Language&Technology

An Educational Blog About Technology as a Language Learning/Teaching Tool

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Reflection About The Course

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As I mentioned in my first post, this blog was a requirement for my Instructional Technologies and Material Design for English Language Teaching course. To be honest, when I learned that we needed to create our own blogs and upload posts about every weeks assignments within a deadline, I thought that i would be very hard and tiring to keep up with the schedule. I was also afraid that I would not be able to be creative and come up with interesting stuff. However, now that we are at the end of the semester, I understand that all my concerns and fears were groundless. 

In my opinion, the best part of this course is that it opens up a new world of opportunities to pre-service teachers. I learned about many tools and ways to teach in fun and beneficial ways, which is one of the main characteristics of a good teacher. However, I must also add that having time limitations, while sometimes be useful and teach us to be punctual, were sometimes constraining, especially when our schedules got busy.

Thinking back to all the assignments we were given, the ones I enjoyed the most were the cooperative ones. Of course, the reason for this may be my partner Rabia Odabaşı, as well as the assignments themselves. I think that as we progressed through the syllable, our assignments got more enjoyable. To me, the assignments about word clouds or timelines were less enjoyable than later ones. One of the assignments I enjoyed the most was the one about digital story telling. For starters, I must admit that it was one of the hardest assignments I did for this course. It was hard to find relevant videos for each line took place in the script. However, it was very fun to do so and when I look at the final product, I am very satisfied with it. In addition, the assignment about English language teaching websites was very useful to learn different ideas, approaches, activities and lesson plans about teaching.

This course prepared us to teach in useful ways for our future students. However, I think, it would be really helpful if there was an assignment about the tools that assist impaired or disadvantaged children in learning a foreign language. Since many of us do not need this kind of tools, it would be problematic to face such situation and not knowing what to do. I would feel very sorry if I could not help the student in need with all I have. Therefore, such improvement would be beneficial for pre-service teachers and their future students.

As my final words, I would like to say that I find this experience very useful, because thanks to this course and our assignments, I have many ideas to apply when teaching my own students. Also, I should say that this course brought out the creative and “man-of-action” side of me. For that, I would like to thank the lecturer of the course, Gökçe Kurt, with all my heart. I suggest for the students who will take this course in the future, to keep an open mind and enjoy the process instead of stressing about deadlines, which are not really a problem with good planning and hard work. 

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Memrising Vocabulary

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Remember the times that we had to buy some books, cds or flashcards to study vocabulary items? Here is a news for you: Those days are long gone! As everything we know such as books, music, movies, games went digital, so are the tools for language learning. Digital tools makes language learning fun, interesting, easier and accessible for almost everyone.

Mobile applications for language learning

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Among the many tools created to help you learn a second language better, mobile applications are what stand out the most. Most of them are free, uses up a tiny bit of your memory, and they are always with you, which gives you the chance to study anywhere or anytime you feel like it. Among the many available mobile applications for language learning, the one I would like to highlight is Memrise.

pic from here

Memrise? Is not it Memorize?

Well, yes, it is a little wordplay, but that is not the point. According to Wikipedia, Memrise is a mobile application founded in 2005. It has more than 150 language courses across 25 languages and have over 20 million registered users.

Main advantage of the application is its user-friendly interface, which helps learners to use it easily. As soon as you download and open the application, easy to follow directions, hints and clues are supplied.  It gives you an option to sign in using your Google or Facebook account, which helps creating your own profile containing your information about you and your progress.

It also gives you the opportunity to set daily vocabulary goals and set a time to give you notifications to return to the app and continue studying.

 How to study with it?

On the main page of the application, there is a themed-story, which shows your progress in the shape of a rocket launch. This story-like atmosphere and the use of some elements of humor takes your attention off the language-learning task you are on and gives you a feeling of playing a game, which motivates you further and makes learning much more fun.

Under learn new words tab, you can find the word you are going to learn, listen to its pronunciation, see a picture relevant to its meaning and read the equivalent word for it in your mother language. All these different types of stimulus intensify the learning and makes recalling and retrieving the word easier. After learning the words, you are prompted to do practices consisting of picking out the correct answer from given choices and typing out the spellings of the English counterparts of words given.

There is also a chatbot, with whom you can practice the words and phrases you learned throughout your learning experience. The application also has a paid-Pro version, which offers you more advance-level words and videos of conversations including the words you learned.

How to use it in the classroom?

Since Memrise is a fun application, which helps students to learn and study new vocab, teachers can use it instead of traditional vocabulary lists. It is possible for teachers to set daily vocabulary goals for students to achieve. In addition, teachers can ask their students to set alarm periodically to return to the app and take some tests regularly. Another activity that can be done with the students is after setting goals for certain levels per day or week, all students in the class can take the speed review test- basically racing against time and each other. Then the teacher can follow the progress of each student from the leader board and determine a positive reinforce or some kind of award for the leading students.

Because of its easy-to-use interface, fun theme, various reinforces, Memrise is a very useful application for vocabulary learning that I would suggest you to check out here. Besides, you can always use a few application that complements each other simultaneously, and learn different aspects of language from different perspectives! Please make your own suggestions through your comments and share your opinions with us!

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TIME TRAVEL WITH YOUR TIME CAPSULE!

For this week’s class, we were assigned to prepare a digital story. After brainstorming with my friend Rabia Odabaşı, whose blog you can follow here, we decided to take a known process and make it interesting.

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You have probably heard about time capsule and how they work. You write a message for your future-self, put it in a container to be opened at an exact time and date, and then you open it when the time arrives. Of course, they can be prepared for other people or generations, too. Time capsule is good and everything, but where is the fun in that?

Well, as nerds who love movies and TV series such as Back To The Future and Dr. Who, we decided to add a little twist: What if the time capsule was prepared for your past-self, not the future one? To find out how you can do it, please watch the video containing the digital story we prepared for you.

What is digital storytelling?

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Digital storytelling is a modern and a much interesting way to tell your stories. The main idea of digital storytelling is to create your story with the help of images, audios and videos and make it memorable and interesting for your audience. In order to give you an idea about it’s process, I would like to tell you about the steps I followed to create my part of the story.

After finding the theme of your story and writing down a script, I searched and found some relevant clips from some movies, tv series or cartoons, such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, The Wolf of Wall Street, Community, SpongeBob SquarePants, Fast Five, Shawshank Redemption, Lucy. In order to cut the exact parts I wanted to take out and merge some parts, I used Apowersoft Video Convertor Studio and Apowersoft Video Editor. When I had to reverse some scenes to make them fit the story, I used this website to make it quickly and easily. Then I merged the audio I recorded of myself telling the steps to prepare the time capsule with the merged video I prepared before. And finally, I added some sound effects in the same softwares I used before.

Though it was a fun process and the final product of our work was really satisfying for me, I have to accept that it was hard to come up with a relevant video with every step I mention in the story. So, maybe writing things in a not-so-specific way or writing things in details when you have a proper scene in mind or when you record your own video might help overcome that difficulty.

Overall, I can tell that this is a very fun way of telling/listening/watching things. I also think that it is a very good way to teach you students about a certain subject, making it more interesting and memorable for them, hence helping them learn it easily. Another way of using it may be asking them to prepare their own digital stories in pairs or in a style where everyone contributes one step in turns. I believe it would help both their language using and socializing abilities. So I would certainly use this method in giving lectures to my students, and also as a task for my own students.

Please remember to share your opinions with us about our video after watching it!

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Stay Up-to-Date With RSS!

Are you one of those people who checks the updates of their favorite websites manually by typing their URLs one by one? As much as it is inconvenient to do so, it is also a waste of time. So, in order to follow your favorite websites or blogs I suggest you to use an RSS reader.

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What does RSS mean? 

According to Wikipedia, “RSS, standing for Really Simple Syndication, is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format.” Basically, it is a system which informs you when there is a new update on a website. So, an RSS feed means a kind of warning that appears in your reader or account informing you about the mentioned update.

Above is the RSS icon, which means the website supplies you an RSS feed service. While, there are big RSS icons on some websites, on other sites they may not be so obvious, being at the bottom of the page or next to the sub-categories. The picture on the right hand above is taken from the website of Reuteurs and an example of the later. To follow a website through RSS, first you need to use an RSS reader.

What is an RSS Reader and How do I Use It?

In order to follow many websites’ RSS feeds and manage them you will need an RSS reader. An RSS reader is a program which enables you to follow the updates of a website through RSS feeds. There are many options including online readers as well as the offline readers. The reader I use is Feedreader, which has both the online and the offline options. For the online option you need to create an account, while for the offline version you have to download and install the software to your device. Below is the screenshot of Feedreader with the blogs I follow:

In order to follow a blog via RSS, first you need to go to the website and check for the RSS service. If the site supplies such a service, then you need to click on it. After clicking the icon, you will be directed to the rss feed page:

Copy the address of the page to your feedreader, through following steps

Also, please note that the updates which you have not checked yet are in bold letters, which helps draw your attention to them

What are the benefits of it?

While RSS readers can be used for following the news sites or the sites you visit for entertainment purposes, they can be used for improving you professional skills and following the latest developments in your field. Since I am an English teacher to be, I follow English language teaching/learning blogs mostly. One of my favorite blogs is TEFLGEEK. 

One of the reasons I follow the blog is that it gives you an idea about the different and new approaches to follow in the classroom which depends on the experience of the blogger.

 It also supplies you lesson plans for specific objects and activities you can apply in your own classroom.

There are also many useful sources and other ELT blogs suggested on the website.

So, whether you are an inexperienced teacher who is looking for some advice and suggestions from the senior teachers, or you are an experienced teacher who is looking for new approaches or activities you can apply in your classroom, you can follow as many blogs as you want through RSS and manage to keep up to date with an RSS reader!

Please share your thoughts on the RSS as well as your suggestions about the ELT blogs to follow!

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What makes of a language?

What does a language consist of? Grammar and vocabulary with a little bit of pronunciation? When do you master a language? When you memorize all the word and their correct pronunciation? Well, then what about discourse? I believe that in order to master a language we need to have a grasp of what the language is. All the course I take and all the thinking I did tell me that the language is a whole with all the systems and the culture itself. So it is important to learn all the language areas with their daily-life uses in real-life situations. Well, learnenglish.de is here to help you with that! 

Developed by The Learn English Network which is a not-for-profit organisation registered in the UK, the website addresses all the learners from any proficiency level.

The purpose of the site is to help the learners learn every aspect of the language along with the culture itself. It aims for you to be able learn the language and use it in your daily life conversations.It contains all language areas: grammar, vocab, pronunciation. It supply basic information for beginners, also some tests and quizzes help you test yourself and work on what you lack. There are also fun games teaching English mostly for beginners. 

The opportunities of chat room or forum helps you contact people around the world and put your English knowledge in use. Also, you have a chance to ask questions that you couldn’t find the answer in the website. 

You can chat with native speakers in written or spoken language for free on many different platforms that one of them would surely be available for you.  What is good about this site is that it sees the language and culture as a whole. Therefore, it has British culture tab on the website. 

Another good and distinguishing thing about it is that not only the site gives you definitions and formal knowledge or pronunciation information about the structures or words but it also gives you different combinations of words and how they are used in a daily life context with an example of real life situation.

It’s useful for learners who self-study English, but it can be useful in creating classroom activities and making it useful for students who learn English in formal setting. As a teacher to be, I plan to use this website, firstly for my own good, but secondly, for my students. It is possible to give students tasks about certain context and direct them to this website and ask them to create a dialogue regarding the concept with the help of the given example.  Or they can learn some cultural concepts from there and prepare a short presentation about it. It opens the doors of a world which has a very rich context, all in one place with a user-friendly interface.

While there are many websites teaching English, it is important to find the one with the correct information and use of the language. So, I highly suggest you to try this website and share your experiences with me. Also, if you have any suggestions for good ELT sites, please feel free to leave comments about them!

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Read it wikily!

In the modern time where the technology is improved and providing many opportunities for both learning and teaching, it is easy to be a creative teacher. 

Picture from here.

Wiki, which means “quick” in Hawaiian, is one of the options you can use in your class to help students learn better by being active learners. Wikiing, which is the basis of Wikipedia, is creating a  platform where the users can change and manipulate all the present information there. Since it gives the users freedom to change each others entries or uploads, it supplies the users a new way to be checked and evaluated other than the teacher. Also, it can be used by teachers to create some kind of class or student portfolios, and a useful resource for students, which is also created by the students. There are several types of wikiing, such as creating a dictionary or book club projects, but of course the limit is the imagination of the users! For further academic reading on wikiing, please click here.

Here is the book review I created as an assignment for our course. Since I had fun doing it, I suggest you to use it, too. Please feel free to check it and share your opinions with me!

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What Would You Do in 60 Seconds?

Would you sleep just one more minute, eat a cookie, drink a bottle of milk or express a simple idea to make the world a better place? In our case, my friend, Rabia Odabaşı and I tried to make the best of a 60-seconds period to express our solution to some of the foreign language learning problems in children (with the inspiration of BBC’s Sixty Second Idea to Improve the World podcats). For this week’s assignment, we created a podcast on this issue using this free software for editing the audio file and this website to broadcast our podcast.

Since we are pre-service teachers, we wanted to find an idea that combines different theories, and approaches we have learnt until now and find an easier way to teach children a foreign language.

Teaching Through Dancing

From the beginning of our education at the university, the importance of learning in a meaningful and natural context has been emphasized continuously, contrary to the traditional, formal way we learn a foreign language in the classroom setting. Nowadays, with the help of technology, finding more fun and creative activities for easy language teaching. And one of them is teaching with the help of dancing! 

The reason we chose dance as a tool for teaching a foreign language to children is that it engages children in a fun and teaching activity while helping them get rid of their excessive energy and focus!

Should We Give into This Idea?

We tried to summarize the reasons we thought teaching through dancing was a good idea in our podcast. However, I would like to draw your attention to a few more points. Idiko Pinter states in her article that both dancers and language learners struggle to convey meaning. Trying to overcome this problem through dancing helps students to feel safe and relaxed, thus, use their cognitive capacities fully to find a proper solution. In addition, we all know that feeling we get when we want to express ourselves but feel shy or insecure. When children are dancing to the music and uttering new vocabulary items, they do not feel awkward or stuck, they just sing and move with their friends and learn in a fun way. 

 Would the World Be a Better Place? Really?

Definitely yes! Thinking of the modern people’s problem, what stands out to me the most is the communication problems. From our daily lives to the extent of world politics, the lack of communication and having little knowledge about the communicational strategies, are the source of most of the conflicts we face. Therefore, teaching children a foreign language through dancing helps them be at ease with other cultures, other people, but, mostly with themselves! 

By this method, children can gain a great command of speaking in a foreign language, as well as the other aspects of the language, and mirror their language competence to their language performance, hence, improve their communication skills. And, sure, better communication means a better world! 

Feel free to check out our podcast (by clicking here) about children’s language learning through dancing. And, as the future teachers, we would like to learn your ideas about the creative and fun ways to teach children foreign languages!

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Development of CALL Through Years

Technology has been an essential part of our lives for a long time. Although there are some controversies resulting from using technology in an ignorant way, the pros of it are so beneficial that they make our lives easier. And those pros include CALL, Computer Asissted Language Learning. In CALL, computers are used as a learning or teaching assisting devices, which have gone through several developmental stages in time. On a basic level, we can conclude that the development process of CALL in time consists of three major stages: Behavioristic CALL, Communicative CALL and Integrative CALL. 

When analyzed closely, it can be inferred that while the behavioristic stage caused no reform in both teaching methods and pedagogy of teachers, the communicative stage made the individual study possible and the integrative stage completed the cycle by giving users the opportunity to manage their own learning process.

I uploaded the timeline I made in the class to share with you some dates which are turning points in the development of CALL, I prepared my timeline on this website. I suggest you to make timelines for the courses which demand you to remember some key dates or events. As a finishing note, I recommend you to read this article written on the issue and, also, ask you to share your opinions about the future of CALL.

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The 21st Century Education

Discussions we made in the last week’s class about the differences between traditional learning/teaching and the modern methods of learning/teaching, stirred up some of my middle or high school memories. I remember that our classtime passed mostly like this: the teacher on the board lecturing and us, students, listening (or, you know, sometimes not listening).

But, thanks to the reformist 21st century education understanding, the roles of both teachers and students have changed dramatically. The role of teachers is limited to guidance, while students’ role expanded excessively. Contrary to the traditional teaching setting, in the 21st century, students are the executives of the learning process and teachers are guides, who help their students discover how to use necessary means of learning. Therefore it is highly important to have a great knowledge about how to use technology for teachers to integrate it to their pedagogies for guiding students effectively and for students to determine the reliable information and manage the learning process. To visualize the 21st century classroom setting, have a look at the following picture:

Also, I would like to share the word cloud I made with some keywords I recall from our lesson about the 21st century learning using this website, but there are many other sites that you can explore and make yours. After you are done, please make sure to share them, as well as your opinions about the possible future approaches of learning/teaching, with us! 

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Welcome to my blog!

Hello! Welcome to my educational blog. This is my first try at blogging, so I hope to get used to it soon and become a successful blogger who shares beneficial information combining language learning and technology. To achive this, I will try to upload as many course assignments as I can, as well as some relevant suggestions and studies. Please, feel free to warn me, point things out, comment or just say hi!