Morphology lesson: Word-formation

Instructions: Read this lesson thoroughly, analyze the concepts explained below and apply them in a short quiz provided at the end of the lesson.

Objectives: By the end of the lesson, the students: 

• will be able to correctly define the processes of word formation 
• will be able to accurately identify each of the types of word-formation processes.
• will be able to adequately complete the quiz with the resources provided in this lesson 

LET’S BEGIN! 

First, let’s start by laying out some standard definitions about the concepts we will be looking at further on.

What is word-formation? 

Word-formation is the process of creating a new word. It refers to the ways in which new words are made on the basis of other words or morphemes. Generally, there is semantic or syntactic changes in the process of forming new words. Word-formation is divided into two main seccions, concatenative (forming words by adding new morphemes) and non-concatenative (forming words without adding morphemes).

Types of word-formation: 

 Concatenative 

1. Derivation- This process is used to change the grammatical categories of words.
Example:

• The derivational morpheme -er is used to transform the verb bake into the noun baker. 
• The morpheme -ly changes the adjective quick into the adverb quickly.

2. Compounding- The process of forming a compound word. This process is achieved by putting together two or more root morphemes which may or may not have a change in the semantic aspect of the two words.

Example: 

• Sun+shine = sunshine (the resulting word has related meaning to the two root words put together) 
• lap+top = laptop (the resulting word has different meaning from the two root words put together) 

Non-concatenative 

3. Blending- part of one word is stitched onto another word. Speakers take two words and merge them based not on morpheme structure but on sound structure. 

Example: 

• brunch (breakfast and lunch) 
• motel (motor hotel) 
• electrocute (electric and execute) 

 4. Clipping- a type of abbreviation of a word in which one part is 'clipped' off the rest, and the remaining word now means essentially the same thing as what the whole word means or meant. 

Example: 

• burger- formed by clipping off the beginning of the word ham/burger 
• flu- formed by clipping the beginning and the end of the word in/flu/enza 
• ad- formed by clipping the end of the word ad/vertisement 

5. Conversion- A change in category without any change in word form or shape of the word. 

Example: 

• The adjective clean becomes the verb to clean 
• The noun mail becomes the verb to mail 
• The noun party becomes the verb to party

More on:

Word-formation
Derivation
Compounding
Blending
Clipping
Conversion

Video resources:

It's time for the quiz!
Good luck!!!

Reflection #13: Almost Done!

Welp... this is it.... this semester is almost done. It went by soooo fast!! Anyway, there isn't much to do anymore, the last assignments are a Google Sites portfolio,

an Excel sheet for grading purposes

and a lesson on something related to our field of major; Two of which I already did.

This class was wonderful. As I've said before, the best class I've ever taken. Everything was fun from beginning to end. Not too stressful and not too strict either; Just perfect. I'm going to miss you professor Ferrer... hopefully I get to see you again in Metodología y Práctica.

So, as always... here we go with the embed works and hyperlinks. Over here is my Google Sites portfolio that the professor assigned us. I didn't bother to make a new one because i had already started one in a previous class so this has a lot of material from a class about kids with special needs and exceptionalities.

Keysalis J. Fermín PPMES Portfolio

Now, over here is the Excel spread sheet done for grading purposes. This was very helpful and fun to make. It was relatively simple to follow all the steps of the tutorial video provided by the professor to make this sheet. It looks very neat, professional and i'm certain i'm always going to use this tutorial as all the other video tutorials the professor has provided us with.





Next post will be my lesson on Morphology and then it's over for the semester. It's going to be hard to top this one... Hasta la próxima!

Reflection #12: Picktochart and Social Media

Well this week was fun. I can honestly say, this has been one of the best classes i have ever taken, and probably will ever take in my college career. The professor gave one of the best assignments ever! He wanted us to use Facebook and Twitter for 48 hours (24 hrs. each). We were supposed to use these platforms exactly how we use them on the regular, but with the difference that on Facebook, he created a page specifically for the class and we're supposed to post everything we do throughout the day on that page. For Twitter, we have to use the hashtag, #edpe3129 with every tweet we post.

I have no idea how the professor comes up with projects like these but I love them. Professor Ferré always breaks from the norm of all the other regular classes. As college students, we constantly deal with simple minded professors who can't come up with creative assignments to save their lives so this class is like a breath of fresh air. 

The assignment went great for me, however, I'm not really big on social media when I'm taking classes back to back throughout the day so my participation was not very active. I managed to post about three times each day and I felt like that was a lot. The purpose of the exam was to evaluate how effective was the communication within social media and then see if we could apply it in the classroom as a learning tool for our students. In the class' website we had to post a reaction that evaluated the two social media sites and say how it affects education nowadays. Here is my reaction to the assignment.

Also this week, we created an info-graphic chart which displayed the topic that we chose for the Power Point presentation with a voice over assignment.

For this, we used the website Piktochart. We chose a template that could accommodate our information and then we posted it on the class' website too. Here is the chart I created about Distance Education which is the topic I chose for the presentation.

Video Presentation: Distance Education

This has been one of the most interesting projects i have ever done. This class has been filled with a lot of "firsts" for me. As mentioned in the previous reflections, The professor assigned a major project in which we had to do research about a specific topic about our field of major; I chose Distance Education. One of the things that the professor taught us to do (which i found the most helpful to make power point presentations) was to make an original template, personalized to fit your presentation perfectly, instead of using the ones provided by Power Point. I LOVED this tutorial because, from now on, I will NEVER use a regular template again; once you know how to create original templates, you can never go back!

Here is what my first template looked like:


Eventually, I decided it didn't look good enough so i made another one and this is the one I used for my presentation:



The best part about this whole assignment was the bonus for this project. The mission was to make a video of yourself explaining some points about your presentation and incorporate it within the presentation so that you could appear inside the video presentation. The professor did not give us any tutorials on how to do this. He left it all to ourselves to figure out this extra credit bonus that had a value of 5% of the whole grade for the project. Of course, I started looking for sites to do this but often came up empty-handed.

At last, I found a site called VideStir which had this tool available and so, I got to work. Once I had the presentation done, the first thing I did was the voice-over for it, with the same tools that Power Point offers; I did not use any external sites for this presentation other than VideoStir to record myself (even though the professor recomended many, they did not work for me). I recorded my voice with my laptop's mic and I recorded myself with my phone's camera. After this, I exported the presentation as an mp4 video file to upload it with the one of myself and merge them together. I uploaded both videos to VideStir and it was surprisingly easy; Only thing I had to do was choose in which position I wanted the video and how big i wanted it to appear.

Once the videos merged, I was able to do some last tweaks on Windows Movie Maker and voilá; I had my video presentation! I am extremly proud of myself for acomplishing this and extremly grateful with the professor for giving me the opportunity to challenge myself and conquer!

Finally, here is my video presentation about Distance Education. I hope you enjoy it! I worked very hard on it. :D

Reflection #11: Copyright, Plagiarism and Intellectual Property

Some weeks ago, the professor gave us a pretty heavy assignment where we had to do some research about copyright, plagiarism and intellectual property.

For this assignment we had to incorporate a lot of details about Microsoft Word which he taught us in a video presentation earlier in the semester. This assignment is due this week. I spent a long time doing this research and came up with very interesting learning points which I put into my research as you can see down here.

 

Also this week, the professor assigned a new big project in which we have to do a Power Point presentation with a voice over on a topic that's related to your field of major. He also pointed out a bonus that will earn us a 5% of our grade which is amazing!!! We'll see how this goes, it should be interesting...

That's it for this week, nothing very complex.

Reflection #10: All about the Internet and the World Wide Web

The lesson for this week is about the internet!
We learned everything about the
internet itself, what it is, what it's used for and who came up with this wonderful tool. At first, the internet was just a project of the Department of Defense of the United States. The main goal was to create an indestructible network where scientists from around the world could share information and collaborate in research and investigations from afar. We also learned that World Wide Web and Internet are NOT SYNONYMS! The internet is a big big network, the world wide web fall into the internet as one smaller web that gives you access to information and the ability to share it too. It was cool to learn how these two are different and how they both work.

As always, we had a quiz on this and we also had an assignment which was a little different than before. In the assignment we had to compare two softwares used to communicate via video chat. One is called Anymeeting and the focus of this one is to convey professional meetings or conferences with colleagues of whatever field you're in. The other software was Google Hangouts; now, this software is much more recognized than the one mentioned above. This is a very simple software that is used to communicate in a more casual way with family and friends. it was pretty simple to compare them both, although they both offer video chat, they are both useful in different contexts. On a professional context where you need to hold a meeting with some colleagues or your boss, use Anymeeting. If you're just looking to casually communicate with family or friends, Hangouts is the way to go.

It was pretty cool to do this assignment. Here are some screenshots I took to compare them.

This is Anymeeting:

This is Google Hangouts:

And this is my essay comparing the two.

Reflection #9: The Holy Week

This week, the professor decided to bless us with no homework to do over our very well deserved free time. However, I have taken this time to keep up with the blog and I'm making sure all my posts are neat and have all the necessary information to meet the requirements of this long term project.

This blog will be evaluated at the end of the semester and graded as a partial requirement for the class so, I took this time to give it some much needed love. I transcribed all the work I have done on the class' website and posted it on my box account so that I'm able to add it on my posts here as an embed widget and provide my readers with a better experience and all the work in the class.

Since there's not much to say about this class, I will talk about my week for the rest of this post. This week has been full of work work work and more work.

My other professors gave me a bunch of work to do over the week so I had enough to keep busy everyday of the week. However, that didn't stop me from having a good time on my free time or from spending time with my family (which is what the week should be for but some professors have no respect). Overall, I had a nice week, I made time for everything important and I'm ready to go back to work on Monday.











LOL... that was a joke, I'm not ready at all.

Reflection #8: Google Slides

This week has been one of the most challenging weeks in this class. The assignment the professor gave up was a complete nightmare for control freaks like myself. He sent us an e-mail saying that we had to do a presentation on "how to create an effective presentation." We had to incorporate everything about the topic and include different visual resources BUT we also had to do it as a group... the WHOLE group. The entire class was a participant in this Google Slides presentation assignment. We were all just doing our thing separately without even acknowledging one another but it was a disaster because some people were deleting each other's work and writing over others and it was just awful. More than 30 people adding stuff to a presentation at the same time was an experience i hope to never have again.

Even though that was a horrible experience, I have to say that the tool itself is pretty great for doing online presentations without having to meet face to face and having many people in a group... maybe not 30 but if you have about 5 people in a group it will work just fine and the communication will definitely be more effective that way.

Click here to see the presentation that the whole class did and down here is an online reaction that we were required to upload to the website regarding the experience of working with 30+ people in a presentation.

Reflection #7: Flyers, Bulletins and Word Art

The class is becoming more and more interesting as the weeks go by. I feel like i discover something new every day. This week, we started doing a flyer with Microsoft Word. I didn't even know that was possible. I thought you needed a special kind of program or software to prepare such things. We worked with shapes, shadows, lines, word art and even pictures that we got to edit with GIMP. We also added text to the flyer and a picture of ourselves as kind of an "author's signature"

The experience overall was great, we got to apply previous knowledge of the things we have been learning in class while also obtaining new knowledge about other things.

Here is my flyer. I really enjoyed making this

Reflection #6: Editing Images

This week, we were introduced to a photo editing program called GIMP.

GIMP is a software that's similar to Photoshop in many ways, but this one is FREE so, in my eyes, that fact alone, makes this software 1,000 times better than Photoshop (confessions of a broke college student). GIMP is also available to different types of OS like Mac, Windows and Linux. Although the program seems to be pretty awesome, the download process was very annoying. The file is big, therefore, it took me about an hour or two to actually have it on my computer. i do have to admit that my computer is not the fastest machine in the world, nor is my internet connection so i think that played a big part in the whole experience. Nevertheless, i was able to install it properly and get to work. With the help of the professor and his video lessons, i was able to navigate through GIMP without any problems and i managed to do just fine, if i say so myself.

On our class website, we were assigned a homework which consisted of us, changing the appearance of this terrible-looking guy that the professor named, Pepe.

YIKES!... As you can see, Pepe is quite difficult to look at without gagging. Our mission was to turn Pepe into a handsome -kind of- young guy that looked somewhat decent or better in any way than in his horrible picture. Using the tools provided by GIMP, we had to clear up his acne bumps and acne scars from his face, we had to whiten his teeth and also shave his sideburns. It took me about an hour or less to do everything the professor asked us to do. i must say, i enjoyed it very much. I was very pleased with the results that i got and Pepe definitely looks a lot better now. 

Here is a comparison of Pepe's looks before and after GIMP.

Aside from the photo editing homework, we also had another online assignment that required us to look for information about the history of computers or technology in general and choose one topic that we were interested in to produce an essay that we would have to upload to be evaluated.

Because February is Black History Month, I decided to highlight the work of African-Americans in the era of technology and portray their inventions and how much they have affected and influenced the world as we know it today.

Reflection #5: Rubrics

This week, we have continued working with Microsoft Word and becoming more familiar with all the little tricks available to us yet, unknown to many.

In class, we started a document which is an example of a rubric -kind of- with a different format but it basically serves the same purpose of a rubric which is to evaluate student's work. We learned to develop all the parts of the rubric and to organize the columns and lines of the table perfectly straight and lined up with the rest of the document. We even learned a new way of making signature lines. That was awesome.

Also, we learned how to make the document look official by putting the emblem of the Department of Education on top and following the right guidelines to make the introduction of the paper appropriate for the rubric.

 Here is the final result of the document done in class.



 And here is the work done online on the class' website this week.

Reflection #4: Keeping up with a blog

Keeping up with a blog is not as easy as you may think. When you're not used to having a blog and managing it on a frequent basis you end up forgetting you even have one. It happened to me. I'm not used to taking online classes, let alone be in charge of a blog that you have to update weekly to meet the course requirements.

The class is still focusing on adorning our blogs and filling them with information that relates to our areas of study so we haven't done anything different. However, we did learn the basics of Microsoft Word and that was a great class! Apparently, we've all been living under rocks (or at least I have), because Word has a lot of features that i didn't know existed, which are there to make your life easier and to facilitate your work while writing on this platform. Like the citation feature... WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?! I've been using online citation generators since I started doing essays and all this time there was that little button on the toolbar that I simply didn't care to notice and would have saved me a lot of copy-pasting time all these years.

Anyway, I really want to thank the professor, foe taking the time to enlighten us with these mind blowing tricks Word has to offer and for helping us to have a better writing experience overall.

Here is the work done in class this week.

Reflection #3: Getting to know your blog

This week we concentrated on getting to know our blogs and adding stuff to it so it looks pretty and has nice content on it. I gotta say, I love blogging. It is very exciting and fun. I've thought about having a personal blog before, but I did not have the necessary tools to make my idea possible. I'm hoping after this class I'll be able to make it happen.

In class, we talked about html code and embed code. How to use them and what they are for. We added pages, links, animations and many other things to our blogs. I'm getting the hang of this whole blogging trend and I definitely see how it would be a magnificent tool in the classroom. Students can have access to a class blog which would have all kinds of information related to the class, organized by date or topic, making it easier and more entertaining to learn.

I will be using this tool in the future in my classrooms and also in my personal life. That's it for right now...

Here is the work we have been doing on the class' Website this week.

Embed document example

Reflection #2: Creating a Blog

On this second week, we had to make gmail accounts to be able to create our blogs. We couldn't use the @upr.edu account provided to us by the university to create the blog, therefore, those who didn't already have a separate gmail account, had to create a new one.

I was surprised that many people didn't have separate gmail accounts from the university, I guess not everybody has realized that hotmail is long dead... which in turn, reminded the professor of a funny video about unconventional email addresses. Back when it wasn't cool to use your name as an email address, some people (myself included) would have a very awkward sounding, usually embarrassing combination of words for an email and you had to think twice about who you gave it to.

After we were done laughing about the video, we finally created this blog but we couldn't really get much done because of the time but we did get to write a nifty introduction (which is the first post on this blog) summarizing our purpose for the blog and what the class is about and also, our first weekly reflection. That's it for this week folks.

Link example

Uncle Tom's Cabin

12 Years a Slave

Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Video example

Branches of Linguistics

Branches of linguistics from Victory30

Reflection 1: Starting out

January 19th was the first day of class for EDPE 3129 "The Use of the Microcomputer in the classroom." This is a hybrid class, which means we do most of our work online. Out of the two week days that the class is supposed to meet, we only meet once face-to-face, and the rest of the class time is done online (like this blog).
Already I like the class because it focuses on all the educational aspects that technology has to offer to the educational system.

By integrating technology into the classroom we, as teachers, have the power to reach our students in ways that were impossible before. We can further motivate our students to use all the tools they have available right now for their academic improvement, and the possibilities are endless.

I believe that a good balance between technology use and traditional methods of teaching is the best formula to educate our kids, while engaging them in activities that keep them motivated and to prepare them for the fast-paced world that awaits them outside of the classroom. I will update this blog weekly (hopefully) so, I'll be back next week with another class update. 'Till then, see ya!

here is a fun assignment we did this week online to introduce ourselves to the rest of the class, literally called, FUN-troduction lol.

Hello world!

My name is Keysalis Fermín. I've created this blog as a partial requirement for the class EDPE 3129: The Use of the Microcomputer in The Classroom. Here, I will publish a weekly reflection about the topics or concepts that interest me the most and about my learning process. Enjoy!