Week 2: Personal Reflection

Materials learned in Week 2:

• Effective Web Searches

• The ABCD Learning Objectives Framework

The first thing I learn this week is knowing and comparing various web search engines available on the Net. Visiting the webpage Choose the Best Search Engines for Your Information Needs opens my horizon of many web search engines. Previously, I use Google to find information I need.  After reading most of the posts in Nicenet, I find out that Google is the most frequently used search engine by the participants. I believe that each search engine serves different functions and may come up with different results. In my opinion, there is no best search engine in which I can find any query I want to find out. Using more than one search engine is the best way to sharpen my query searching.The more we try to use different engines, the better result we can find as we know which engine we use for certain type of information.

The A-B-C-D Learning Objective is the other thing I learn this week. It stand for Audience, Behavior, Condition, and Degree of mastery.  It provides us as teachers to determine how successful their material has been. By clearly stating the results we want the learners to accomplish, we can identify whether students have gained the appropriate skills and knowledge. Because objectives should be stated before learners begin their instructional materials, they provide students the means to organize their efforts toward accomplishing the desired behaviors. Though I teach this material to students every other semester, I find it very beneficial to learn it again as it can refresh my mind, enlarge my understanding every time I read the participants' posts in Nicenet and serve as my reminder whether I've done what I've taught to my students.