There is No End to Learning!

Hello there, Reader!

This was the title of my first post on this blog. At the beginning of the semester, I was very excited about blogging. I’ve always loved being present on the internet, sharing my ideas on things and blogging. Thanks to our Instructional Technologies and Material Design course, I was able to share my projects and opinions on various topics about using technology in language teaching.

Looking back on my philosophy statement about teaching with technology, I can say that I still stand by my words and think ELT teachers must integrate 21^st century’s technological offers in their classrooms.

Throughout this experience, I didn’t notice any changes in myself. Only thing that comes to my mind is I’m more patient when it comes to using technology. There were times when I found some of the tasks boring and repetitive, but I still completed them, nevertheless. After a while, it become boring to search for tools and harder to be creative.

Of course, there are things that I liked about this course. For instance, as I mentioned, I liked that we got to be creative and share our opinions. Some of my favorite posts are;

• Wiki What?
• Turn Your Favorite Book into a Movie!

Another thing I didn’t like about the course was the group/pair works. Some tasks took up too much of our time. Maybe, the number of those tasks could be decreased and focus more on individual works like the blog itself. My least favorite tasks are (based on the process, not the outcome);

• Padlet Project: Endangered Species
• Digital Storytelling: The School Trip

Overall, this course taught me so much! And I think it wouldn’t be as effective as it was if we didn’t have our blogs. With this blog, I was able to work on every new thing we learned during our lessons.

Thank you for following me and hope you have a wonderful day!

taken from here

Get Help From These Web 2.0 Tools

It’s 2019 and we are on the internet almost every hour. We are reading the news, watching videos of cute kittens, checking our e-mails or just keep refreshing the same page over and over. Some of the time we spent online is very productive, but sometimes we are just wasting our precious time.

Web 2.0 tools are a great way to utilize our time on the internet. From education to business, there are so many apps/websites we can use to do this.

This week, our assignment was to create an infographic of our favorite Web 2.0 Tools and explain their pros/cons (if any exists) and why YOU should use them.

I chose five of my favorite tools, Memrise, Duolingo, Voscreen, Google Drive and Padlet. You can find the information about each of them in the infographic that I created.

Once again, I used Canva for this project.

Feel free to comment any of your favorite Web 2.0 Tools!

Meet RSS, A Time Saver!

Imagine following a blog. You visit it every day to read new posts. No problem. But imagine following fifteen different blogs, maybe more, about (let’s say) five different topics. Wouldn’t it be hard and time consuming to visit each of them, everyday? Don’t worry, there’s an easy solution to this problem: RSS.

• What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, it is a feed that gathers all the new posts from blogs and sites you follow and store them in one place. Isn’t it amazing? You can simply download or add a free RSS reader to your computer. Then just go to the sites you want to subscribe! RSS will show all the new posts in one place and some readers even give you notifications when there is an update.

The reader I use is feeder. You can add it to your Chrome browser by clicking here. Another reader I used for a while is feedreader.com. I’m new to this RSS world so I’m still trying to find the best tool for me.

1. What you see when you open your Feeder. 

2. You can change the display settings and add filters from here. 

3. You can add new feed by clicking on the "+" sign.

Here’s a blog I enjoy following. It’s called Team 2 Eagles. It’s a blog written by a classroom teacher. She updates everyday with what they did on that day with pictures. I like this blog because as a teacher candidate I enjoy seeing other teacher’s classroom activities. I think teachers and teacher candidates like me would really enjoy following this blog.

What are your favorite blogs? Comment down below :)

Turn Your Favorite Book into a Movie!

Hello friends, hope you are doing well! This week, I’m back to share a new task I did for our course.
Our assignment was to either create a magazine cover or turn your favorite book into a movie/create a movie poster. And of course, being the book lover that I am, I chose the second option.😊

(some movie poster examples. taken from here)

For the book, I chose the first book in one of my favorite series: THE RAVEN BOYS (THE RAVEN CYCLE #1)

I found this task very fun, but I’m not sure if I’ll be giving this assignment to my students in the future. On one hand, I think creating a poster/cover on its own is not helping our students’ language skills. On the other hand, if students are asked to present their covers with their friends and talk about the plot of the book, their choice of casting, etc. it can be helpful for their speaking and presentation skills, which is great! In this case, I’d happily give this task to my students.

As always, here are the tools that I used:
Canva (for creating the poster)
Pinterest (for finding images)

My Poster:

Digital Storytelling: The School Trip

Hello everyone! This week I’m back to share my digital storytelling project with you!

taken from here

The process of creating a digital story depends on the story you want to tell; once you have a script, you can choose between different apps to find the best tool for your project. I created my story with my friend Sare. 
First, we wrote a script for our story, which was about a school trip where the class goes to a career fair and learn about different jobs. Then, we recorded ourselves. We also created pictures with the characters we created. For this, we used Buncee. To edit our sound, we used Audacity and Freesound to add some sound effects. Finally, we used Windows' Video Editor to combine the pictures with the audio.

Creating a digital story was difficult. We had difficulties with finding an app/tool to create our story. Because of this, this process took up so much of our time. I don’t think I’ll be giving a similar task to my students in the future; there are so many other projects students can do in a language class.
Pros: Helps students to improve their pronunciations.
Cons: Difficult to use/find the right tools. (Can)Take up too much time.

To visit my partner’s blog, click here: Sarah Typing...

Please enjoy our story and leave your comments!