of the associated sub domains of a domain, omit the www and instead specify only the main domain. For example, a search for site:bbs.com would encompass not just www.bbs.com, but also news.bbs.com, sports.bbs.com, and so forth. The site: search operator works even when just the domain extension (like .com, .org, .gov, or .co.uk) is specified. Thus, we can restrict our search to .com sites with site:com, to .gov sites with site:gov, or to .org.bt.  

Restricting your search by format  

we can restrict our search to Word documents, to Excel documents, to PDF files, or to PowerPoint files by adding filetype:doc, filetype:xls, filetype:pdf, or filetype:ppt, respectively, to your search query. If we want a  PowerPoint presentation on How to integrate ICT in subject  Simply query Google for “integrate ICT in Mathematics filetype:ppt”

Towards the end of today’s lesson we were briefed on the benefits of using Google books and google help centre. Google Books is a Google service that makes discovering book content easier for us on the web. It started way back in 2004 and since then its mission has been to digitally scan and archive tons of book.

Google Help centre Help Forums. 

While surfing the nets we often get different result, in order to get the exact information, making a thorough search with multiple search engine is must. Having learnt the use of the search operators I am now able to work much faster  and smarter and carry out online activities smoothly than before.   

As a part of exercises we were assigned with home assignment which consisted of searching Educational web sites. Implementing all the techniques and methods I was able to search more than 10 educational web sites and submit it on time.

Thanks