Designing mobile learning: Empirical journey to reality in Malaysian secondary school context

Designing a conducive and meaningful learning environment in the teaching and learning is thought-provoking tasks. The use of teaching materials will be one of the resources and normally teachers or the practitioners will need to put a lot of considerations will assist teachers in creating the desired learning outcomes. This paper aims to share the initial steps engaged in the process of creating a mobile learning concept which is applicable for Malaysian Secondary School Education. Therefore, the mixture of qualitative and quantitative measure was deployed in order to achieve the primary objective of creating a workable mobile learning concept. The findings from analysing 40 documents had unlocked a few gaps to be filled in: they enabled the focus to be on the small “l” component for the English Language secondary school syllabus as well as on the feasible methodology to be applied for the real mobile language learning context. Whereas the input from the need analysis provided more insights on how the content for the dry literature components could be arranged in the learning context. Hence, by combining the input from the documents analysis and need analysis data, they had proven to be empirically and beneficially useful steps to be taken before embarking on the actual conception of any teaching and learning design to be proposed or implemented. These initial steps had proven to be beneficial for the next stage of designing the mobile learning environment in Malaysian secondary school context

End-Users’ involvement in the development of web-based learning resources for English Literature

Developing teaching and learning materials is one of the ways to improve the pedagogical approaches in today’s diverse classroom. Traditionally, teachers prefer to develop materials using the paper-based concept rather than an ICT-based one. However, with global changes, paper-based materials have gradually lost its charm and the focus is more on the promoting of ICT-based materials. The purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate the usability of a web-based learning resource for the English Literature Component for secondary school students. This article reports on end-user’s perceptions of the quality and importance of the interface of a prototype of the English literature website. A Participatory Design approach which involved four experienced teachers and three students was employed to evaluate the website interface. Questionnaire of Usability Evaluation of Website (QUEW) was adapted for this evaluation process. Results of this formative evaluation process show that almost all aspects categorized as the interface easiness and the website interface displays are considered most important by the end-users. The feedback and comments given by the end-users throughout the process of improving this web-based learning resource helped the researchers to make improvements on the development of the prototype

Reading levels and attitudes towards reading among Malaysian secondary school students of Esl

Reading is one ofthe most important language skills because it is the foundation of learning. Acquiring the ability to read effectively and eficiently is a great challenge to many English as Second Language (ESL) learners. This study investigated the reading levels of secondary school ESL students and their attitudes towards reading. The assessment instruments included a diagnostic reading test adaptedfrom the Malaysian Ministry of Education and the Mikulecky Behavioral Reading Attitude Measure. A total of 37 Form Four students were selected for the study. The results of the diagnostic tests revealed that 72% (n=27) of the students were at the elementary level. 27% (n=IO) were at the intermediate level, and none of them at the advanced level. Despite oftheir low reading levels, these students showed above average attitudes towards reading. Early diagnosis of students' reading skills is an initial step for teachers to select, arrange, and plan their teaching approaches in reading. Using multidimensional and diverse pedagogies based on students 'interest as well as their abilities may motivate and help students develop a morepositive view towards reading in English. eventually improving their reading

G+ COMMUNITY: MEASURING TEACHERS’ READINESS AND ACCEPTANCE

The purpose of this paper is to explore teachers’ acceptance and readiness in using the cloud-based community as a platform for professional collaboration related to their teaching and learning. Familiarity with certain social networking platforms has made the preferable collaboration among teachers only limited to using Facebook, WhatsApp or Telegram. However, with time and space constraints in schools, some of the sharing sessions could not be done effectively most of the time. The study focuses on teachers’ acceptance and readiness of having their community in the cloud when they were introduced to the platform during a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) course. A total number of 61 teachers used Google Community named as ‘Contemporary Children’s Literature (CCL) 2016’ as a platform for their Professional Learning Community (PLC) during the course. Descriptive analysis was done using Google Sheets and the findings show that these teachers are receptive towards Google Community in terms of its engagement level, usefulness as well as ease of use. The introduction to Google Community has created a new pathway for their collaboration especially for teaching and learning purposes. In a nutshell, their acceptance towards the cloud-based community indicates that, given the right training channel, teachers are positive and opened to utilising and integrating the cloud-based technology in their current teaching practice

Students’ Acceptance of Teaching Interaction through the Diversity of Media in M-Learning

The technological and telecommunication development of this decade has had a profound impact, especially on the education system. In relation to this development, mobile technology in learning or M-learning is a new concept in the learning process. Examples of portable technology include PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), Smartphones, iPads, Tablets, and more. Thus, the availability of these advanced technologies promotes an environment of m-learning among students as it is easy to carry, lightweight, and not burdensome. Through the applications of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Edmodo, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, information is available anytime and anywhere and to anyone. The objectives of this study were to identify the level of students’ knowledge of m-learning, identify students’ perceptions of m-learning, identify the applicability of students' application to m-learning and identify the relationship between students' level of knowledge and applications usage of m-learning. This questionnaire was used in the data generation, which was analyzed descriptively by using statistical Package for the Social Version 20 (SPSS Statistic 20). The respondents of this study were 204 students in the first year of Faculty Technical and Vocational Education. The finding of the study showed that the use of m-learning in the teaching and learning process has a positive impact which had a min value of 4.00 and above. Besides, this study showed that the use of m-learning is highly recommended as it provides a more engaging learning experience for students. Researchers have suggested that its use of m-learning includes urban and rural students in line with the government's goal of developing an innovative and competitive convergence-based generation