3Rs

we talk about the 3Rs -reduce, reuse and recycle in our daily lives.

we are aware of the global issues of global warming but how many of us actually practice what we preach?

something that comes to our mind about the 3Rs would simply to reduce the amount of waste we produce each day, reuse materials such as scraps of old newspaper, magazines or used plastic containers and recycle them by making it into something useful.

what about clothes that you decide to throw out of your closet?

common practices would include giving it away to the salvation army to help the needy people.

here's an idea that i stumbled upon while googling..

making use of your unwanted garments,

get it attached to your lamps at home and you can make an interesting gift or even add a new mmber to the furniture collection in your house.

simple and hassle free.

you reduce the waste you create,

you reuse unwanted garments and make it into a recycled product.

get your thinking caps cracking and explore the world of reducing, reusing and recycling.

idea adapted from: http://www.privatecircle.it/home.htm

DCX130 Investigative Lab - Bread!

So! Last Thursday (4th Sept. '08), we had investigative lab where my group (me, Salwa, Zila & Phyllis) was assigned to do make bread using the bread-making machine!

We had to make 2 different types of bread; White bread and Stone Ground Wholemeal bread for comparison and evaluation of the characteristics of each bread.

Here are the results of our investigation:

Table 1. Volume and description of bread made from different flour types

Table 2. Evaluation of quality characteristics of bread

So there you go. Click on the tables if you wish to see a larger and clearer image of them.

May I also add my opinion, that although it is a lot easier to make bread using the bread machine, the fun of bread-making is absent during the process. You could only just watch the machine do all the work after throwing in all the ingredients in the bread pan, haha.

Wouldn't it feel more satisfying and accomplishing if you get to have your hands on the kneading of the dough and all?

read the numbers off your fruits

recently via an email from my ST about labels on the fruits that look harmlessly "unimportant" but significant. All a person will do is to remove the sticker it and wash the fruit thoroughly before sending it into our mouths. i just got to admit how ignorant we are as consumers.

After reading the mail i happen to "discover" that the stickers actually meant something. (: I went on to search engines trying to see if the information was credible but i have yet to find any.. maybe i shall visit the supermarket to verify the stickers with my own eyes.

serious stuff aside, i actually found out that there are collectors out there who keep fruit labels as a hobby. they actually spend time not only to collect such labels... they also document their findings of various fruit labels.

interested to find out about such hobby?

you can read it here!

anyway back to the numbers on the label in the email...

.

.

.

The stickers tells consumer who are more concious about their choice of fruits as to how the fruits were grown. Reading off the label allows one to know whether the fruit is organically grown or conventionally grown with pesticides and herbicides; and the genetically engineered fruits.

Conventional Fruit Labels has four digits mostly starting with the digit 4.

Organic Fruit Labels bears five digits and starts with number 9.

Genetically Modified Fruits Start with the digit 8 **.

I personally go for organic food instead of those that are genetically modified.
Okay, so if you come across an apple in the store and it's labels 4***, it's an conventional apple grown with herbicides and fertilizers.

If it has a sticker 9****, it's organic and generally safe to eat.

If it says 89222, then think twice...

It has been genetically modified.

So next time you go shopping, remember make your choices and know how to avoid buying inorganic and GMO fruits.

Shop Safe :)

website review: Learning Seed

Here’s the review.

Suitability: for everyone.
Synopsis: Collision of educational videos and softwares on nutrition, consumer education, parenting, critical thinking etc.

Here’s a snapshot of the homepage.

You may see the home page of the site boring as there's little or in fact no graphics to capture the attention of their audience. Same ol cliché but true, looks are deceiving! May I seek you permission to allow me to show you more about the site?

In Learning Seed (LS), the target audience is basically everyone. In our context here, i would affirm that this site is for both young and old. For the young, such aids come into good use especially we are talking about incorporating ICT into our lessons. What more for us to use it to make lessons more interesting. It is a site with an abundance of infomation that you do not have to read per say. All you have to order it, preview it. If you find that the resource is worth adding into your inventory, just purchase it and make it yours!

Although shipping is not readily available to singapore, arrangement can be made via email. In order to minimize shipping cost, the power of networking comes into serious play. The more we order, the lesser the shipping will cost per resource.

Looking at LS, there are special sections has a range of “interesting” catchy links that you just want to click on it and find out. Take for example, “New and Revised” has a full list of fresh videos that has been recommended. All the videos are made accessible for a grace period of 30 days for viewing. there is a great variety of topics of the videos. The videos are very current and the availability of the videos encompasses and COLLIDES with the world of home economics today!

in addition, if you have grown tired of videos, you can consider going for the animations. There are animated cartoons and comics that provides another alternative to the usual videos. Such videos are good resources to be screened in the midst of a lesson to capture the attention of students.

being educators does not mean that we have acquired all the knowledge that we need. i see knowledge as a vast ocean. something that we cannot stop it from coming. we all learn new things everyday. life skills is what it takes for us to call for.

right..
are you ready to click on the site here to plant your learning seed today?

do not have to worry about navigating around the site because the site map is properly categorized to allow easy navigation. FAQs section is also available. It is stated that there's consume redress available should your video gets damaged. It will be replaced at zero cost!

food and craft

simple "experiments" wow students alot.

bet everyone has used pasta of different cuts and shapes to make into crafts and such.

the common ones that are used would be the alphabets pasta that looks like this.

how about putting some food colouring to it and add some colours to it instead of having to get those that are readily available that looks like this?

was multi-tasking this weekends and i found this somewhere while googling on sites for review and cracking my brains to come up with something simple yet meaningful for my friend's 21st.

found this perfect for a pasta lover.

simple as it takes and i might do it over the weekends at home.

materials needed would be food colouring, alcohol, plastic bags and pasta.

directions are simple and it doesnt seem to take too much of a time either.

all we need is to soak a portion of pasta in alcohol completely into a sealable bag.

add in a few dops of colouring.

allow the colouring to dissolve completely and leave the bag to stand.

(the intensity of the colours of the pasta depends on the standing time. you can be playful and create different hues!)

afterwhich just drain the liquid off (note: do not rinse the pasta!).

and dry it on baking sheets.

and tada!!

i always reccommend people to lacquer their pasta with a layer of top coat nail varnish to add a sheen to the pasta.

picture of end product and idea adapted from http://tutusandturtles.blogspot.com/

next,

i was having a conversation with this art teacher and she shared with me that

she conducted a lesson on different texture of painting in class.

students were awed by her lessons.

guess what she used?

eggs and bread!

something that you and i would thought that could only surface in the kitchens.

not true anymore!

here you see an example of an end product.

done by a sweet student on the last day of school.

don't you think we can do this in HE lessons too?

twist it and teach them about complementary protein?

add some bake beans and get the students to perform a hands on experiment!

experiments to engage the students.

teacher delivers theory.

one stone, two birds.

(:

okay reviews up next.

DCX 130 Website Reviews

Website Review 1
BrainPOP - http://www.brainpop.com/


BrainPOP is an animated website that is educational to students. There have been comments on the website from teachers who use BrainPOP to educate and that their students love it. Because the visuals and the animations are very colourful and eye-cathing, a lot of students are very interested to learn from it.

So this website does not only focus on one area of study. It has many different topics on Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts & Music, Health as well as Technology. Students will find this even more interesting as they will then be able to go to just one website for all the subjects they are studying in school.

Under the Health section, that is where you can find more relating topics to food and nutrition. If you click on the Nutrition topic, there are further sub-topics like Alcohol, Body Weight, Carbohydrates, Fats, Food Safety and lots more. Under these sub-topics, there are information and even videos relating to topic. It makes learning much more fun and interesting for students. Teachers can use this website as a tool during lesson time.

There is also a section especially for educators / teachers where tips, tools and resources can be found. On this page as well, news and updates about BrainPOP are also posted. There are lesson plans only for teachers' usage but there are limited examples on there. It is still very useful to read about as it may just provide more ideas for teachers for their own lesson plans.

Conclusion
This website also encourages educators to share their resources, such as lesson plans, videos or any resource that can be useful on the site. I think that is one way for all educators to develop and become better to ensure education is delivered to the students in the best way possible. This is indeed a very useful website for especially teachers to introduce to their students for learning as well as sharing resources among other educators worldwide.

Website Review 2
Epicurious - http://www.epicurious.com/


Epicurious is not only a typical recipe website. The wonderful thing about it is that this site also contain articles and guides, the community page where members can add their own recipes to the site or just browse through those added by the other members. The best thing is? There's the video library! I'll be going into each of these sections each to further elaborate how they can be beneficial in teaching food and nutrition.

Recipes and Menus


At the Recipes and Menus page, you can search or browse for any recipe you would like. This is really helpful as it can help teachers to share some wonderful recipes that can be taught during practicals or even take a sample recipe for discussion in class about the different ingredients and the science behind it. This also helps to build up one's experience to give the recipes here a try.

Students also may find this website useful as it helps to give them ideas and tips for their food and nutrition assignments or even their coursework. I think looking at other recipes and other ways of cooking a certain recipe can provide inspiration and creativity for the students to learn.

Articles and Guides
Articles and Guides is another main category of the website where you can read and find out more on topics such as culinary travel where writers or journalists talk about favourite culinary spots in certain countries e.g. Discover Greece, or they would write about essential restaurant guides in some places e.g. Where to Dine in New York for the best dining experience there, and for this topic specifically, it basically gives an introduction first, after which there are more categories on this page of different types of dining such as high-end, budget, hotspots, favourites and classics.



Also check out this visual guide on Pasta. Very useful for teaching also.



Another interesting section under Articles and Guides is the Epi Log. This is where you can find food news and views from all over. It is like a blog with many different writers. Any news relating to food and culinary, be it personal or not are published here. There are also tips found in some of the entries which I think is very useful. Besides that, there is also a long list of food blogs on the left side menu for visitors to check out.

Resources


The above picture shows what is in the Resources page. It is very helpful for both teachers and students should they want to check up on a food or any word relating to food. Even methods of cooking like "saute" or kitchen equipments like microwave oven or what a "paring knife" is can be found in the food dictionary. There are over 4000 food terms available here.

Videos
My favourite section of this website is here. :)
I really found this section very beneficial as I get to watch not only cooking videos, but also technique videos! I would really like to have my techniques right before even being able to cook right. You can find technique videos to watch and learn. Examples of videos are like:

simple method of creaming



knife skills like julienning!



And I would just like to add another video, it can be found under the Celebrity Kitchen Tours section and this if of Isaac Mizrahi, a fashion designer, (remember him from AdFund??) and how he makes his own Mint Chocolate Chip ice-cream!



There are other parts to this video as well which can be found at the Epi Videos section under Kitchen Tours. :)
Do check out the other sections on the videos page, I would list them all out but then it would be too much and won't be exciting for you to check them out anymore!

Conclusion
I think that the videos are very beneficial because I feel that most teachers and students are more interested in watching to learn techniques and ways of cooking. It gives a clearer picture on how the processes are like. It's very interesting. However there are quite a limited number of technique videos on the site. Hopefully more will be added soon!

Overall, I would really recommend this website to others, both teachers and students alike as a resource for them to look for more ideas, tips and helpful techniques, as well as a large variety of recipes uploaded by people all over the world. You could even drop a comment on the recipes to discuss and make the recipe better. There are even forums for deeper discussions on relating topics. This website is a very extensive resource for teaching of food and nutrition therefore, do check it out!

Old Navy - Review of Online Shopping Website (DCX131)

Old Navy – www.oldnavy.com


I wasn’t too keen on online shopping before. After experiencing my first online shopping experience, it was really fun and exciting that I decided to do it again once in a while for items I may need. Of course there are advantages and disadvantages to shopping online, but I would not go into that for now as I have this one site to review on and that is, Old Navy. Old Navy is an American clothing store which cannot be found in Singapore. It is also one of the Gap Inc. Brands, alongside Gap, Banana Republic and Piperlime.

Homepage

As you can see above, that’s the homepage of the website. From the homepage alone, you could clearly tell that this is a clothing store. The main picture of the adults and children wearing a certain trend of clothing here is good as it catches the eyes of the visitor first. This is a positive point where it grabs the attention of the visitor to give an idea of what type of clothing they have for the current season and it makes visitors curious, wanting to check out the other styles too. The homepage also states the starting price of the clothing there to get people interested as their prices are mostly quite reasonable there.

Target audience

Aside from that, you can also see who this store is specifically targeting by the navigation bar at the top of the page e.g. Women, Men, Boys, Baby Boys and Baby Girls etc. This also gives a clear overview of what you can find in this online shopping website so as not to waste time should you want to look for something else.

Navigation / Links

Apart from the navigation bar at the top, the main table on the left of the main picture there provides links directly to the different sections available. This is for easy accessibility to the pages you would wish to look at.

Other links can also be found at the bottom of the homepage, such as clothing that are “On Trend”, even sweepstakes where consumers can participate in to win prizes and lots more. The e-mail updates feature is also there for visitors to sign up. There are also links to the other online stores under Gap Inc. Brands which can be seen at the bottom of the page. It also provides a clearer linkage to these other sites at the top of the page as well.

Search and Content

At the top, right-hand corner of the main content of the homepage is the search function. You can type in a word of what you would like to search on and under which category would you like the search to look into. For example, I searched on “jeans”. Here’s how the results look like:

The search function is quite specific. Not only the normal types of jeans for bottom-wear are shown in the results, but denim skirts or clothing of the jeans / denim material are also included. At the left side of the page, there are links of the different items in the search results organised accordingly, by department, by colour or by price. This makes it easier for you to look for what you want specifically and also a lot faster.

The items are shown in a thumbnail format, with the item’s name, and price and even special notices. Discounted prices are also shown. When clicking on an item, you will be directed to the item’s page with full details about it such as the colour, size, fabric type and how to care for it as well as more details of the item itself.

Visitors can also zoom on the picture by just moving the cursor over the item. The zoomed version will pop up on the right side of the main picture there. There are also other angles available but only to certain types of clothing which may have designs on the back or sides.

Authentication

Old Navy is an authentic online shopping website. When a member wants to sign in, the website will be secured, and at the bottom of the web browser the person will be able to see confirmation of authenticity “Authenticated by Equifax”. Also, clicking the “About Gap Inc.” link at the bottom of the homepage brings you to basically information telling consumers who was the one who started Gap Inc., how it was started, where its first shop was opened, their purpose and values etcetera, and they are very well recognised as well by having won many different awards.

There is also a “Contact Us” link where you may go to should you wish to have them clarify your doubts about their products.

Accessibility

For accessibility, this site is very good. The links are good and they are very accessible on each page you go to as well. In terms of purchasing, it is necessary to be a member to purchase and signing up for membership is free. The process is simple where you would need to provide your e-mail address for the first step. Subsequent steps include keying in important personal information such as address, credit card number and such for Old Navy to access in order to process the orders made.

In terms of language, accessibility would be poor because this website is only in English. Foreign-speaking people would have difficulties browsing this website if they prefer to know details of a certain type of clothing.

However, Old Navy is attempting to modify and make changes to cater to more visitors by making the website more accessible.

Design

Old Navy has a very simple and organised design. Outlook-wise, it’s simple and pretty basic, with just faded stamps of the Old Navy logo on the background.

Organisation-wise, I think it is excellent. It is very useful to have the clothes categorised accordingly.

Under the categories itself, there are further sub-categories. For example as can be seen on the left image here, under Tees & Polos, there are further categories such as Short-Sleeve, Polos, Long-Sleeve etc. This gives makes browsing easy for the visitor.

Unique Feature

One of the unique features of Old Navy that I think is excellent is that it has the section called “What’s Now, What’s Next”. The link can be found at the bottom part of the homepage. This is where visitors or members of the website can go to and see what are the upcoming styles and trends of clothing that will be sold. The styles are different each month, so I think it is really interesting that visitors can know what styles to expect next month.

Forms of Payment

There are quite a number of payment modes. However they do not accept Paypal, Cheques or Money Order. Most of the payment methods are by cards.

Privacy Policy

Old Navy may share personal among the other Gap Inc. Brands if the member decides to purchase items from these different stores in one order. Personal information may also be shared with service providers who manage customer information and perform services such as communications with customers, promotions, conducting surveys etcetera. However, Old Navy does not authorise the service providers to make any other unrelated usage or disclosure of a customer’s personal information.

Redress

Old Navy merchandise can be returned within 90 days of original purchase date. For Old Navy swimwear returns, there must be the original price tags and hygienic liner intact.

Overall Rating = 4/5

Although the fact that Old Navy does not have excellent accessibility since it only is available in English, at least it is improving to cater to more visitors. The losing point was that Old Navy didn’t have enough payment methods. Besides this, I think the website is pretty much great to shop at and easy as well!

Reviews of DCX130 Sites

1. Washington Apples

http://www.bestapples.com/index.shtml

I'm sure alot of us have heard of Washington Apples. They are crunchy, juicy and delicious! Well here is the site of these apples. In here, not only do they present information about Washington Apples itself, but they also give further information on healthy living, recipes, and even meeting the grower of these apples! You can also buy Washington Apples merchandise here!

Students and teachers alike can benefit alot from this site, pertaining to the topic of apples. Here, you can find the nutrition facts of a Washington Apple. You can find quite alot of information zooming in on apples that relate to Food and Nutrition.

Students can also learn about the different varieties of apples here, and this would be interesting for them to know about in Food and Nutrition, where they would be able to choose different types of apples when shopping for apples as a consumer.

Methods on how to prepare apples are also shown here. Coring, peeling, cutting into chunks or sticks, are all different ways of preparing apples whether for further cooking or just snacking on them.

Also, here, the site provides important terms that are associated with apples that teachers can use to inform students with.

Last but not least, there is also a "Teacher's Corner" for teachers to use some of the resources as well as get some ideas on making fun activities for the classroom. Although some of the activities of this particular teacher's corner is more inclined towards students of younger age (below Sec 3 and 4), it could still be a fun activity for Food and Nutrition students.

Overall, I think that this site is quite a useful and interesting one, albeit focusing only on apples.

Overall Rating: 3.5/5

2. Learning Seed
http://www.learningseed.com/

This site actually sells lots of resources pertaining to topics mainly on Food and Nutrition. As a teacher, I am able to find a wealth of resources that would be useful in my teaching of the subject. I can choose to purchase some of these items if I want to, and thus add on to my collection of resources.

Also, this site is easy to navigate as they allow me to browse categories by subject. As such, I am able to zoom in when searching for a particular item in a subject that I may want to look for. (For example, if i click on "Food and Nutrition" I will be brought to a page where resources are listed such as a video on Germs and Viruses: A Self-Defense Guide )

In this site, there is also a section on Life Skills which have resource items that include kitchen safety, sewing seams, etc. I find it very useful to have these resources categorised neatly. On the other hand though, I find it a bit troublesome as I would have to purchase any item I may want first online, and receiving it would take quite awhile. Thus the resources here are not available for immediate use.

Some of these resources include in DVD format (videos) which I can use to show students so that they would be more excited to learn visually.

Purchasing the items would require me to have an account and log in, but even so, the site does not ship to Singapore. =(

Moreover, I feel that this is a very useful website for me as a teacher to build on my resources on teaching Food and Nutrition.

Overall Rating: 4/5