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.

My Research of Covid and First Padlet Writing Experience

 

   Recently I was given a project from one of my courses in university. With a group of four people we had to create a Padlet page about certain topics. The topic we chose was about Covid. We had to make a KWL (what we know, what we want to know and what we learned) chart about the subject. Every person had to write 3 questions or points under each headline. 

   The project was enjoyable and did not take long to finish. We had to use trustable websites as a source and such websites were not hard to find. We definitely learned quite a bit about Covid and Padlet after the project. 

   Padlet was useful in allowing placing information in an aesthetic way but it did not allow the user to put multiple images or videos in a single post. This handicap did limit us but other than this Padlet was a pretty useful tool in helping us what we needed to achieve.

   This project was also pretty helpful in improving our collaboration and digital literacy skills. As we had to do the project together as four people we organised our questions and sources together and this definitely helped our collaboration skills. In addition we searched a lot of websites for reliable information and this helped us to learn what to look for in a website. Overall the project was very much helpful.

   Thanks to my friends Bora Sarakurt, Muhammet Berkay Seçer and Eren Kızıltepe for everything they have done in this project. They all have blogs like this which you can reach by clicking their names.

   You can check out our Padlet page through here.

   Thanks for reading and walk tall.

A photo of our Padlet page.

How to Teach a Generation who Cannot Focus?

             
            The future generation education is at our doorsteps. Students that are digital natives who learned to use mobile phones before speaking. Kids who cannot focus for more than five minutes. On the other side, old teachers who insist on teaching through old methods without using technology. Next to these old teachers, are fresh minded young teachers and candidates, confused as to how they will deal with future obstacles. Dear readers, welcome to 21st Century education. In this blog, I will share my thoughts and opinions on new generation students and education as a teacher candidate.  

  As a future teacher, I am very much worried about new generation students. Their attention span has been damaged by consuming short length but high quantities of content in digital space. It will be extremely difficult to get them to sit for 40 minutes in a classroom listening to a teacher. That’s why future and current teachers will have to utilise more and more tools, activities, and technology to catch and sustain their focus. In future it will be up to young teachers to develop new tactics and pedagogies for these new students.

            Technology usage must be optimised in future classrooms for new generation students. They were 2-3 years old when they learned how to use a mobile phone. They will be more digital natives than us, future teachers are. Governments and states around the world will have to invest in more technological tools for their schools.

            Considering all mentioned, future teachers must do more research and studies, read more about 21^st century education and observe new generations to prepare for new challenges that awaits them.

            Thanks for reading and walk tall.