In Action Time

This is a photo from the day when I was about to play on the stage by a script called "Perangkap". I was given a role as Rose, a bad girl who has been sicked for a long time. The guy besides me acted as Steve, a bad guy who paid Rose and he wanted to kill her.

The guy beside acted as Tim, Rose's boyfriend but actually helped Steve to kill Rose, too.

Develop Your Talent

1. Enroll in acting classes.

v Acting classes will help you discover your strengths as actress. Some actresses excel at drama, while others are natural comedians. You might discover that performing Shakespeare is your calling, or that musical theatre is for you. In any case, acting classes teach you to develop and inhabit your character, work with other actors and take direction.

v Improvisation classes are a good place to start. Many people immediately think of comedy when they hear the word "improv," but improvisation classes actually teach essential skills for dramatic acting, too. Improvisational acting trains you to pay attention to cues and respond quickly. You'll learn to naturally react to others' prompts and silence your inner critic.

v Acting workshops will help you understand the craft of acting from a different angle, through "scene studies." Typically, you'll be assigned a few parts in from a few scenes, which you'll practice over an entire semester. You'll participate in class discussions about the meaning of the scene and the intentions of the screenwriter or playwright. Finally, you'll be subject to critiques, and you'll be able to put the skills that you learn into practice right away.

v When you advance past basic acting classes, you'll have the option to take specialized classes for film or stage acting, which require different skills. Experiment with both to figure out which suits you best.

v You may enroll in an acting program at a university and pursue a degree in acting, but if you're not ready to commit to an intensive program yet, try taking a few classes at your local community college or theater arts school.

2. Explore acting techniques.

There are numerous approaches to acting, each of which offer insight and training into accessing and portraying emotion.

v The Stanislavski Method is a step-by-step method to building character, and includes script analysis. Stanslavski-trained actresses include Stella Adler and Marilyn Monroe.

v The Meisner Technique focuses on action-based character development and actor response. Meisner actresses include Tina Fey, Jessica Walter and Naomi Watts.

v Method Acting involves adopting the behaviors and mindset of your character, and immersing yourself in your character for the duration of the production. Method actresses include Kate Winslet, Natalie Portman and Tippi Hedron.

Documentary

These are the property for my first performance on the stage. There are a bottle of wine, a chair, and a table. What a simple thing!

This was when I and my crue had a rehearsal for a thousand times before I came up on the stage.

This was one of the scene of "Perangkap" script. What a climacs!

We are the actors and the actress that play "Perangkap. And finally, we got the 3rd position from that festival. It was really fun!

11 Steps to Reduce Stage Fright

1)    Always be prepared! Be overwhelmingly, thoroughly, and completely prepared before taking the stage. It can be horrible if you don't know your stuff. Much of your fear comes from anxiety if you will make a mistake, or if the audience will know more than you. There is one sure way to beat that and that is by knowing your material inside and out.

2)   Be calm. If you are not calm you'll face more difficulties than usual. To cool yourself down these steps may come in handy.

3)   Meditate. Meditation is all about cooling down. Our stress and tiredness make us unhappy, impatient and frustrated. It can even affect our health. Meditation makes your mind calmer and more focused and is a good remedy for stage fright.

12 Steps to be a Good Actor and Actress

1. Relax.

Great actors spend their entire careers learning to relax the muscles in their face and body at will. Tension is very obvious when you are on stage. Your voice will sound thin and wavering, and your movements will be jerky and unattractive. To avoid these stiff and nervous displays when you're acting, it is essential to remain as relaxed as possible. Even a scene involving high drama calls for measured and calm concentration from the actor. So, act dramatic, but be calm inside, and don't work yourself up.

2. Focus your attention on something on stage.

It could be another actor, a prop, etc. Keep yourself in the moment and never stare off into space. It is obvious to the audience if you are vagueing out and it is very distracting. Keeping in the moment enables you to remain in character and enhances the believability of the role and the play itself. Also, try not to play with your clothes, or use other nervous gestures, just look at the back of the theater, or your focus point, if you are tense.

3. Immerse yourself in the role completely

 Forget that you are pretending and try to become the character you are playing. Envision how that person reacts to life, how that person dresses, walks, thinks and converses with others. Don't be afraid to act like someone else, Draw on these visualizations when portraying the character. Always stay in that state of mind when acting. If you try to pretend to be sad, it's an effort; if you are sad, it comes out in your acting well. Do not try to act the character - instead, be the character.

Example of The Use of ICT in Teaching Learning Process

To help you understand more about the use of ICT, here I provide some videos about the example of using ICT in Teaching Learning Process. Please enjoy the video.

Top 10 Negative Effects of Internet on Students

Internet is the most powerful invention and if used in the positive direction, internet can prove to be very productive. But, these days, due to the social networking sites such as Facebook taking over, internet is producing adverse effects on the students, especially those students studying in college. As it is rightly said, something that has some positive effects also has some of the negative effects on the other hand. In this article, we are discussing the top 10 negative effects that internet produces on the students.

10. No Face to Face Communication

When students are very much indulged in the usage of internet, they might not be able to achieve face to face communication with the friends and the family. There are many instances where students talk to each other on Facebook the entire day and they are in front of each other in reality, they react like they do not even know each other. This is a great disadvantage of internet as this reduces face to face communication among the students. Even the family is ignored by such students and they tend to sit in front of their laptops or desktops the entire day.

9. Thinking Capacity Reduced

These days, whenever teacher gives assignments to students, they tend to search it on the internet and copy down the facts. But, this is not the right thing to down. This would reduce their thinking capacity and they just cram the facts listed on the internet. This also makes students lazier. If this thing continues in the future as well, chances are there that students would not do anything on their own and just cram what is given on internet, they would not even try to think whether the matter given there is actually correct or not.

8. Sexual Exploitation

According to a study conducted by University of Florida, the students who use internet two to three hours on a daily basis are likely to fall a prey to sexual exploitation. With the advent of internet, exploiting small children sexually has become very easy. There are a large number of sexual predators lying there on the internet and once a student comes in contact with such people, his mind and thoughts are affected by that. In the long run, this can produce adverse effects on the mental health of the student and he is sexually exploited online. In the extreme cases, student might not be able to tell this thing to anyone.

7. Privacy is disturbed

The more you use internet, more are the chances that your privacy is disturbed. Hacking the internet has become very easy these days, hackers are very intelligent and you cannot even imagine how they are going to use this talent of theirs to spoil your life. Not only your basic information, but some of your most confidential details might get into their hands if you do not use the internet safely. Students must operate the internet under supervision of their parents and even if they think they are old enough, parents should not allow them to be that much self-dependant.

6. Addiction

After alcohol and drugs, internet is the third most addictive thing. Once you fall a prey to this drug of internet, it is very difficult to come back from there. The internet addiction can be of any kind, a student might be addicted to the social networking sites or the gaming sites and in the extreme cases, a student might even fall a prey to the gambling sites. In the third case, student may even lose all his family’s wealth.

Bad Effects of Internet

While the Internet opens a world of possibilities for young generation, expanding their horizons and exposing them to different cultures and ways of life, they can be exposed to many dangers as they hit the road exploring the information highway. Negative effects of internet such as internet addiction, explicit contents and plagiarism are not unusual in today’s culture, if not used properly, the Internet may be severely damaging to the mental and physical health of children and young adults.

Advantages of Using ICT in Teaching Learning Process

Many of the Internet projects require students to communicate with students from different states or countries via electronic mail or mailing lists or other news groups. Furthermore, The Internet should be a part of an integrated teaching system. It should be seen as a tool that supports and enhances learning and not as a means by itself. A poll result conducted by Global Strategy in April 1997 shows that this is the only way that the Internet adds value to the learning process. Teaching using the Internet does not by itself lead to achieving curriculum objectives, because part from assisting in class preparation, a good knowledge of the Internet allows us to assist our students in their class activities involving the Internet. Besides, Professional Development is a key to updating skills and for career advancement for teachers. Among others, we can use the Internet to join a discussion group, subscribe to a news group, take classes, and keep in touch with professional colleagues.

To successfully use the Internet for teaching, we must know how to access the various services available through the Internet. Moreover, it has been reported that the majority of teachers who use the Internet in teaching are those who believe that the Internet is a new way for doing things. These teachers also use the Internet for shopping, banking, looking for mortgage rates, etc. It is not the computer by itself but how they are used that makes the difference. They emphasize teacher training as a key to effective use of computer technology in the classroom. Every new technology brings with it positive and negative impact. Nobody has taken time to analyze the negative impact of exposing students to the Internet may have on their social development.

Technology in Education

Computers and Internet connections are becoming widely available in schools and classrooms. In 1999, 99 percent of teachers in the United States had access to a computer in their schools, and 84 percent had one or more computers in their classrooms. These are staggering numbers and that was only eight years ago. Just imagine what the numbers would look like now. The availability of media is everywhere. One angle that you might not have thought of are the benefits of media to teachers. Teachers can use media to help find problems that fit real world situations for their students. A good example of this for construction students or math students, figuring out correct angles to build a bridge or build underground tunnels is a very real life job. Students could use real bridges numbers and statistical information in their problem solving helping them really learn what it took to build that bridge. But sometimes problems are not as easy as this, unlike problems that occur in the real world, technology can incorporate graphics, video, animation, and other tools to create problems that can be explored repeatedly. Multimedia representations are easier to understand than problems presented as text (Williams, retrieved Sept 23 07).

25 Common English Idioms For Esl Students

The idioms and expressions below are some of the most common in English. The example sentences show

how idioms are used in context. Have fun!
1. As easy as pie means "very easy" (same as "a piece of cake")
Example: He said it is a difficult problem, but I don't agree. It seems as easy as pie to me!
2. be sick and tired of means "I hate" (also "can't stand")
Example: I'm sick and tired of doing nothing but work. Let's go out tonight and have fun.
3. Bend over backwards means "try very hard" (maybe too much!)
Example: He bent over backwards to please his new wife, but she never seemed satisfied.
4. Bite off more than one can chew means "take responsibility for more than one can manage"
Example: John is so far behind in his studies. Besides classes, he plays sports and works at a part-time job. It
seems he has bitten off more than he can chew.

Disadvantages of Using ICT in Education

The use of the Internet for education is not without problems. Therefore, one should expect the problems to be encountered in using the Internet in teaching to be evolving as well.

There are some disadvantage of using ICT for teaching and learning :

a)          Plagiarism.

Apart from Web sites that claim to help students write term papers, there are numerous cases of students downloading information from the Net and turning them in for grades. We can minimize this problem by requiring students to cite research sources. There is an online service, Plagiarism.org at http://www.plagiarism.org/, which can assist us in minimizing cases of plagiarism in the class. This service claims to prevent plagiarism by determining if a term paper has been copied from the Internet or not.

b)          Student Privacy.

Criminals, marketers, and other persons can easily get information from students when they are online. These could post danger to students’ lives or may even lead to litigation against the school. To avoid this problem, students should be educated on the dangers of giving information to people online. Parents and teachers need to supervise students’ online activities.

c)           Low Income Groups.

According to the US Department of Education, over 50% of public schools with a high minority enrollment had a lower rate of Internet access than public schools with a low minority enrollment in 1997. The same was true of instructional rooms in those schools. In addition, students from low-income families may not have computers at home or may have computers at home with no access to the Internet. Consequently, students in low-income communities may be disadvantaged. To reduce the effect that social or economic status may have, we should give Internet assignments that students can easily complete while in school. If necessary, schools may need to keep computer labs open for longer and/or odd hours. The use of computers at public libraries should also be encouraged.

Definition of ICT

ICT is an acronym that stands for Information Communications Tecnology. However, apart from explaining an acronym, there is not a universally accepted defininition of ICT? Why? Because the concepts, methods and applications involved in ICT are constantly evolving on an almost daily basis. Its difficult to keep up with the changes - they happen so fast.

Lets focus on the three words behind ICT:

• INFORMATION
• COMMUNICATIONS
• TECHNOLOGY

A good way to think about ICT is to consider all the uses of digital technology that already exist to help individuals, businesses and organisations use information. ICT covers any product that will store, retrieve, manipulate, transmit or receive information electronically in a digital form. For example, personal computers, digital television, email, robots. So ICT is concerned with the storage, retrieval, manipulation, transmission or receipt of digital data. Importantly, it is also concerned with the way these different uses can work with each other.

In business, ICT is often categorised into two broad types of product:

• The traditional computer-based technologies (things you can typically do on a personal computer or using computers at home or at work); and
• The more recent, and fast-growing range of digital communication technologies (which allow people and organisations to communicate and share information digitally)

The Importance of ICT

ICTs stand for information and communication technologies and are defined, for the purposes of this primer, as a “diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information.”  These technologies include computers, the Internet, broadcasting technologies (radio and television), and telephony.

The potential of each technology varies according to how it is used. Haddad and Draxler identify at least five levels of technology use in education: presentation, demonstration, drill and practice, interaction, and collaboration. Education policymakers and planners must first of all be clear about what educational outcomes (as discussed above) are being targeted. These broad goals should guide the choice of technologies to be used and their modalities of use.

Each of the different ICTs—print, audio/video cassettes, radio and TV broadcasts, computers or the Internet—may be used for presentation and demonstration, the most basic of the five levels. Except for video technologies, drill and practice may likewise be performed using the whole range of technologies. On the other hand, networked computers and the Internet are the ICTs that enable interactive and collaborative learning best; their full potential as educational tools will remain unrealized if they are used merely for presentation or demonstration.