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.