One Last Post to Rule Them All..

            For your knowledge, we have come to an end. Not for my blog, but my Instructional Technology and Material Design course. This is my latest blog post covering 2018 spring school year. We began taking this course at the beginning of 2nd term. Our beloved teacher, Gökçe Kurt, has been full of energy and very helpful.
           When it comes to our lesson, it mainly deals with the usage of technology in second language learning classes. As you know, we had many tasks, groupworks and projects. As always, what I like most is to work with my classmates! I'm a team player, and I love being in a project with my friends. We accomplished many things, created lots of storie etc. But given a task every week sometimes bothers me. Because we take 7-8 courses each year, from time to time, we have a task to do for all of them. But I'm not complaining about this, as a student, this is what we need to do. I just think like that as an ordinary human being.
           For my future career, I have learned many tools to use in my classroom from this course. Even, not only for my classes, but also in my personal life. For instance, I have learned what webquest is, what it is used for and I like it a lot!
           As far as I think, some useless tools can be removed from the syllabus, such as Bubbl.us. I can say this because I am one of the persons who have made a presentation about it. Instead of bubbl.us, youtube.com can be added to syllabus. Recently, youtube has gained incredible amount of popularity among people. People of all ages spend time on Youtube. You can make your students record a video about something relevant to your topic and make them upload it to Youtube. I'm sure it will be fun!
          One of my favourite assignmets is to create a Digital Story. I and my friend Beyza had great fun while doing it. We created cartoon characters, a background, recorded a stop-motion video and vocalize it. It was so good!
           Lastly, I'm calling out for the students who will take this course next year. Do not postpone your assignments to last days, and do not think that they are unnecessary. I used to think like that, but when you come to the end of your course, you realize that they are really helpful to you and your future character. It contributes a lot about being a qualified teacher that our country needs most nowadays!

I hope I will see you in my next blog posts!

Bubbl.us - Mind Maps

Hello guys, today, I will introduce you what Bubbl.us is and what it is used for. We have made a presentation with my friend Ayşe Beyza about Bubbl.us in our class. So what I'm going to do is to make it shorter and tell you about it!

Bubbl.us is a brainstorming-tree application that helps you organize your thoughts. It has a simple design which enables young learners to brainstorm and create their own diagrams easily. You can create mind maps with Bubbl.us very easily. I can hear you asking what a mind map is! A mind map is a graphical representation of ideas and concepts; a visual thinking tool for structuring, understanding and remembering information which helps you generate new ideas.

  
This our mind map. It contains the tasks that we have done for Instructional Technology & Materials Design class!

 

What are the advantages of using Bubbl.us? 

• First of all, it is an online application, so you don't have to download anything to use it!
• It works same on all platforms.
• You can get your mind man as an image, you can get an embed code and easily share it.
• It attracts young learners' interest with its colorful theme.

 

Why should I use this app as a teacher? 

• Students will not have any difficulty using the program thanks to its simple design. 
• You contribute to your students' imagination by making them do a brainstorming activity.

 

User Guide

First, you need to open a new account by clicking "register" button when you enter the website.

Once you have signed in to your account, you will see a list of your saved mind maps. If you don't have one, you can create a new mind map by clicking "New Mind Map." To edit one of your mind maps, just click the name of it.

When you click it, you will be directed to the mind map editor. In the blue section above, you can see all the things that are currently open. Down below, there are buttons to share your mind map, to save it as an image or to print it. I have shown them one by one in the picture below.

As you can see, it is really easy to use this application! So what are you waiting for? Go and create your own mind map and share it with us!

FluentU / Best App to Learn English!

Hello you all, today, I want to introduce you a mobile app, which you can use for your English learning. As you can see from the headline, It is FluentU! FluentU is a unique mobile app among the other mobile apps in a learning process. It takes real-world videos such as music videos, commercials, news and inspiring talks and changes them into learning experiences. Unlike the other apps, FluentU uses a modern approach that makes you be familiar with the English culture and helps you get into the English language. So what I'm going to do is to show you how this app works!

1. When you download the app, first of all, you need to select the language you want to learn. It is English in our case.

2. Then, you need to register by writing your mail address, username, and password.

 3. You should select your proficiency level.

Finally, you get in! When you click the "Menu" button, which is 3 lines standing in a row, you will see some options such as Achievements, Browse, Search and My Content. In "Search" section, you can search literally whatever you want. You can look for phrases, words or even specific content, such as travel or past tense.

In "Browse" section, you can search for videos, audios or flashcards related to your subject. You can filter the results according to their levels or topics. For example, if you want to see only the videos about Science and Tech, you can easily filter it!

Here comes the best part. When you watch a video in this app, you can have a quiz about it! Also, it gives you the vocabulary and dialogue of that video. You can check the words used in the video, or you can read the dialogue. But it is not over! You can listen to all these words and dialogues by clicking the speaker button next to it!

One of the best things about this app is that you can give your students relevant tasks. FluentU allows you to set daily achievement goals. For example, if you watch videos which last 10 minutes in total in a day, they give you 1000 points. You can find videos on the subject, words or the tense you cover in your classroom and want your students to watch that video and take the quiz! They will spend more than 10 minutes by working on the quiz, checking the words and dialogues! And they get their 1000 points. You can set a weekly point goal for your students and want them to do reach at it!


Stay tuned for more attractive tools and useful information! If you know any other app for learning activities, please don't hesitate to share it with me!

A Backyard Adventure

Today in my blog post, I want to talk about my digital story, which I did with my classmate Beyza, you can see her blog by clicking this. First, let me tell you what digital storytelling is. It is a way of telling a story online with combining text, recorded audio narration, video and may be music. There might be various kinds of a story, for instance, personal story, historical events, book trailers or fictional stories.

I and my friend Beyza gathered in her apartment to do this. First, we started with finding pictures for our project. We used google images for this, and then, we started filming them to create a stop-motion video. Afterwards, we recorded our audio and combined them with the help of Microsoft Movie Maker. It was actually an easy project, and I find this very helpful for young learners. If I become a primary school teacher, I would definetely make my learners do this. Because I think they will love the idea of making a cartoon with interesting characters of their own, and vocalize them. You can see the video down below with the images we have used for our project.

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RSS Feed

Hello everyone, today, in my blog post, I want to explain to you what RSS is. RSS is a tracking system working with regularly updated sites, podcasts etc. to keep you informed of updates. With this technology, you can access all contents of all the sites you follow from a single page. Some RSS readers are Feedly, Reeder, Feedreader... The one I'm currently using is "feedbro" You can download it by clicking this only if you are using Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Right now, I only follow BBC World News, and I recommend this you all. As a teacher, it is my duty to follow what is happening in the world, and when it is necessary, transfer it to my students within the context of my lesson. Not only you will become their teachers, but also you will be their guides as well.

This is how "feedbro" looks like when you subscribe BBC World News.

You can see on the left that I choose the BBC World News, and on the right, you can see their regularly updated news.

ESOL - An EFL Website

Today, I would like to inform you about a website, ESOL COURSES, which is a website for English learners. They publish free online self-study lessons for English students, and also classroom resources for English language teachers. The directors of ESOL are Adrian Jones and Sue Lyon-Jones. I couldn’t find any information about them. The website is based in England. However, they state that their lessons are written by ELT authors and qualified English language teachers. We can find the writer’s name on each page.

When you open the main page, you can see many options for different skills you want to practice. As you can see from the picture, from the top of the page you can choose the difficulty level. There are 5 choices, which are “Beginners, Elementary, Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate and Advanced.” You can study grammar, improve your vocabulary, do the writing tasks etc. There are many subtopics under each title.

The target audience is both students and teachers. It helps students improve their English. Also their lessons are suitable for teaching literacy, numeracy, functional skills and general classroom use in schools. Teachers may adopt their techniques and use them in their clasrooms.


I couldn’t see the dates of the posts, so I can’t tell you if they update the site or not. I have checked many of the links, they work properly. As far as I examine, there aren’t any misinformation or any error in the tasks. The images they use are high quality and very appealing for learners. They are related to topics.

In EFL teaching, we can encourage our students to use this site to cover our topics. If we have a specific subject, for example daily routine, we find relevant tasks from this website. Students may find this site interesting because of the content.

Wikiing - Being a Wikier(?)

   We learned what is a wiki, what wikiing is etc. in the last lesson. Wiki is kind of a modern library. It is full of information, and you can contribute it, share your own knowledge with it or with the help of it whenever you want. There is no limitation, but you need to take permission first. Here are the some Wiki examples:
 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
 http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page
 www.wikibooks.org

Don't forget to put "0" before "w" if you live in Turkey!

I think Wikiing contributes to the development of writing skills mostly. The more you write, the more you become competent to write. Also, teachers can encourage their students to research about a specific topic and make them post an article on Wiki. They can form working groups and thus they get used to working together. These are all connected to each other.

At the end of the last lesson, our teacher gave us a task related to this post. She wanted us to choose a book we like and recommend it to other people. I chose "Lord of the Flies" and I created a wiki entry, which you can see it by clicking this, on the wiki page she opened. I included who wrote the book, the number of pages, its genre etc. I wrote a paragraph summarizing the plot and the main characters. Furthermore, I explained why I recommend this book. You can simply read my entry from below.