Blogger VS WordPress

WordPress and Blogger are two of the major heavy text-based blogs which offers plenty of designs and features. Both websites are similar yet different in many ways.

• Users able to host the WordPress software on their own account. However with Blogger, users have sign in through Google's servers.
•  WordPress platform is shared all the way down to the source code which mean the users able to change and extend the service as needed. Whereas with blogger is proprietary product with no outside influence. 
• Blogger has a limited team behind its designs and thus only a few options for user to customize or create their own templates.  However with WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of free and premium themes for seemingly every conceivable websites need. Each theme is fully editable and developers with a though of experience and patience can create and upload their own custom design.
• The internet's most popular eCommerce platform and is owned by the same company as WordPress. However with Blogger, users can only earn money by displaying targeted ads through Google AdSense. 
•  Google owns and operated the servers hosting the users website, along with the blogging software itself, so their website will susceptible to malicious attacks.

Blogs have the potential to expand students creativity, not to mention  their writing skills. It required minimum technical knowledge and able to easily create quickly and maintained. Students will be able to pick up how to use blogging platforms with minimal technical assistance and teachers will enjoy the ease in the initial setup. 

What I did on Deepavali...

Deepavali is the most festive holiday of the year for the world's Hindus and it is an official public holiday in many countries with significant Hindu populations which include Malaysia.

Deepavali celebration

House will be decorate with color-paper lanterns with "kolam" which refers to intricate, temporary floor designs made out of dyed rice and colorful powders.

Kolam

Other Deepavali practice in Malaysia includes attending fireworks displays and setting off small firecrackers, giving children gifts of money enclosed in purple or yellow packages, and the most of Malaysian favorites, eating the abundance of sweet and savory foods especially the snack called "murukku". It is basically deep fat fried rice noodles shaped into a spiral and infused with cumin or sesame seeds.

Murrkku

While other people are celebrating Deepavali happily, I was stuck with doing projects for the entire day.   

My project

Can Millennia Change the World?

Last Wednesday, Mr A.J Meenai came and gave us a talk about "Can Millennia change the World?". Mr Meenai told us that he used to be a delinquent, which surprised us. He also told us some of his background stories, being a bully, disrespectful to his father and others. But even though he had a bad attitude and past, he still able to "wake up" and realize what awful things he had been doing. He changed for a better, going to places and gave lectures or seminar, telling people what should they be doing and not repeat his past mistakes. One of the important part he told us is that

 "Enhancing your soft skills is more important than enhancing your hard skill" 

Soft skills are the combination of many skills such as people skills, social skills, communication , character traits, attitude, career attributes, social and emotional intelligence quotients among others that enable people to effectively navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills.

Some of the soft skills that able to master and improves oneself are:

• Speaking up
• Being honest with yourself
• Having confidence
• Listening
• Managing your time
• Stop whining
• Staying present in the moment
• Getting enough sleep
• Having empathy    

Hard skills are also important, but no matter how good you are in making something, if you are lacking of the soft skill, you cannot catch people's attention.

Google Forms

• Is a way to gather information related to meetings or conferences
• Able to create a simple survey form

Google Form's Features

• Able to see responses immediately, whether is in summary or individual responses
• Able to insert images and YouTube videos directly into the questions
• Able to set up a Multiple Choice Grid with the features in rows and rankings in columns
• Able to publish with pre-filled responses where users can publish a version of their form

Responses from the survey

Multiple Choice Grid

Interesting ways to use Google Form

• Combine Google Presentation for students to explore and reflect on the material-for engaging, active lesson and activity. 
• Able to graphed the results from the survey
•  Allow staff to view the profile of opinions and take ownership of any decisions made which resulted even the quieter stuff also able to response and reflected upon
• Able to learn the types of questionnaire as google form show different kinds of template

  

  Google Form's template