TIME TO SAY GOODBYE 

Hello my dear readers! We came to an end for this amazing semester. As well as the previous semester, this semester enlightened me about 21st-century teaching and gave me a lot of task ideas that I can give to my students in the future. 

I really enjoyed creating materials as a teacher and I must say that creating materials as students first, enabled me to see the important details and necessities to create better materials as a teacher this semester.

To be honest, this course was the most beneficial one compared to my other courses. I am really happy that I took this elective course and I highly recommend this course to all future teachers. This course not only teaches you how to create materials but also widens your perspective about technology integration in language teaching, improves your creativity, literally prepares you to be a teacher by not only making you learn but by making you use what you learn and provides an environment for group work. 

I can not tell a specific thing that I liked or learned the most because for me every task was equally useful, exciting and important. Luckily I didn't have big difficulties other than some technical problems. My partner in every task İzel always helped me to find practical solutions and we worked out everything smoothly. 

I wish I could continue this course next semester and keep creating various materials. Before saying goodbye, I want to thank my teacher for giving us this amazing opportunity and coming up with brilliant ideas. Even though it was the first time that she was giving this course and we were dealing with a pandemic, the course didn't have any disruption and the content was flawless. 

Last but not least, I want to thank you my dear readers for being with me along this journey. I hope you find this blog useful and enjoy reading it. Take care of yourselves and never stop learning! 

CREATING A TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED PROJECT FROM A CLASSIC COURSEBOOK

Hello my dear readers! As you understand from the title, this week me and my friend İzel were given a coursebook and asked to choose an end of the unit project to turn it into a technology-enhanced project. 

The picture above is the original project given in the coursebook. It requires printing out pictures, scissors, colorful pens and cardboards, and if this was a group project the students would also need to come together. Thanks to technology integration, students only need a technological device and internet, nothing else. Moreover, they can do collaborative work online which we understood the necessity of it in this pandemic time.

The handout above is the one that we created. We wanted the design to be catchy and the instructions short and clear. To show them how to use Padlet we recorded a screen casting video and attached it to the handout via ARize and gave its link as well. Here you can watch the video. ⇩

How to use Padlet from İzel Gür on Vimeo.

In this task, we were free to choose the project, how to design it and which web tool to integrate. Therefore it enabled us to use all the information that we have learned throughout the semester and improved a necessary skill for being a teacher in 21st century which is being creative.

FLIPPED CLASSROOM FOR VOCABULARY TEACHING

Hello my dear readers! Last week we created a flipped classroom for grammar teaching, which you can see in the post above, and our target audience was high school students. This week, me and my friend İzel created a flipped classroom for vocabulary teaching and our target audience was fourth graders. Our vocabulary unit is called "My Friends" and it is about opposite physical appearances. Here you can watch our flipped classroom video.


Physical Appearance Traits from İzel Gür on Vimeo.

In my previous post, I talked about the advantages and disadvantages of flipped classroom, but I should add that in my opinion, for young learners, flipped classroom is way more useful. Because thanks to flipped classroom, they have the chance to see the subject over and over again with colours, animations, music and both hear and read it at the same time.

Me and my friend İzel created this video using Powtoon, which we used for our grammar video as well, and shared the work half-half. First, we chose the words which we can find suitable characters for from the unit. And that was the hard part. Powtoon doesn't allow you to use all of the characters for free so we ended up being able to teach 8 words in the video. Then, we recorded our voices and found a suitable background music. 

I liked creating a material for young learners and I hope you find this flipped classroom for vocabulary teaching video useful.

VIDEO LECTURES AT HOME? HOMEWORK IN CLASS? WELCOME TO A NEW WORLD OF ACTIVE LEARNING!

Hello my dear readers! This week I will be talking about "Flipped Classroom". Contrary to the traditional classroom, flipped classroom is a new strategy which enables students to learn the content at home and practice it in the classroom. Students watch the educational videos that their teacher uploaded and then when they come to the class, they do activities and have discussions with their classmates about what they have learned.

This approach benefits both teachers and students in many aspects. First of all, flipped classroom enables students to learn at their own pace and have more ownership for their learning. And also, since flipped classroom saves time for classroom activities, the students become more interested and engaged. In other words, this approach makes the teaching student-centered. 

There is one point that the teachers must consider. Some students may not watch the video. To prevent this from happening, the classroom activities must require watching that specific video and not let those who didn’t watch the video participate in these activities. 

A Flipped Classroom Video - Conditional Clauses-Type 0 and Type 1 from İzel Gür on Vimeo.

The video you see above is the one that I prepared with my friend Izel. This week’s task was creating a grammar teaching video as an example of a flipped classroom. Our assigned unit was focusing on If Conditional Type 0 and Type 1. 

To create this video’s animation, we used Powtoon. We recorded ourselves narrating the subject and then added it to the animation with an uplifting background music. We shared the topic as the introduction and Type 0 for me, Type 1 and the exercises for Izel. 

Powtoon is a very user-friendly tool. It enables you to both add your own audio and choose a background music from its own list. It is easy to edit the animations as well. The only problem that Powtoon caused us is that it doesn’t allow you to make videos for more than three minutes. That’s why we needed to create multiple videos and add them one after another from a different tool called Adobe Premiere Pro. 

Overall, creating the task was enjoyable and the result was satisfying for me. I believe that Flipped Classroom is a really useful approach and I will use it when I am teaching. 

TRAVEL THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR SMARTPHONE

Hello my dear readers! This week our task was creating a high school level material by using Augmented Reality. If you don't know what Augmented Reality is, in short, AR is a view of the real, physical world in which users find elements enhanced by computer-generated input. There are many applications that you can use to experience AR. Me and my friend Izel prefered "ARize" which I found the most user-friendly. There is the video of me introducing our material. ⇩

an augmented reality material for english learners from İzel Gür on Vimeo.

After deciding the city and the landmarks we searched for the best quality videos. We wanted to have diversity so we used 360-degree videos as well as mp4 videos. The difficult part of creating this material was coming up with engaging questions for non-audio videos. But I believe thanks to all that brainstorming we ended up with a satisfying result. And I must say that I really enjoyed creating this material.  

THE FIRST HANDOUT THAT I PREPARED

Hello my dear readers! As you see above the first task of this course was creating an inductive task based on the use of corpora. From my old high school English grammar book me and my friend Izel were searching for a unit which was given in a traditional deductive way. We chose "be to" & "be supposed to" unit as our topic and used the given examples in our material. Here you can see how this subject is taught in the book ⇩

While preparing this material I noticed how useful corpus can be.

Corpus is a contemporary technological tool and used for various different purposes. What benefited me and will benefit language teachers is that corpus enables reliable language analysis due to the fact that it consists of either written texts or a transcription of recorded speech which means the data of the language is collected in its natural context.

In our material we used corpus to make students explore the meanings and the  grammar rules of "be to" and "be supposed to". Then in exercise 2 and 3 the students practice these structures. And finally in exercise 4 they produce their own sentences using these structures.

Thanks to using corpus, instead of a traditional deductive teaching we can have a inductive teaching which enables learning to be more permanent.

WELCOME ONCE AGAIN

Hello my dear readers! 

Last semester I was posting about how to integrate Web 2.0 tools in language teaching. And I was using those tools as a student. It was for my Educational Technologies class.

This semester I’m going to use this blog for my new class, Material Design in ELT. This course is also about technology in connection with education but in a matter of designing materials as you can understand from the name of it. Therefore, I will be using technological tools as a teacher and I’m really excited about it. 

I hope me and my classmates can learn deeply and create successful examples of what we learn. I am looking forward to design and post my first material.

It’s good to be back! 

ALL GOOD THINGS MUST COME TO AN END

Hello my dear readers! We finished the semester and completed the course. That's why this is a good-bye post. I must say that I liked blogging more than I thought. I learn the best when I share the information. Therefore blogging was very useful in that matter as well as improving my writing skills. 

This course enlightened me about 21st century teaching and gave me a lot of task ideas that I can give to my students in the future. In other classes of mine they teach us teaching approaches but they don't show how we can integrate technology which fulfills the needs of this era's students'. I learned that there are lots of different and entertaining ways of technology which can be used in and out of the classrooms. It will not only catch the students' attention more but also will be a time saver. The teaching will be more efficient and up-to-date.

I believe that we used this course to good account although it was given only one semester which is not enough. In my opinion this course should be given for two semesters. Another thing that I would suggest would be doing a research and finding a different way of using technology in education from what we had learned in this course and then sharing it in our blog. Thus, we can learn more ways of technology integration in education.

The thing that I liked the most about this course is blogging. Due to anyone can be the reader and what we write will stay on the internet forever blogging makes us do the task more attentively. To be honest there is nothing that I didn't like about this course. The learning process, the given tasks and grading system is really proper.

The difficulties that I had were technical problems. When me and my friends were creating a PSA and a podcast, it took a while to figure out how to edit. By trying over and over again and watching tutorials we managed to end up with satisfactory results. 

Finally, I want to thank my teacher for enabling me to see the technology integration in education from a bigger perspective and my friends for creating amazing works with me. But the biggest thanks to you my dear readers! You made this blog valuable by reading it. I wrote everything here in the hope that it would be useful to you. Thank you for being with me in this journey. Take care of yourselves my precious readers! 

IN CONCLUSION

Hello my dear readers! All this term I talked about Web 2.0 tools to use in the classroom. Here, in this post I put an infographic to show my favorites. All have limited free usage and a lot of amazing affordances . Not only from affordances perspective but also when I look from a student's eyes they are the most entertaining  and useful Web 2.0 tools. 

To create this infographic and the magazine cover under this post, I used Canva as well. You can create a infographic, magazine cover, flyer, CV, wallpaper and many more. If you want to learn more about Canva you can read my post below.

The other tool Padlet is the one that I created my climate change KWL chart with. It is so easy and fun to use. To see different ways to use it in the classroom go to my "Online Way of "Write on a Sticky Note and Put It on the Wall" Activity"
 post.

Most of my friends' favorite is also Pixton. It is so colorful and full of features. You can find all the clothes and all the expressions that you want. You can even create a character which exactly looks like you. I'm sure it will be one of your students' favorite as well.

Please leave your favorite Web 2.0 tools as a comment. I am looking forward to explore more!

A TASK TO IMPROVE CREATIVITY

Hello my dear readers! As you see above this week our task was creating a magazine cover. Our teacher left the choice of the theme to us. I preferred to crate a beauty- fashion magazine. Because we are in the end of December, to make it accurate I talked about Christmas, new year and the recently released Netflix series.

I especially liked this task because it didn't need a lot of technological skills and it was more of a visual work. Having the freedom to choose the theme of the magazine made the task more enjoyable as well.

I used Canva as the tool to create this magazine cover. One of the reasons why I preferred Canva is because it is easy to use and it has a lot of free templates. Another affordance is that it allows you to download the product as PDF or PNG or JPG without any payment.

If you are looking for a task which improves creativity as well as English skills, this task will be the one students enjoy. Don't forget to consider that young learners will need guidance in terms of finding the right tool and using it.

I hope you liked my first magazine cover and this task idea. If you have creative task ideas please leave it as a comment!