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.

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.