Technological English Teaching

[ecemvarol]

The Actual Ending

Hello and welcome back for the actual last time! I created my blog for my Educational Technologies course when I was a second year student and made a farewell post when the semester was over, and now I’m making another “last post” as a third year student for our Material Design course. Who knows, maybe I’ll make another farewell post next year!

It’s been fun, educating and interesting creating and posting all the things I did, but everything must come to an end someday.

Since I took another course from our teacher, my expectations were more realistic this time around. This time, I knew it was going to be fun and educative and of course, I was right.

My favorite things we did were the flipped classroom assignments. It was very fun to do and it allowed me and my partner Gökçe to be creative. I learned a lot doing our assignments and I believe they will help me in the future no matter my proffession.

So, here we are. I’m making my last post here and I’m off my way to graduate in a year. I hope this blog will be useful to whoever may find it. Take care!

[ecemvarol]

WebQuests!

Hello everyone, this week, we were given the task of creating a WebQuest that will give directions to students and help them complete tasks.

WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which students get all information from the web. They very easy to make and a good way to for students to complete tasks. Since WebQuests include easy to understand and step by step instructions, these quests would be a good way to give harder-to-understand tasks to your students.

We used questgarden.com for our task and while we faced a couple problems, it was still easy considering it was our first time. We had some minor problems such as the site not supporting Turkish letters or just struggling with figuring out how to customize our pages. Nothing that can’t be solved, though.

Here’s a link to our work and hope you enjoy it as much as we did:

http://questgarden.com/q/yourdreams

Also, here’s my partner’s blog:

https://gokcenurturkmen.blogspot.com/ 

Go check her out!

[ecemvarol]

Since there is no more conventional reality, we’re trying our luck with an augmented one!

Hello everyone, this week we are using Augmented Reality as part of the worksheets we’ve prepared about Iceland with my partner Gökçe using Canva.  “Augmented reality is the real-time use of information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and other virtual enhancements integrated with real-world objects.”  

Since traveling is a no-no during these times due to the Pandemic, the interest for virtual experiences has peaked. We chose Iceland because it's a country full of natural and man-made sights me and my partner both love. If we had the chance, we would include even more spots to talk about. To simply explain what we did, we embedded videos to the pictures we used in our worksheets that you can scan and watch using an app called “Arloopa”. We’ve explained how to do this in a video:

Also, here’s our worksheets:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UgkeG8ccYg2Q0SypE8Yrruf-GG_bknWh/view?usp=sharing

[ecemvarol]

Flipped Again

What’s up everyone? Today, I’m back with another flipped video for you. This time, we’re teaching grammar and also it's geared towards high school prep students. I’ve explained what a flipped classroom and a flipped video is in my previous post, so if you’re behind, go check it out! 

Again, I did this video with my school partner and friend Gökçe and it was tons of fun. We’ve used Canva and PowerPoint to create our video. We weren't challenged much by this assignment since we’ve grown used to making videos because of our classes, but we still learned a lot. The most difficult part was choosing our subject but the rest flowed easily. Hope you enjoy!

Here's my partner's blog: https://gokcenurturkmen.blogspot.com/ Go check her out!

[ecemvarol]

Upside Down

Hello again, everyone. This week’s post is going to be about flipped classrooms. A flipped classrom is an environment in which the students take more of an interactive role while learning by doing activities that make them participate in the class. Those activities are mostly similar to what comes to mind when we think of homework, such as watching videos and having online discussions.

Flipped learning, like most things have it’s advantages and disadvantages. While it creates an environment where individual learning is more accesible and easier, makes teaching more student centered, and allows students to catch up easier when they’re behind, it also simply doesn’t work sometimes. A flipped classroom relies mostly on technology and digital works, so access to them is a must. It’s also reliant on student participation, which can be lacking from time to time.

Considering both the pros and cons, I think flipped learning would be very efficient for the right classroom. As for this week’s assignment, we created a flipped video to use in a flipped classroom with my partner, aimed towards 6th graders. We used Pixton to create our visuals and PowerPoint to put our video together. We lastly uploaded it to Nearpod and added activities that students can work on troughout the video. Hope you like it!

Here's my partner's blog: https://gokcenurturkmen.blogspot.com/ Go check her out!

[ecemvarol]

Be Aware!

Hello everyone. In our first week, we’re starting off with creating a “language awareness” worksheet based around using a corpus. What’s a corpus? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a corpus is: “ a collection of written or spoken material stored on a computer and used to find out how language is used “. In simpler words, a corpus is basically a digital encyclopedia of words and phrases with lots and lots of example sentences for them. So, there are of course lots of different corpora (plural of: corpus) similar to how there are different encyclopedias with the same subject material. 

For our work, we used “Skell” to create worksheet that’s based around data driven learning. That means the students will have to deduct the information they need to learn from data instead of it being just given to them. 

We created our worksheet with my partner Gökçe from last year and we think it turned out great.

In our first task, the students use Skell directly and collect their own data from it. In our second task the students will analyze the data they've collected to deduct meaning and rules from them. Then, they will fill out the missing parts of the rules we’ve given them with what they’ve learned on their own. In our last task, the students put what they’ve learned into use and fill in the blanks with “across”, “over” and “through”.

My partners blog: https://gokcenurturkmen.blogspot.com/

[ecemvarol]

Ahoy...

Hello everyone! I’m back to posting with a brand new course from the same teacher. This time, our concepts will be tied to creating materials to use in classrooms, mostly in language ones. I’ve been improving on my skills regarding the digital world during the time I was away so I’m excited to learn new things but also put the things I’ve learned into use. I hope these posts will be beneficial and fun to anyone who comes across them. Goodbye for now!

[ecemvarol]

A bittersweet ending

Hello and welcome back for the last time! As you can probably guess, this is the last of post of my blog. I created this blog for my Educational Technologies class and now that the semester is over, we won’t have any more assignments for it. 

At the beginning of this semester, my expectations from our class were drastically different from what I experienced. I thought it was either going to be a generic technology course and we would learn the basics again or that it was going to be a lot of work and no fun. Well I was both wrong and right! This class has in no way been “generic”. It was fun and I learned lots of things from my assignments, but there was a lot of effort that went into them. Which is a good thing too considering it wasn’t for nothing.

My favorite projects/assignments were the movie review, the movie poster and the digital stories. Mostly because they were the most entertaining to do but I also learned a lot. I learned about new web sites and tools for various tasks, embedding, formatting and so on. I will definitely make use of all the information I got from this class in my future teaching days.

As time goes by, more and more technology make way into our lives in different ways and education is no different. It’s up to us to make use of it for the best outcome.

So, this is it. I hope you liked seeing my journey! Goodbye.

[ecemvarol]

Web 2.0 Tools

Hello everyone! This weeks second assignment was to create an infographic to show our favorite Web 2.0 tools to our audience.

I chose Feeder, Prezi and Grammarly because I think they are really beneficial and easy to use. Here’s the infographic I made using Canva;

Feeder is an RSS feed that is easy to use and its design is minimalistic, so I like it. Grammarly is useful in every situation that will require you to write in English, it will also help with learning and correcting mistakes. At last, Prezi is a really good alternative to other tools with the same purpose because of the diversity it provides and also because it is more organized, more effective and easier to use.

That’s it for today, thanks for stopping by and reading my post :)

[ecemvarol]

Designing my own movie poster!

Hello everyone, this week our teacher gave us two assignments and this one is to create an online movie poster for a novel we’ve read. I chose Dune because it’s one of my all time favorite books and it is considered one of the best sci-fi works ever written by lots of people. It has actually been made into movies before but none of them were very popular. Dune deals with different subjects besides just sci-fi, like philosophy, politics, religion, technology and so on.

Here’s my poster;

I made this poster using Canva and Paint. Yes, I said Paint. It can actually be very useful if you know how to use it! Hope you liked what I ended up with :)

[ecemvarol]

Game of Succulents

Long time no see, everyone. This week, I am back with a digital story I created with my friend Gökçe. Digital stories are short forms of digital media productions that allow everyone to share their stories. Out of three options including creating a public service announcement (used for acknowledging the public about concerns in a non-commercial way), a how-to video (explaining doing something step by step) and a fictional story (creating an original and fictional story), my friend and I chose to make a how-to video.

We thought about our topic for a while because we wanted it to be unique and fun. Then an idea came to my mind, I had recently propagated a succulent using a leaf I got from a dear friend, so I suggested that we talk about propagating succulents. Also everyone loves succulents, don’t they?

The process of making the video wasn’t easy because we were not experienced in editing and all, but in the end I think our video turned out really well. You can take a look at it for yourself! :)

Also check my friend Gökçe’s blog here: https://gokcenurturkmen.blogspot.com

[ecemvarol]

Your own online bulletin board, Padlet!

Padlet is a web app that lets its users to post notes on a digital wall. This can be helpful in various ways in class like planning, getting suggestions and gathering answers.

We made our wall using a strategy called a KWL chart. KWL is an acronym that stands for;

K: What do I know?

W: What to I want to know?

L: What did I learn?   

KWL charts are used for guiding students through their class by having them think about their already existing information and then helping them to set their goals about the class. I also think that this helped me be more organized and I would definitely use this strategy with my future students.

Let’s move on to our topic; the lack of education in our country; Turkey. Education is vital for a country’s growth, but no country ever has perfected how to educate. Though one may say that our country has been having problems about it for a long time, and more than other countries.  Problems regarding education means problems regarding a country’s future, so they should not be taken lightly and should be fixed, but we seem to have had a hard time doing so. So we researched our way into the questions that most people are curious about and made a simple Padlet about it. 

Take a look at it, we hope you like it!

Also, these are my partners for this project. Go check them out.

Gökçe; https://gokcenurturkmen.blogspot.com/

Seda; https://rookieducation.blogspot.com/

[ecemvarol]

Reviewing a movie for the first time!

This week our assignment was to create a wiki page for a movie of our choosing with a partner. A wiki is a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content. 

My partner Gökçe and I decided on Persepolis because of its unique story and the important issues it portrays. Reviewing it made me think deeper on a different level about the movie and made me notice some details I haven’t before. Here is the review, take a look at it ;

http://ourfilmreviews.pbworks.com/w/page/137087295/Persepolis

Hope you liked it, here’s my partners blog if you want to check it out;

https://gokcenurturkmen.blogspot.com/

[ecemvarol]

Visit Original Link

Welcome To My Podcast!!

Hi, this week our teacher asked us to create a podcast for our blogs. Wait, you don’t know what a podcast is? Well, it basically means a digital audio or video file or recording, usually part of a themed series, that can be downloaded from a website to a media player or computer. Take a look at mine :)

Now let’s talk about the process, it was really fun. The only part I had a problem with was choosing which answers I was going put in because of my time limit. I enjoyed hearing about different answers and perspectives everyone had, and I wish I could have included every single one of them. I would definitely recommend my students to create podcast in the future because I believe it would help them a lot, especially to get them more comfortable about hearing themselves speak English. Not to mention I learned editing audio files to some degree too. 

I think that’s all I had to say for today, and hope you enjoy my podcast, bye!!

[ecemvarol]

About RSS Feeds

“RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. 

An RSS feed consolidates information sources in one place and provides updates when a site adds new content. With social media, all you see is the favorite stuff that people share. With an RSS feed, you see everything a website publishes”

I use Feeder for myself and for now, I quite like it. The left part shows the blogs I follow and the right part is the extension that notifies me when a blog posts something new.

For now, my favorite blog is TEFLtastic. It’s about teaching English in different countries, different styles and ways. I like that while giving important tips and information for teachers, it also contains humor, keeping you interested. In my opinion keeping your students interested in your lecture is really important too, so trying different styles of teaching is optimal until you decide what works best for you and your students. This blog is “TEFLtastic” for that because it provides different exercises and perspectives. 

So, there are lots of different types of blogs you can find or follow via RSS feeds. Why don’t you give it a try? :)

[ecemvarol]

21st Century Education

As time passes, we change. Humankind changes and with us, everything else needs to change and adapt. From beauty standards to architecture, or from technology to language. Education has also changed throughout history like everything else.

These days we are leaning more towards the learner-centered approach than the teacher-centered approach which was used more commonly back in the day.

Teacher Centered Approach to Education is when the teacher acts as the primary information giver and evaluator. The students learn and apply the given information exactly but they mostly can’t form their own opinions and thoughts, or think creatively. They lack communication and problem solving skills and also find it hard to be excited about their education.

Most of us have seen and experienced this approach and also probably didn’t enjoy it so much :)

On the other hand, Learner Centered Approach to Education is when the teacher acts more as a mentor or a guide than just purely transferring existing information. This allows the students to think for themselves and express their thoughts, forming their own wisdom. Students find learning more interesting and exciting. They use technology that they are familiar with and furthermore, the effects last a lot longer, unlike memorizing. This method also caters to different types of learners.

“ The value of education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”                                                                                                                                                                                           -Albert Einstein

I hope most of you will experience or have experienced this type of teaching because it makes learning far more enjoyable in my opinion :)

Things will keep changing and I’m sure that education in 20 years won’t be the same as it is right now and I hope it changes for the better.

[ecemvarol]

A fresh start...

Hello and welcome everyone, this is the first post of my blog I created for my class Educational Technologies. I will be sharing my work on the topics of my class every week from now on.

I hope together we can learn many things starting from this day and until the end of the year :)