THINKING ABOUT TECHNOLOGY AND MATERİAL DESIGN

 In today’s world, technology is a need for everyone especially for preservice teachers. It is really important for them to take technology and material design courses because 21^st century education is based on technology. One important point of these courses is that they allow you to choose materials according to your course objectives.  It also aims to teach by using visuals audio and audiovisual devices in education; using computer, Internet and other communication technologies and distance education. The usage of visuals and audio recordings help learners to understand better by concretizing the subjects and thus making it clearer.

These kinds of technological tools also increase the cooperation in the class because there are some materials that can be done with group activities. This helps students learn to share and cooperate with their peers. Technological materials do not only involve learners’ activity, teachers also need to contribute by organizing tasks, giving assignment or by simply leading them.  The teachers’ effective involvement is the key to apply technological materials in the classroom environment.

There is one thing that we should be careful about and that is giving the right technological material to the right level of student. It is important for the teachers to be able to examine the material and to give the proper tools. In order to choose a proper material, teachers should make researches about these materials and they should also know how to evaluate the tools. (Teachers should be informed about that)

AMAZING TOOL: STORYBIRD

Hi everyone! In this post I will be talking about another tool for creating amazing stories. I worked with my friend Ceren Cömert while creating and presenting this tool so I recommend you to see her blog too. This tool is called Storybird and it is a site for collaborative storytelling. You can actually write books on the site and then publish them. Additionally you may have your friends and family collaborate with you by inviting them in this creative process. In order to be able to write a story you need first to create an account. You can either use your email address or create another address for storybird. Once you have created an account you can start writing beautiful stories or poems.

First of all you need to choose an artwork to be able to start.  When you have selected the artist and the artwork you would like to work with you will be able write your story. In the process of writing the story you can choose between the given images in accordance with your topic. You just have to drag and drop the image that you like. You will also add a cover page that you will be able to design.

When you have finished you can save and publish it. There are two ways of publishing your stories:

·         Privately: Only family and friends can see it.

·         Publicly: It will be published in storybird so everyone can read it.

If you want to share somewhere else you can find the embed code of your story. And voila! Now you have an amazing story with professional images.

Storybird is a useful tool because it helps learners to create something by using their imagination with large amounts of pictures and images. All these colorful and funny images motivate the learner to learn a language and find new, creative ideas. As it is a very simple tool teachers can use this especially for young learners by giving them some simple tasks. Here are some example tasks:

1)Some key words can be given to students. By using these key words students are expected to write a story and add photos according to story that they created.

        Ex key words:  sunny,  green, family, book, apple, homework

        2)The first sentence of the story can be given to students as a clue and then they are expected to write a story about this clue.

        Ex: One day Robert went for a walk. On the way he saw a/an  …

        3) Students are given only a word as a theme. They are all expected to write a story about this theme. At the end there will be different stories about the same theme.

Ex: Courage

With my friend we created a story by using story bird. We chose the second task so as to show you an example. Here is our first sentence:

        One day Simon and her mother are discussing about…………. (the future)

You can reach the story from here: FROM THE DECISION TO THE FUTURE WITH SIMON

LEARNİNG EVERYWHERE İS POSSİBLE NOW WİTH MOBİLE APPS

Hi everyone!

In this age of technology mobile apps has an important place. Education is everywhere, in our computers, tablets and even in mobile phones. I find educational mobile apps very useful in the process of learning a foreign language because they keep you on track and they are easily accessible. In this post I will talk about a mobile app called HELLO ENGLİSH.

In this app there more than 400 interactive lessons containing conversational English, grammar topics, vocabulary and more. Beside lessons we can also find interactive games on reading, translation, spellings, grammar, and vocabulary. There is also a dictionary to help learners to look up the words that they don’t know the meaning.

I want to give an example of a game which is in this app. There is a cup game which allows learners to fill in the blanks by choosing the right cookie to prevent the cup from being empty. Learner should choose the right form in order to make grammatical sentences. There are many other useful games that learners can enjoy and learn at the same time.

Beside English there are a lot of languages that you can learn and practice through this app. I find this app quite effective and entertaining for all types of learners. I suggest you to try it. J

 YOU CAN FİND THİS APP  here.

A DİFFERENT WAY OF LEARNİNG: DİGİTAL STORYTELLİNG

Hi everyone! 

In this post I will inform you about digital storytelling which is another creative way for education. This project was a collaborative project so I worked with my partner Ceren Cömert. (You should also visit her page. J) As we shared the task, we had only a few difficulties while doing this project. Choosing a website to create the digital story was a little complicated because there were lots of useful websites. At the end we decided to use Storymaker because we found the graphics quite colorful and appropriate for the level of the readers. Another difficulty that we had was the voice recording part of the story. We had to adjust our voices to the scenes of the story and it took time to do this process. We finally managed to create our digital story. 

How we created the story?

First of all we started to write a short story and we decided on the characters and the background of that story. Then we used the website and created an animated digital story. At the end we recorded our voices and we combined them altogether by using Movie Maker.

We named the story as "Julia's Secret Ability". It is about a little girl who tries to discover her secret ability by doing different activities. The aim of this story is to teach the usage of "can" and "can't" to beginner students.

I think that creating a digital story is really important in the foreign language development because it will help keep students engaged. By this way learners can develop higher order thinking, reading and writing skills. They can also learn how to use new technology techniques so using digital storytelling will help students learn better.

A USEFUL WEBSİTE

Hi everyone! In this post I will be evaluating an ELT website so that it can be helpful for your studies. While I was looking for a website I came along to a very useful site which is called LEARN ENGLİSH ONLİNE. First of all I tried to find the authors of this page because I think it is important to know who the creators are.  There are 3 authors (LYNN, PRYFLLWYD, AMATSU) and many volunteers that help creating the website. Some information is also given for each of the authors so we know more about them. This site has been helping people to learn English since 1999 and it was last updated in 2015.

This site is an online service which aims to help people to learn English and gain confidence. The main aim is to help promote friendship and understanding amongst native speakers and learners of English as a foreign / second language.
Their motto is, "We do what we can, when we can."

The Learn English Online site has free English lessons for beginners and for learners of different level. You may even use this website to prepare for exams like IELTS or TOEFL.  It offers English grammar and extensive English vocabulary sections, along with free lessons for beginners, a free English magazine, diary, games, lessons and tests, and an insight into British culture, traditions and customs.

I couldn’t detect errors so I think it is a quite accurate page that we can trust. In addition to that the lessons are well explained with visuals which may help the learners to understand better. But I cannot say that the visuals are in high quality and I also think their sizes are not appropriate.

And finally I think that this site is very useful for both learners of English and for teacher who are in search of materials so I really recommend it.  Teachers may give assignments to their students using this website because there are quizzes, tests and fun games to attract their attention in the learning process.

CREATİVE WİKİ PAGE

Hi everyone!  This post is about creating a wiki page and  I created this wiki page with my friend Ceren Cömert. We used wikispace as a tool to write a review about a film. .I think Wiki is a really helpful tool because you can create your own page and share whatever you want. We shared our ideas and some photos about the film that we have chosen. You can see down below our wiki page with the help of some photos:

Creating this page collaboratively wasn't that hard for us because we were always in contact. Wiki is really useful for collaborative work.


 We've chosen the film(La La Land) and photos together. The reason why we wanted to write a review about La La Land is because both of us watched the film and we really enjoyed it. We also recommend you to watch it as soon as possible. J

In the process of creating the review we had some difficulties about uploading photos but generally it wasn’t so difficult for us to create a wiki page. We had also a lot of fun creating a new page so it was a great experience for us.

You can watch the trailer of this movie here:

An finally I want to share a song that I really like  from the movie:

LET'S SING A PODCAST

Vocaroo Voice Message

Hi everyone! In my third post I created a podcast with my friend Ceren Cömert. We created a new song and wrote lyrics for children using the original Smurf song. We used Vocaroo  to record our voices. It was difficult for us to find a suitable place to record but we were able to find an empty classroom. And beacause the classroom was empty there were echoes on the recording. Sorry for that :)  Being in pair helped us a lot about the preparation process.

We hope that this podcast will be helpful for teachers who want to teach their students some adjectives and simple grammatical forms in a funny  way. Students can memeorize the lyrics easily and sing the song. This way they will be able to learn in a different way. So this is both informative and entertaining.
 Here is the lyrics:
￫I am always dropping or breaking many things (Whoops)
But it is an accident.
Who am I?
Clumsy Smurf
￫I have a surprise for my dearest friends but if you open this small box you will be (Boom)
Who am I ?
Jokey Smurf
￫I always carry my mirror and flower.
I look at myself for hours and hours.
Who am I ?
Vanity Smurf
￫I save my Smurfs from the greedy Gargamel
When he comes to our town, I say the magical spell (Poff)
Who am I?
Papa Smurf
￫We live in this sweety town, why don't you join us. If you are well behaved you can see us.

We had lot of fun when we were recording this. So I hope you will enjoy to. And If you did you can comment this post :)