Updates from Education

My name is Cansu Şişmanlar. I'm an ELT student at Marmara University, in Istanbul. I was born in Bursa and I'm 20y.o.

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Not an “END” but an “AND”

Hello my dear readers,

This post is the last post for this term, by term I mean the lecture, of course, it’s not an ending of a blog that has just started, I will continue to write about more personal things from now on. I want to say my biggest thanks to my teacher who will be reading this post to give our final grades.

This course was a lot different than the other ones where we just simply sit almost 3 hours without absoutely doing nothing.  I reckon that the best part of this lecture is how you have to use your brain and be creative. This was not a lesson that simply depends on the teacher but your imagination. I had so much fun discovering new websites, tools and working with partners and create something  belongs to me. Of course, every beautiful thing has it’s own cons. To be honest, it’s hard to say this was really bad or unnecessary but I had really hard time when we had to record our voices and then listened at the classroom. It was creepy. I wouldn’t want to do that again  if I could. However, when I consider the actual aim of the lesson, recording voices or videos are just a bunch of easy things. I really loved how this lesson can help you understand students’ view. When we were asked to do tasks at the first time, I believe most of us were thinking that we had so much to do how are we going to do all of these, impossible. Well, no past me, it’s possible. After taking the class, my views on using technology, how to use it, how to make my students use it changed a lot. To be honest, I have woken up because I have never acutally thought about it before. Shameful, I know. That’s why I really want to thank to my teacher for awakening me and also making us write blogs because writing a blog was therapeutic.

My suggestion would be for the next students, no pain no gain!!!

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Padlet

Padlet is a WebQuest tool that functions as an online cork board. It can be used in the classrooms for many ideas. As a teacher,  you can simply give tasks for students, share information and use it for the syllabus. As for students, it can be used for sharing information, to know what your teacher has assigned you. How is it used? Well, quite easy. First, you need to sign up/log in. After that, you are going to need to choose a layout for your corkboard. You have a lot of choices. When you chose one, all you need to do is follow the instructions. Here is a padlet example from a teacher.

I have presented Padlet in the classroom with my mate İrem Şenol. Thank you for reading.

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Challange with Johnny

Hello, my dear readers!    This week, we are supposed to introduce an application that is used for learning, practicing or any use of English on mobile phones. I’m introducing you British Council’s application, Johhny Grammar’s Word Challange. It’s an application for students to compete with their friends and students all over the world and to test their English. This application helps with reviewing commonly made mistakes by students&correct those mistakes. It motivates students by challenging them and it helps students to feed their vocabulary tree. As you can see in the picture, after downloading from your phone’s application store (AppStore or PlayStore or any other)  you can either log in with your Facebook account or register, you can also play as a guest. It has no restriction if you play as a guest. 

  After login, you see a screen that shows the play button, your badges, and leaderboard. When you click on the play, you have 3 choices to play; grammar, words, spelling. You can also choose the challenge mode such as easy medium and hard.

  After choosing a game category, the game is beginning. The application gives you 50 seconds of time and as many questions as you can answer correctly in the given time. In other words, you are racing with the time to answer as many correct questions as you can to pass your friend’s score or have your best score. After 50 seconds, a feedback page comes up on your screen. There, you see your mistakes and the correct versions of the word or the spelling or the grammar rule. In addition, if you achieve something a congratulations page pops up and it informs you about it. As can be seen in the picture, Grammar Novice badge directly goes to badges section that I’ve mentioned above. 

  After playing many games, you can see which place you’re at on leaderboard; which places your friends at and others from all over the world from category to category.

I took a screen video during playing the games, you can click here to watch it.  Thank you for reading. 

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Me and BFF

Hello dear readers, This week, we’re going to tell a digital story by using technology. I and İrem have decided to tell you our friendship story, how it began and why are we still friends. First of all, İrem is my both housemate and school friend which also means that she is everywhere with me. I love spending time with her. You can check her blog here It was really fun to make such a task. We used a website to create our cartoon versions. The website is called, Zimmertwinsatschool. It’s such a cool website and it is easy to use. First, we chose a background and setting. Then we arrange people, how many of them, what is their role in the story. We were not allowed to download the story video we had created but we found a solution!! We downloaded a program which is called BandiCam, that records the screen. We played our story video and recorded our screen while it was being played. At the final step, we recorded our voices and match all items together by using a movie maker called, Movavi.

Note: The website of Movavi says its free but when you download it and done with your creation you can’t save it without paying, it puts a banner on your video in that case we also have that on our story video.  Overall, working for such task was fun for me even though we had many troubles as I mentioned like banner situation etc. I would give the same task for my students because using technology helps people to get used to it and narrating a story may help students with their pronunciation by hearing their own voices. In addition, I believe no one would hate such a homework, am I right?  Thank you for reading this post. Please remember to WATCH OUR DIGITAL STORYTELLING PROJECT VIDEO.  I love you always!! 

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Mess-blogging!

    Hello, my dearest readers!    This week I’m writing a post about RSS Feed. What is it? It’s a system that makes it easier to keep up with the updates, new blog posts etc. of the blogs you continuously follow and read. Why is it needed? Well, of course, it’s not something obligatory but by using RSS Feed reader, it becomes easy to follow blogs more than one or two and you save your time and mind wondering and checking every single blog if there’s anything new or not.  If you’re blog addict, you shouldn’t miss it! You can download to your computer or use an online version.     I’m using an online version of it and it is very simple. You just type or copy&paste the link of/to the blog and it’s done. Rest is the reader’s job. I categorize my blogs by the content of them such as lifestyle, sports, cooking and I think it looks pretty organized. Here is a picture of my RSS Feed. 

  If we’re talking about blogs, I should mention one of my favorite blogs, Anthony Teacher. This blogs’ intended audience is, teachers. It contains new ideas about how to teach, has some questions that can be used for a pop-up quiz or a practice in the classroom. It has also information for new teachers such as what is a flipped classroom as you can see in the picture. I suggest this blog to teachers because I believe even if you believe you’re the best teacher in the world, you should always be open to others’ ideas. This blog has many features to explore as a teacher.

Thank you for reading, I love you always.

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Dave’s ESL Cafe

Hello everyone, You’re probably wondering what is the meaning of the title. Well, it’s the name of a website specially created for English language learners and teachers. The author of the website is Dave Sperling. There is not much information about him but you can find his mailing address, facebook link, and email. It’s easy to contact him. You can see him in the screenshot.

His website has many useful contents for both students and teachers. The content of the website is the English language. The purpose is, obviously helping English language learners while they’re studying.The target audience is everyone! Informations that are given on the website are appealing to the target audience. For students, there is and help center in the form of a forum. Students can ask questions about English and find answers. They can find idioms, slang, phrasal verbs and how to pronounce verbs correctly. 

For teachers, Dave has many ideas about how to teach English with fun. Idea cookbook section works for this. You choose a subject of English and Dave gives you his ideas about how to teach. If you’re running out of creative ideas, or too tired to think about it. Dave is there to help! What’s more surprising is that English language teachers can find job opportunities from every part of the world and apply it. It is really attractive, isn’t it? 

Moreover, teachers can chat, discuss job-related stuff with every teacher from all around the world. 

I really loved this website because apart from having many great opportunities, it has no broken links, has many colors that attract you or students and the most important, informations that are given are not false. There is not a date that shows the last time the website has been updated but is it really a necessary feature?  How this website can be used in EFL classes is that the ideas given for teachers can make the subject easier to learn. It can attract attention, students can reach the information they need easily by just asking teachers or students using this website. Students can solve quizzes to reinforce their information and such thing.  Finally, I really recommend teachers to check this website because in addition to students teachers can find many things for their jobs and themselves. Thank you for reading. Don’t forget to like and write your own thoughts. :) To check website yourself, click here

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Wikiing.

   I can hear you saying “what is that?” if you have no idea about wikiing. A wiki page is a website that you, as a visitor, can edit the content with permission. It is visited for information, authoring, and knowledge. You can log in or set a parameter for your students to enter and then editing part is starting! Now, you’re wikiing. You can also make commentsand share suggestionsor ask questions to others’ wiki pages.What I mean is, there is an interaction going on and that is amazing to get feedbacks.    Here is an example of a wiki page    I believe that if wiki pages are used in the classroom content, it can be helpful to develop writing skills. Students can practice the grammar knowledge they have learned at school and it can also be helpful to develop reading skills ad wikiis are not only used for writing context. We were told to do a wiki page as our task for Instructional Teaching and Material Design class.It was a book review. To do it, our teacher used a parameter and we send requests to be ableto create our wiki pages. I put a screenshot of my wiki page belowand we used PBworks for thistask and I think it was really fun and helpful for my language knowledge.

Thank you for reading, stay tuned!

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Visit Original Link

NIGHTMARE, a podcast story with İrem Hi dear reader,   This post is about our work given by our teacher in the last class of Material Design. We were supposed to create a podcast and me&İrem decided to write a story. We were given the first sentence and a few words to use in our story. First, we came up with the idea of writing a horror story and matched some words with our plot. Then, we searched for some audio effects to make our story more alive. The third step was recording our voices by using my phone and then we uploaded our recording to Vocaroo  Creating a podcast was really fun but I must say that it took so long to come up with a proper recording. To a podcast that lasts only 2 minutes, spending almost 2 hours was also a nightmare. We had hard times because of our pronunciation and the sound effects ware late to be heard. While we were recording, our doorbell rang and the pizza we had ordered came. We had to try 4-5 times again and again. Moreover, uploading our recordings to a website was also hard because our recording primarily was an mp4 and the website didn’t accept mp4 file so we had to convert it to mp3.   When I start teaching, I would think of using podcasting but it depends on the level of my students and content like speaking&listening activity. I can’t give podcasting assignments to kindergarten or primary level of students but I can use my recordings to make the lesson fun. However,  I don’t think that giving podcasting assignments to students would be effective because of the reasons as I mentioned before. Instead of consuming their times with such things, they can speak in the class time or if we are looking for some fun they can create plays for example.  To see the transcript of our recording, click here  Thank you for reading :)

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A timeline created with Timetoast's interactive timeline maker.

History of CALL Computer-assisted language learning a.k.a CALL is one of the most important thing for using technology in second language learning classes. It’s basically a method that using computers as a tool in classes. With the fast change and development of technology, CALL is also changed and developed accordingly. It started to be mentioned in the 1960s and it was only named for universities because the computers used for CALL was the computers that were used for WWII. It later became wider when PC(personal computers) invented.   Behaviorist CALL is the very first one that appeared in 1960s. It was used for a tutor-based-computer. It gave immediate feedback and error correction.  Then, in the 1980s, Communicative CALL emerged. It thaught grammar implicitly and didn’t give any responses.   Integrative CALL happened in the 1980s, and with the invention of Internet, it became widely used. Multimedia was used in here. Learning was made personal.  I put the timeline for history of CALL that I’ve done in the link. 

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21st Century Education

 Call it, Change and Technology.

 As time goes by, the world is changing. People are inventing and improving because the life style requires inventing and improving. This life change influences schools too. Schools have to keep up with the change in order to not fall back and bring up students. In that case, using technology in a classroom situation is a must now.

Since technology entered our lifes, it also entered our schools with;

1-ICT

(Information and Communication Technology)

2-TELL

(Technology Enhanced Language Learning)

3-CALL

(Computer Assisted Language Learning)

What about 21st century students? These students, like I am, need to be good at critical thinking, communication, collabration and creativity. Here is a video about 4Cs.

Thanks to use of technology in schools and off-schools, it’s now easier to find informations. There’s a lot of tools and materials that can be found in the internet and the number of them is getting more and more each day. Technology eased the teacher’s duty too. Since there are lots of videos, slides, skype callings etc., teachers can have more time in the classroom and it personalized the learning process.  I’m ending this post with a video, you can click on the picture to open it up.  Thank you for reading. 

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Hello everyone,   My name is Cansu Şişmanlar and this is my tumblr blog. You’re welcomed here. :) This blog contains my works for Instructional Technology& Material Design class. I will use this blog as a portfolio. I hope you will like it and find a piece of your thoughts and ideas!. If you want to find more about me, you can look here.