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