Time to Say Goodbye

As you know, I was using this blog to explain the projects we did in the Current Issues course I took this term. And now that we've come to the end of this term, it's time for me to say goodbye to you. However, I would like to talk a little about my ideas about this course.

First of all, I must say that I really liked this course. Because if we want to be successful teachers in the 21st century, we must keep up with the conditions of the age. We must know how to use current technology and also see technology as a tool for our students' education. Thanks to this course, I think I improved myself in terms of integrating technology with education and preparing worksheets for my students. As for the weakness of the course, it was that these assignments took some time. Even though I enjoyed doing it, it was tiring sometimes. It was difficult at times, considering the assignments I was doing for my other classes. For me, the easy part of the course was that I enjoyed doing it. Also, thanks to our teacher Gökçe Kurt, I was able to clearly understand the assignments we need to do because she explains what we need to do in a very descriptive way.

My favorite task was the video we made for flipped classrooms. This video was also the most difficult task to do. Because it was very difficult to synchronize the video I made with my voice. It was also very difficult to find a quiet place to record audio with my friend. The task I disliked most was making Corpus-based material because it could be considered a bit boring compared to other tasks. It may also be because I do my other tasks with great pleasure.

My advice to those who will take this course next year is that you definitely know how to use Canva. I made all our worksheets from Canva, and it is an absolutely amazing site. It would also be useful for you to know how to edit videos because we spent a lot of time on the 'flipped classroom' task.

Thanks for reading. 

AI-integrated teaching material

Hi everyone!

 

Today I would like to tell you about the AI-integrated teaching material that I made with my friend Sude Özer. As you know, AI technology has been very popular since the last year and can be used for many purposes.

 

AI, or artificial intelligence, in education refers to the integration of technologies that mimic human-like intelligence to enhance learning experiences. AI in education brings various advantages. It can provide personalized learning experiences, adapt to individual student needs, automate administrative tasks, offer real-time feedback, and enhance overall educational efficiency. That's why we decided to create a material with AI for learning English. Let me briefly tell you about the material we prepared.

 

We designed this material for EFL high-school prep students. Our topic is 'Describe your room' and in this activity, we focused on listening and writing. First, the teacher explains the subject and hands out the worksheets to the students. (The worksheet we prepared is at the end of the post) Then, students describe a room in the picture given. Secondly, the teacher opens a listening passage for the students and asks them to write down the descriptions they hear. Afterwards, students will enter the imagine.art website and write what they have just written. This site will design a room picture based on their description. After this is done, the students will compare the pictures designed by AI with their friends according to the description they wrote.

 

source

Here, we wanted our students to listen to the listening passage carefully, understand it, write down what they understood on the AI website, and create a room for them. Students who can write down all the details in audio will have the closest picture.

Click here for our worksheet

Thanks for reading.

Did You Know AR Can Be Used to Teach English? I Did Not!

 Hello everyone!

Today, I am going to introduce you a wonderful material to use in your classes; AUGMENTED REALITY. First let me introduce AR to those who have never heard of it. Augmented reality (AR) is a link between real world and digital world. In fact, this technology is not very new and has been developed since the 1950s and 60s. Do you remember the game PokemonGo which everyone played in 2016? What makes those creatures in the game look real is AR technology.

I am going to tell you about an assignment in which we have used this technology. I have done this assignment with my friend Sude Özer. In our assignment, we have used QR codes to intorduce a city. We created this handout introducing the Eiffel Tower, the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, and a popular food in Paris, escargot.

You may still be wondering how to use all this I have explained in teaching English. Our aim here is to make our students feel like they are there without taking them to Paris and to take them around the places we choose. Then ask questions about the places they visited. We chose our videos from Youtube. We tour in the videos and information about this place is given in the background. Our students open and watch these videos with QR codes. Afterwards, we want them to do the activity we prepared for them. We asked them about their experiences about the places they visited and also asked them questions about the information given in the video. In fact, there were exactly 360 videos on YouTube. I would like to add them, but no information was given about the place visited in the video. That's why I didn't want to choose. When our students finished answering these questions, we also gave them homework in the last part. We asked them to write about a day they spent in Paris in their diaries.

I believe that it is a very good thing to use AR technology in teaching English. I think students will love doing this too. In my opinion, it is a very effective and fun activity as they get to know a new place and culture and do it in English. Although it is not possible now, a few years from now, maybe students will feel fully present when they watch these videos with VR glasses in the form of a headset. I'm sure this will make this assignment much more fun.

You can see the worksheets that we prepared below. We designed it using Canva. By clicking here, you can see the worksheets we have prepared on Google Drive and download them if you wish.

GRAMMAR TEACHING THROUGH VIDEO FOR FLIPPED CLASSROOMS

 Hello everyone!

I am here again to introduce you to a completely new way of teaching! Well, when our teacher introduced us to this way of teaching, I had never heard of it before. However, when I looked up to the internet, I saw it is actually really common. Therefore, maybe it is not completely new for you. I would like to share my experience of using this way of teaching with you. 

Our topic is flipped classrooms. In my Current Issues course, we work on different tools with my friends as you know. Flipped classroom in brief, is an approach which carry class lecturing to home. As the name suggests, you literally flip your way of teaching. As the teacher, you record yourself or use a video that teaches your students the intended topic. Your students watch the video and when they come to class, they practice what they have learned. 

The advantage of this approach,  it leaves enough space to class work. Thus, more activities can be done in the classroom. Also, students who are absent in the class will not fall behind. Additionally, one of the advantages for teachers is that they can reuse the content they have created.

As a disadvantage, not every student may have the necessary technological devices and a good internet connection at home. If even one person in the classroom does not have the necessary technology, the teacher should not perform this practice.

source

We learned and experienced this useful approach by preparing our own flipped grammar teaching classroom. On account of my experience, we have been given an assignment and wanted to prepare a video that teaches a grammar topic. I and my friend Sude Özer chose "quantifiers". Click HERE to access our video. By the way, I am the person speaking in the first half of the video. We really tried our best to prepare this video. Therefore, I hope you all like it. Please leave your comments below, in the comment section. 

We have used Pawtoon to prepare our video. It wasn't easy to do, but it wasn't too difficult either. I didn't know that my time was limited, and then I got scared when I saw that there was a limit. Afterwards, we designed two different videos. It also didn't let me download the videos. Therefore, I uploaded the videos to YouTube and downloaded them from there. Then we combined the two videos. Of course, these happened because we did not purchase premium. Also, we prepared the video first and thought of recording audio when it was finished. However, this made it very difficult for us. Because sometimes the video continued to progress and the part we needed to explain was not finished yet. That's why I had to extend some parts of the video later. This caused us to lose a lot of time.

source

I also put a table at the end of the video and prepared this table from Canva. I can also say that it took a long time to prepare this video. But I think it was a good experience to do this as a teacher candidate.

Hey hey hey, we're not done yet. In adition to our video, we prepared two quizzes. 'Wordwall' helped us a lot with its fun and simple game templates. 

                                                          

                                                                                 source

Our first quiz is about countable and uncountable words. In this way, students will have made preliminary preparations for the topic we will teach. Here is our first quiz. The second quiz is about quantifiers. That is the main topic we explain to our students. This is the second quiz.

For today, that is all from me my dear followers. See you in my next post. Love you all!

Corpus-based material experience !!

Hello to all of you! I hope everything is good with you! I haven't posted anything on my blog in a while, and I really missed this. We took a class this year called "Current Issues in ELT," and one of the assignments we had to finish was "creating a corpus-based teaching material”. I completed this task with my friend Sude Özer. 

 

Before beginning, I want to explain some terms related to the task. The first one is data-driven learning. This approach assumes that language is data and the students are the ones who act as a researcher to discover and understand it. For our handout, we chose Skell corpus. We chose a grammar subject which is the difference between ‘have to', and 'must'. Before I go into more detail, you can look at the worksheet at the bottom of the page.

The handout (which I provided below) consists of four parts. In the first part, we test our students' current knowledge by giving them a fill in blanks activity. Students will be able to understand their deficiencies after completing this task, which will motivate them to concentrate on it when doing the subsequent exercises.

In the second part, we wanted our students to go to the corpora website called Skell and instructed them to write ‘must’ and then ‘have to’ respectively in the search bar. Students will look at the examples and analyze them. The second exercise encourages students to use a corpus website, where they can view realistic examples of the targeted real-life usage. Afterwards, we asked our students to write down the sentences they found and liked. 

In the third part, we gave a table again and asked our students to write the differences between ‘have to’ and ‘must’. We also asked them to do this part with their peers and discuss it. In the fourth part, we gave the students the fill in blank activity again and asked them to practice. In the second activity, they had to use their own words to make sentences with the words they learned. Thus, we made sure that our students learned the subject thoroughly.

In my opinion, students will love this activity because they will learn by researching on their own. However, one of the problems that teachers may encounter while doing this activity may be technological inadequacy. Because not every student may have a digital device. Also, if the school does not have the necessary equipment, this activity may be impossible. 

 

Here is the link of our project 

It was all for today's post. Thank you for reading.

Time To Say Goodbye

 Hello my dear fellows,

Time has come, it is the time to say goodbye.

Thanks to this, blog I learned how to be a 21st century teacher. As a student and future teacher I improved my technology skills. Now, I can use technology to educate my students. With using technology I can make my classes enjoyable for myself and for my students.

Before taking this course, I knew that technology is very important in education. but with the work we did in this course and the tools I learned, I understood it even better. Technology is developing very fast and future students will be born into this technology. Therefore, as the teacher of the future, I must learn these tools in the best way and use them for my students. Thus, I think that my lessons will be both more fun and more effective.If you remember, I've told you that I open this blog for my Educational Technologies class. I'll be honest. I was anxious about this course and it's requirements. I could not imagine creating a blog. However, now I am proud of my blog and my content.

In this course we made a lot of things. I liked Educational Technologies class because we did something different from other classes that I have. 

I loved creating Padlet. I think I definitely use this with my future students. Also I really enjoyed making podcasts. My students can hear their pronunciation and correct themselves. Storytelling was really hard for me but actually I enjoyed it too. 

Lastly, but more importantly, I want to say good-bye to all of you! Because this is final my post and my course will finish this week. I loved being here with you. I really want to thank to you for accompanying me in this period. 

Take care of yourself!

                                                                             source

DIGITAL STORYTELLING!!

 Hi everyone!

Today I am going to talk about digital storytelling. First of all, I want to talk about what digital storytelling is. We can define digital story as a combination of videos, photographs with the music and sounds. Basically, you tell your story based on your topic, and photographs and videos are passing by as you are talking. There are different types of digital stories such as PSA (Public Service Announcement), fictional stories, HOW TO stories etc. 

                                                                   you can find this image here

When I first heard it from my teacher, I thought like, "It's a piece of cake for me,". However, at the end, I can tell you that wholeheartedly that it is not. Our teacher wanted us to try it. Me and Sude decided to try HOW TO story type. We thought about what we could do and decided to make a cake! Therefore we would both try something new and eat cake at the same time.

The most challenging part for me was editing the video. I struggled with it for hours, it was really tiring.

However, the result is satisfying for me. It is not that good but it was my first try. Let me show it to you:

It was all for today. Thank you for reading.