Hello everyone for the last time,

We have come to the end of another term. Overall, I’m glad that I took this course. This course had strengths and weaknesses throughout the semester. To give an example of these, a strength of the course was that it was so integrated with technology and that it constantly improved the students. However, students are tired of doing assignments and it can be said this is a weakness. Therefore, although doing homework constantly in this course kept us in shape, it could be difficult for us sometimes. Yet, since we were knowledgeable from last year (Edu-Tech), it was easier to do some tasks. Of these tasks, my least favorite was preparing a material, because although it would be useful for my future students, it was boring to prepare. My favorite assignment was the one in which we prepared a flipped classroom video because in that assignment I learned to use many editing sites and I think I will be able to prepare various videos for my students in the future. Thanks to this and similar assignments, I feel that I have improved a lot in digital literacy on the path to becoming a teacher. My advice to students who will take this course next year is to do all the assignments diligently and try to learn as much out of it as possible. Furthermore, my advice for improving this course is that I think that not having any exams in this course and the entire course being based on assignments like the Edu-Tech course will increase the efficiency of the course.

Hi Guys,

In the last assignment of this semester, we created an AI-based assignment for the students. We had a discussion on the topic with my partner Kübra Karaarslan, and then we distributed the tasks and finished our homework. Mainly, we used two AI tools. For this assignment, I did a lot of research to find the most effective “text to image” AI tool and decided that Ideogram was the best among the free ones. That’s why, when we were giving homework, we gave our examples from Ideogram and wanted the students to learn how to use this AI tool. Another AI tool that we encouraged students to use was Chatgpt, which most of us know. As a result, our aim was for students to improve their digital literacy by using these two AI tools and benefiting from both.

Click here for our assignment.

Hello Everyone, I hope all of you are well.

AR/VR elements are becoming more and more prevalent in our lives. Therefore, there is a controversial issue of whether can AR/VR be useful in language education? I think it can be quite useful when used appropriately. An example of this is the worksheet prepared by me and my pair Kübra Karaarslan. While preparing this worksheet, we included QR codes for students to take 360-degree virtual tours and then they can watch informational videos to answer their questions. In addition, we have attached 3D visuals of some pieces so that the students will have more interactive learning. Therefore, more student-centered learning will take place. To sum up, AR/VR tools are promising tools that give students a new learning style in language teaching.

To access our worksheet click here.

Hi everyone, today I want to talk about flipped classroom.

Unlike other teaching methods, the flipped classroom approach encourages students to study course materials at home in advance, and students do interactive and practical activities with the teacher through these materials during the lesson. This teaching method is student-centered and increases interaction between students, creating collaboration between students. At the same time, it provides students with ample practice on the subject they are learning and helps them develop their own learning style. However, some problems may arise in this teaching method. Some students may have limited technological opportunities, which may lead to inequality, or some students may not be able to fulfill some of their responsibilities at home. However, overall it can be said that it is a very beneficial approach.

Me and my pair Kübra Karaarslan prepared a 3 minute vocabulary teaching video for 5th grade students using this approach, before starting to prepare this video. We tried many applications such as, Pawtoon, Renderforest, Canva etc. and Animaker was the most suitable one for our topic. In the our teaching video, we designed two characters with my pair Kübra as a teacher and had these characters explain the words of the 5th graders’ Games and Hobbies unit. While I was doing the games part, my friend Kübra took over the hobbies part. However, while preparing this video, we had personal problems in finding a quiet environment while recording sound, or sometimes we had disagreements about how to explain some of the terms we were going to explain, but after having a little discussion, we overcame these problems. While using Animaker, we did everything with our creativity, without using any templates, and after our video was finished, we created various quizzes for students to test their knowledge with the help of Wordwall.

You can find our video in here and for the Wordwall quiz please click here.

Hi everyone, long time no see. I hope you are all okay.

In this material, which I made with my friend Kübra Karaarslan, we tried to create a material that will test the knowledge of the students and teach the vocabulary skills to 9th-grade students about health and diseases. With this study, students will have the knowledge to explain their own health problems with L2 when they go to the doctor, or they will be able to give L2 advice about health problems and discuss health with each other.

In addition, with the visuals in the material, students will learn the information from the material both theoretically and practically, as they see the situations and body parts they encounter in their own lives. This will encourage students to do the activities in the material. Furthermore, students will learn how to use corpora and technology in language learning. Students will get help from the Skell application in the 2nd activity. Thus, while using the Skell application, they will not only learn the information planned to be learned in the activity but also learn other terms passively while doing research on Skell. In other words, students will learn the language with a system suitable for 21st century teaching. However, some problems may arise when applying this material in the classroom. For example, some students may have limited access to technology, or some students may have difficulty integrating themselves with technology, and therefore these students may fall behind their other friends. Therefore, we should think about these while doing this activity and implement these activities in a way that is fair for all students.

In short, these activities will have many benefits for students. Because students will understand the subject and after grasping the subject, they will reinforce the information they have learned with different types of activities and with the help of Skell. Thus, the activities in the material will achieve its purpose.

Here is our material: Health Problems and Emergencies

Hello Everyone, I hope you are all well.

 After many various tasks we have done, we have now finished the term. When I first started this course, I thought it would be a course that would not attract my attention and we would do boring activities on the computer, but it was not like that at all. We learned how to use a lot of colorful and useful web tools in the course and did a lot of different tasks in just one semester. That’s why I think this course is a prime example of technology’s benefits to English language teaching. Thanks to this course, I had my own blog and I learned to use many different websites, and since the language of the internet is English today, I also improved my English while using those sites. Therefore, when we combine the possibilities of technology and English language teaching, we see the contribution of technology to students.

Actually, I enjoyed all of the tests we have done and they all taught me something individually. However, if I had to say what I liked the least, I would choose the podcast task. Whereas I’m not someone who likes to listen to my own voice, I still enjoyed doing the assignment and I chose this assignment because we had to choose one. As for my favorite task, I was torn between the digital poster and a movie review. However, I think movie review was the task I enjoyed the most because I love watching movies and reading movie reviews.

I am very satisfied with the progress of the course. However, in some lessons, if we keep the feedback session longer, the course can be more beneficial.

Hi Everyone,

I had both difficulty and fun while doing the storytelling homework. While I enjoyed doing the homework at the beginning of the assignment, it became difficult to get out of it towards the end of the assignment. However, I can say that I am quite satisfied with the result.

We chose PSA among the homework options. I worked with my friends Okan Şıvgın and Yiğit Gökay to do the PSA homework. For our PSA assignment, we touched on blood donation, which is a current issue that needs to be raised awareness. We divided the tasks among ourselves. My task was to add the sounds to the animation we made, adjust who says what and synchronize the music. On one hand, I was dealing with the volume and the synchronization of the spoken sentences, on the other hand, I was dealing with the sound files to fit into the animation. We used RenderForest for our animation video. Apart from that, I used an application called OpenShot for sound and music editing.

Although we faced difficulties, I think that we overcame our problems one by one by discussing with my group mates. What I mean is that thanks to the problems we faced, we worked as a team and overcame the problems, and this showed us the benefits of collaboration. Therefore, I think it will be of great benefit to students as it is an assignment that can encourage students in language classrooms to work collaboratively.

Here our animation video!

Hello Everyone,

I want to talk to you about maybe the funniest homework I have ever done until now the Digital Poster! When I started the process of doing homework, I went back and forth between the movie poster and magazine cover and finally, I decided to make a magazine cover. The reason for this is Steve Lacy, a musician I’ve been listening to recently.

Honestly, I had a lot of fun doing the Magazine Cover and I didn’t feel like I was doing homework during the process. I used two different apps to create my poster, one was PicsArt and the other was Canva. On the one hand, I edited the photo on Picsart. On the other hand, I edited the text, font and logo in Canva. I like the ready-made templates in Canva, but I made the poster from scratch and I think it reflects my own style more.

I would definitely like to give this assignment to my students in the future because this assignment not only develops the student’s creativity, but also allows the student to do a good brain training on how to make his/her poster more attractive.

To check out my magazine cover click here!

Hi Everyone,

Today I created a podcast for the first time in my life and frankly it was an interesting experience for me. There were 4 different types of podcasts to choose from and I chose option 2, which I thought I could do best. In option 2, we were asked to make a podcast about how we could make the world a better place, and we had to do it in exactly 60 seconds.

I chose afforestation, which is a subject that I really care about, and tried to say what I could about this subject in 60 seconds. I enjoyed doing it because it’s a topic that interests me, but also because it’s my first time to podcast and I’m not normally a podcast listener, I got a little stressed and wasn’t sure exactly what to do. I also asked my roommates to be completely quiet since I’m staying in the dorm but every time I tried there was little noise in the background and I couldn’t do much about it.

I would like to give podcast homework to my students in the future, but I would make podcast homework optional and I would add other homework options because I think that podcast homework actually has advantages and can be a little more useful especially for people with social anxiety, but there are other assignments that give students more pleasure and feel more comfortable. In short I can say that podcasting is a good experience but not the best.

Click here to listen to my podcast!

Hello Everyone,

Today I will talk about my padlet experience. Our lecturer showed us a colorful application called padlet in the lesson. Padlet is a fun virtual wall to use and read, where one or more people can add comments, images and videos. When I first entered the Padlet page, I was afraid at first that it would be complicated and difficult to use, but after a little fiddling, I saw that it is an easy-to-use web tool and I enjoyed it more than I expected while writing and editing my page. In addition, my friends Ceren, Çağla, Yiğit and I discussed how our page should be and we exchanged ideas, so we all made different additions to the site, so our page became much more colorful. The topic we chose for the padlet was poverty. In order to present this issue on the padlet in a nice way, I reached statistical researches about poverty, meaningful cartoons and heartbreaking poverty visuals. Hence, I was never bored during the process as I gained a lot of information about the topic. Shortly we can say that Padlet is a very useful website, as it presents information in a regular, simple way that does not bother the reader and it is a great blessing for 21st century students.

You can reach our padlet from here.