We Will All Go Together

 

I love Daryl so much.

Well, time to say another goodybe.

It is the end of another semester and the end for my course which is the reason for the blogs. We were required to write blogs about our assignments for a course called Current Issues in ELT. Now that the course is coming to an end, I will share some of my thoughts about this course.

The course was not a hard one. I already had a very similar course last year and I and the friend with whom I completed most tasks with were very experienced because of that. The quantity of tasks were a little much and combined with the tasks of other courses, we got a little overwhelmed and sometimes could not find inspiration or creativity for our tasks. However, we steamrolled most of the tasks with ease and learned quite a bit while doing so. I learned how to integrate technology into my future classrooms. Most of my students would be ones who were born with telephones in their hands, so learning how to integrate techonology was very useful for me.

My overall favorite task I completed was the video we created with my friend for a flipped classroom. We loved making videos because my friend is very experienced in editing and we both are competent in adding a bit of humour into these videos.

At the end of it all, I am glad I have taken this course. I would recommend it to any future students of Marmara University ELT to take it as well. I am sure all of us can benefit from learning about technology even if some people do not like to use it.

I would also like to thank my friend Muhammet Berkay Seçer. We completed every task together since last year and enjoyed every second of doing these tasks together. I insist you check out his blog as you can see his perspectives of the tasks I have shown on my blog. You can reach his blog by clicking here.

I hope to continue writing these blogs in the future but right now, I will be taking a much needed vacation.

As always,

Thanks for reading and walk tall.

Teachin' about Generative AI

 

Today I am coming at you with another activity prepared by me and my friend as a university course task. This activity was about familiarizing students with generative AI tools by letting them create an image of Muhammad Ali. I have done this activity with my dear friend Muhammet Berkay Seçer whose blog you can check by clicking here.

Firstly we prepared this activity in the form of a worksheet we created in Canva. We decided to use Muhammad Ali as a topic as he had a chapter in the coursebook our target students would use. We then found an image of Muhammad Ali and used Canva's cartoonify tool to change it. We then wrote questions about the image and then wrote the task where students are required to create their generative AI image of Muhammad Ali.

Overall generative AI is an extremely useful tool in any aspect of life and being competent in its usage will be one of the main requirements of educators in future.

You can check out our worksheet here.

Thanks for reading and walk tall.

The image we created in Canva

AR/VR and a Teaching Material

 

Today I come to thee with another post about an university assignment I had. This time we needed to prepare a Augmented / Virtual Reality integrated teaching material. I done this assignment with my brother from another mother Muhammet Berkay Seçer whose blog you can check by clicking here.

We needed to choose a city and integrate AR or VR to a material in the form of worksheet in our case. We chose the capital of Italy, Rome as our city. We first checked YouTube to find 360° videos of famous landmarks in Rome. We found videos for Collesium, La Fontana de Trevi and Sistine Chapel. We then used Canva to place some images and QR codes to the videos we found. We then wrote five questions about the landmarks that we will ask to students after watching the video. We then "decorated" the Canva page and we were finished.

Using modern technology like AR / VR in a classroom is a great idea. It is beneficial for students to see what they are talking/reading about with their own two eyes as if they were right in front of them will definitely help students better memorise the knowledge. That's why I really enjoyed this task and I am sure I will integrate a similar material in my future classrooms.

You can check our material by clicking here.

Thanks for reading and walk tall.

Flipped Classroom and its Consequences...

Today I will be talking about another one of my university assignments. In this assignment we were supposed to create a video for a flipped classroom and a task to accompany it.

Flipped classroom is a different approach to teaching things in a classroom in that you do not actually teach in the classroom. Students study the course topics at home and they do exercises or activities in the classroom. It is the exact opposite of how most lessons are done in the world.

The approach is great in that it allows teachers to have a ton of time to do activities and tasks that can reinforce what students have learnt. It is also very flexible and you can start implementing it even during the middle of the semester. However, it also have some negative sides. Because it is an unconventional way of teaching, the school administration and parents of students can cause headache for teachers. It also constrainst the ability for students to ask questions and clear misunderstandings because they cannot get an answer immediately. Despite these I think the approach can be implemented from time to time.

About our assignment, we created a video and an exercise about verb "to be". We aimed to teach the simple rules using a bunch of sentences as examples.

I completed this task with my homie Muhammet Berkay Seçer and you can find his blog by clicking on his name. We first used Canva to create the video and used the internal voice recording app of Windows to record our voice. We then used Vegas Pro, a video editing app, to combine the video and our voice. We also used Wordwall to create an exercise which we included in the video. Lastly we uploaded the video on YouTube and added timestamps. We did not encounter any problems during the making of the video and the task because we gained a lot of experince from former assignments. Blogger itself caused more problems while I was writing this post than the tools and steps I mentioned combined.

You can check out the task and video by clicking on the respective names.

Thanks for reading and walk tall.

 

 

We're So Back - First Experience Creating Teaching Material Using Corpus

 

After a break from writing blogs I have came back with another post. In this post I will talk about my experience creating a teaching material using Canva and COCA Corpus.

I created this teaching material because of an assignment. I have completed this task with my friend Muhammet Berkay Seçer whose blog you can reach by clicking on his name.

Our objective was to make sure our students will be able to produce a wide range of vocabulary and sentences in the context of travelling. Our target audince were prep school level students. We focused on teaching vocabulary rather than focusing on grammar.

We first created a simple draft using Canva. However after we saw the materials our other friends from univesity created, we decided to make some drastic changes. In the draft version we only had a single tast where students needed to write a paragraph. In the final version we changed that task to only write three sentences and also added a criss cross puzzle we made using Discovery Education's Criss Cross Puzzle Maker. The material was very easy to create thanks to the apps we utilised.

I think our material can be very well implemented in a real classroom. The only problem I can think of is the price of printing the papers of the material as we used quite a bit of colors and also had a total of four pages.

I will definitely save my material and use it in the future when I become a real teacher.

Our teaching materials link.

Thanks for reading and walk tall.

The End of a Great Time

Image taken from here and modified here.

   We have came to an end with the posts about my university course assignments. The end of the term is coming soon and this will be my last assignment, to write a final blog.

   I have deeply enjoyed writing these blog posts and doing other tasks with friends. I will still post other things but I feel a weird sadness that I can not really explain. In this post I will reflect upon my experiences with this course and how it helped me get a deeper understanding of technology.

   Before I took this course I did not really think about how I would integrate technology to my future classes. After this course however, I learned of many ways to add technology to my lessons. I have thought about how I can get my students to do a podcast or write a blog like myself. I have done many things, like writing a blog during this course, that I would have never done without any recommendation or obligation and I enjoyed every moment I did them. This fact helped me to see that I can help my students to experience this enjoyment too.

   Of course I liked some assignments more than others. I have done a digital story with a friend which was immensely long and fun. We needed to solve a lot of problems during it and when we managed to solve them it felt like as if we have completed a puzzle. We could also show a lot of creativity because the only limit we had was on the time department. Making a podcast on the other hand was less fun than this. Because we had lots of limitations like time, word and sound effects we could not enjoy it as much.

   Despite its helpfulness this course was pretty frustrating at times. I never liked restrictions on my school life. I would get really angry during exams or projects where we had lots of constraints, especially word limits. I think this course can be more free on a couple of areas. Podcast assignment could be extremely better if we did not have as many limitations as we did. Just a five minute podcast with 2 to 4 people and no topic or content limitations could give way to extremely quality content like it did in former courses of us.

   Apart from these I am very happy to have taken this course and I will keep posting about other things.

   Thanks for reading and walk tall.

 

The Terrifying Assassin and First Digital Storytelling Experience

 

   As another university assignment we were given a task to create a digital story. I have prepared this story with Muhammet Berkay Seçer who have helped me in most of my tasks.

   We were supposed to create a story with images or video footage and with dubbing. Our story was supposed to be longer than two minutes.

   We used Pixton to create images for our story and Vegas Pro to edit it together. We first wrote the script and created the images relevant to it with pixton. Then, we recorded our lines. I recorded my voice through the pre-existing sound recorder of my computer and my friend Berkay recorded his lines through his phone. Then we combined our voices, images and sound effects and edited it accordingly.

   Pixton was very useful for this task. It consisted all the materials we needed for our story. It was a bit complex to use at first but we quickly got used to it. We also did not have any problems in voice recording. Editing the content took longer than any other part but thanks to Berkay's experince with the program, Vegas Pro got all the things we needed done.

   Digital storytelling was the best task we have done in our course. We were able to use our creativity freely because we only had limitations on time and nothing else. I will definitely assign a similar project to my future students. With proper help and guidance I am sure that students will create extremely creative and quality content.

   Overall, I think it is a must to try to create a digital story.

   You can check out my friend Berkay's blog here.

   You can watch our digital story here.

   Thanks for reading and walk tall.