A Farewell

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    Hi everyone!
    
    As I've mentioned in my "Welcome" post, this blog was opened for my "Instructional Technology and Materials Design" course. Our teacher gave us tasks every week and we wrote posts on our blogs. We generally talked about 21st century learning/teaching, different tools and other websites, blogs that are beneficial in English learning/teaching. 

  And it is a bit hard to choose a favorite task but I want to say I enjoyed the digital storytelling task. I loved creating the story and recording it and also I think it is a good way to use with your students so that you can hear their voices, pronunciations and make them use their creativity. It is a combination of things and it is visual too which is something I always see as a bonus.
     

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    And if you ask my opinion about blogging and this course I can say that even though sometimes I was very busy and maybe got stuck writing a post(first time blogger😅), I can genuinely say that it was a really good experience. I enjoyed seeing new ways to teach and learn. I loved seeing and making examples. I enjoyed doing collaborative works. As a future teacher I am convinced now that integrating technology in your lesson can make a difference and it is really important to see when it can make a difference and really using it at the right time, in the right way. I hope I can develop myself starting with the knowledge I've gained through this course and manage to teach rightfully.

  And this is where I want to talk to the students that will take this course next year, even though the tasks seem to be the hard part of this course, they can really teach you things and make you see different aspects. So I can suggest you to use this course and gain as much as you 
can from it.

   And lastly here is a quote I have posted before and something that our teacher emphasized, so I thought it would be nice to repeat one of the most important things we have learned in this course again and end my post with it.

"If you are not going to change pedagogy, then technology use makes no significant difference." (Mishra and Koehler)

                

  Thank you for reading my posts, I hope you enjoyed and learned :)

Goodbye👋

An Easy Tool

   Hi everyone !

   Today I will write about a tool that we have presented in class with my friends Öznur and Sıla. The tool that we are going to put under the scope is called Easel.ly. And it is an "infographic" creation tool. ( You can visit the site from here )

  

   What is an Infographic?

  
       It is basically information + graphics

   An infographic uses visuals(and sometimes text) to represent information or data in a way that you can easily understand at a glance. It is especially valuable for visual learners. 

 Let's get back to "Easel.ly?"

    Easel.ly is used to make infographics to represent your ideas. It can be used to make charts, posters, maps, timeline etc. The site provides many themes and objects, the users choose the ones they need and make a cohesive infographic. 

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    One thing is that you can log in with a gmail account and use it but it will be limited. But fortunately there are public templates that people made, you can choose one of them and play on it too.

    

     

 And also Easel.ly provides support on your projects with a team of professional designers. You can access to articles and webinars, they can help you to express your ideas using the platform. 

You can also download ebooks to help you use infographics in classroom.

 

 There is also another feature of this site. You can create groups and invite people or join other groups with a password.

 Who uses it?

Easel.ly is ideal for educators, students, business owners, and executives who need to convey a thought, lesson plan, or concept in an easy-to-follow visual form.

For those who lack the time, experience or ability to generate graphics and themes on their own, to get the message across in a quality infographic.

Ideas For Usage In Education 

There are a lot of ways for a teacher to use Easel.ly in education because making posters, timeline,  etc. is always a good way to teach people especially children. 

You can prepare a task that is interesting for the students. For example, you can ask them to choose a book they have read and to make a movie poster of that book.Or you can ask them to present their favourite food or animals... Or you can ask them to make an infographic showing the general and important points of the topic you discussed in class and many more.

And I have two examples here to give you a general idea of how to use infographics in class. We made these infographics for our presentation in class.

                       

 And finally I have a video for you about easel.ly.  

I hope you found this post useful and it gave you and idea or inspiration to use infographics in your classroom.

As always, thank you for reading:)

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English to go!

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"You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it."

-Seymour Papert

     

   Hi everyone!

  As we are getting closer to the end of our school term we are getting closer to the last posts of this blog. But this isn't the last one yet so before we say goodbye let's talk about this week's topic which is, as you can see from the picture, "m-learning" a.k.a mobile learning.

  So,what is this m-Learning?

  It is an educational system where you learn via mobile devices. And it is time for us to be aware of the learning opportunities it offers. And here is a video about m-Learning.

                                                     

  

   There is no surprise that there are changes in the learning with every generation, especially with the current generation who are surrounded with technology almost every part of their lives. 

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  → And If we were to talk about its advantages I think everyone would like the idea of learning what they want to learn anytime-anywhere and it is a really motivating aspect. You also have lots and lots of content in your hand that you can learn from without really disturbing your daily routine. And anyone who can use a mobile device can benefit from m-Learning.

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  So this takes us to a recommendation of course. And since we are familiar with duolingo, memrise etc I thought it would be nice to show this one, Hello English.

                                                         

    Hello English is an app for spoken English, grammar and vocabulary.

It is very easy to use. You just download it to your phone like every other app and you you enter it with a gmail account. You choose your own language and a profile.

And the next part is choosing your reasons to learn English.

                                 


     


  There are multiple lessons you can learn from. There are videos and audio recordings.

      

   There are tests you can do and games you can plan. Aaand they give you feedback if you do something wrong. You can practice with daily news and have discussions with teachers too. You can also use the dictionary. And when you are doing all of these you earn points and golds, so it's like a game that you can know your rank around the globe or in your city if you want.






 

   
   And most importantly they send you daily messages that contain vocabulary and a question to test yourself with the word given, also daily life conversation tips etc.
                                                                                                            

 And it is really nice to work with these kind of apps individually but we should know how to make benefit from them while teaching too. 

Tips for teaching with m-Learning

 You can,

- use the games to attract the attention of your students

- ask students to read one of the articles, news or books from there and have discussion in class

- make your students listen to an audio recording or watch a video and answer some of your questions

- use the dictionary and choose some words daily or weekly than ask them to make memory notes with those words(text,picture,drawing) in the app.

Do you have any other idea to use m-Learning for teaching?

Thank you for reading :)

  

A DAY OF PHEOBE

    Hello there!

    For those of you who has visual intelligence I have the task for you!😁 This week we are talking about Digital Storytelling. As I have spoiled on my last post it is a collaborative work and I have worked with two of my beloved friends Sılanglish(Sıla Çelebi) and Öznur Çelepi . 

    In our material design course we talked about digital storytelling and we actually made a digital story ourselves.

    What is digital storytelling?
    It is basically the digital way of telling a story. It is a way to share your knowledge, imagination with the help of technology. These stories are usually 2-10 minutes in length and is a combination of visual, oral elements,narration etc. If you want further information there are several blog posts and videos on the Internet and here is one of them.

   What about education?

   Digital storytelling can be used in classroom by teachers to enhance the comprehension of a subject, increasing motivation or simply gaining the students' attention. And if it is given as a task to students it will be a chance for students to use their skills in multiple ways. It will be a creative task and it can also be a collaborative work which can help students with their social skills too.

   

  Our Story 

   We wrote a story, made our characters, drew the background and recorded the story, added sound etc. So overall it was a very creative process. None of us had ever done anything like this before so it was a new experience for each of us. 

   We wrote the story and then found suitable characters from this website. And then I have drawn the backgrounds and the penguins(😅). We didn't have much difficulty in doing those stuff but... we had little difficulties during the filming part. Aaand here is the outcome of this process.

   Sooo if you want to know our character Pheobe's day with our alien friend Mantis watch the video please!!😄

     Mantis - Sıla Çelebi     Pheobe - Hiranur Burak     Willy and the narrator - Öznur Çelepi

    What do you guys think about using digital storytelling in education? Do you think it is useful or unnecessary? 

Thank you as always!!!

See you next week hopefully:)

Do You Have A Rich Site Summary?

    
    Hi everyone :)

    How was your week? Mine was fast! Because I was waiting for Infinity War😅 but that's not the subject of course,sorry I just had to say it... Back to earth, this week's topic is something very useful. It might be something you already use or something you have seen, wondered what it is but never used before or you have no idea about it. Which ever it is let's talk about....RSS!!

   
  
   What is this RSS???
   

       RSS is short for "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary"

   
   RSS is a format that enables you to be informed about the updates of websites, blogs etc. of your choice. You download RSS or add it to your browser and create your own feed. Whenever there is an update, you know about it without going to the website all the time to check. Especially if you are following a blog or if you are devoted to a website it is something you can benefit from.


  
   Kinds Of RSS Readers

   There are five kinds of RSS readers you can choose from and some examples for you:

1.   Web-based feed readers ( feedly )
2.   Desktop feed readers 
3.   Browser built-in feed readers ( panda )
4.   Email based feed readers
5.   Mobile feed readers 

    

   Mine is a browser built-in feed reader. I simply added it to my browser by clicking   "add to Chrome" and there are many others as you can see.

                                                                                       

It looks like this when you open it. I can see my feed which are the blogs that I follow.

 


If you click on one of the blogs or websites on the feed you can see the posts in chronological order and read the one you want without going to the website if you want.

   You can also see the notification at the right top of the page.

If you want to know about RSS more here is a video you can watch!

     And last but not least I want to introduce a blog...

 

    It is called Tekhnologic. It is as it can be understood from the name about technology but not any kind of technology, it focuses on technology used in the classroom.

  

        
   This blog is written by a teacher  who likes to use technology and he shares his ideas, experiences with us.

You can read his ABOUT page and get more information on the writer and the blog.

   He gives examples, templates that you can download and use with your class.

   It is really a useful and fun blog that I enjoy exploring and I think you should take a look at it too :)

Here are some other blogs recommendations...

->sandymillin

->tefltastic

->eltplanning

   I hope you liked this post of mine and it has given you new information or an idea. I'll see you next week( maaybe with a group project😉).

  

Thank you!!!

Welcome to The English Class of The Internet

     Hi everyone! 

     How long has it been... a month😯? It really has been a while. I hope you been well and happy.

     I had my midterms and a little break after but now I am back with new content that I think you'll like... Aaand this week's post is about a website of course.

     This website we are evaluating is called "ESOL Courses" !!! It is, as they describe themselves, a free online learning platform. (Website link will be given down below)

     "ESOL" is an acronym for English for Speakers of Other Languages.

     Who are the writers and who is this website for?

     This website is written by ELT authors and experienced English language teachers under the name of the company called "ESOL Courses Limited" which is based in England. Their target audience contains both teachers and learners as they say. What I've seen is that the word "learner" here means "adult learners" MORE than "young learners"

     What is the aim of this site?

     They aim for teachers to find classroom materials(I will be showing an example further in the post) and learners to improve their language skills and knowledge independently if they want.

     Further information...

     And I should say I couldn't see a date on the page but it is very loaded with useful information to last a while. And as this website is prepared by native speakers who are experienced in the field of ELT, you can trust the accuracy of the content.

    As you can see from the site map section yourself too, this page contains categories such as skills, levels which are "beginner,elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, advanced", topic areas and themes, quizzes and games etc.

   









      And as I've seen, the images on the website are attractive and appealing to the eye, in other words it's not boring. 😊


Here I've clicked on the "listening" part and opened a lesson. The lesson first starts with a brief explanation and informs that you will learn vocabulary besides the listening skill.

    They give some statements and expect you to do some predictions.

    And in the second part, you watch the video.

   And they give you a quiz to test your predictions after the video.

 You hide or show the answer key. 

 And as they mentioned on top of the page there is a review that helps with vocabulary.





      
 Would I recommend this website to teachers?
        Yes, I would. I think it is very useful for teachers because they can use the lessons as it is, for example; make their students watch the video and than print out the questions and the review part and continue the class that way or they can just take the subject as an idea and make their own tasks in class. Either way I think it can be very helpful.


       If you are interested, you can explore the website yourself by clicking here.

    

     

    There are many many websites and blogs to help you with language learning especially with English and ESOL is only one of these helpful websites. I hope this post inspired you to search and use this or any other website out there that can really help you....

    

     Thank you as always :)

See you next week!!!