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.

The Poster of My Dreams

 

   Recently I have created a poster as a university course assignment. In this assignment we were supposed to do the assignment alone so I do not have any friends I will mention.

   I used Canva as a tool to prepare my digital poster. Canva was pretty helpful in completing my assignment. It was easy to use and had more than enough features altough some of them required paid subscriptions. The ones that were not free were actually the things I needed but I managed to make do without them. Overall the project did not take long to finish thanks to Canva and my creativity.

   The poster is actually a magazine cover. It is about rock music in Turkey. I have written things that I would want to see in a Turkish Rock magazine. I mentioned some of my favourite musicians such as Hayko Cepkin and Barış Manço. After doing this assignment I wished that somewhere, someone would actually make this magazine real because I want to read something like that so much.

   If we come to the pedagogical side of things, I will probably assign my students a similar task in the future. Maybe with the support of art teachers I could get my students to prepare posters of their own dreams and help them improve their creativity.

   I recommend preparing a digital poster anytime.

   You can check my poster here.

   Thanks for reading and walk tall.

The Story With a Twist and First Podcast Experience

   Podcast have been a relatively popular source of entertainment and information since they were first produced. And recently I got to do my own podcast about a story.

   The podcast I made was needed for a university assignment. The assignment consisted of four options we could choose as a type of our podcast but I chose the one where I would write a story and voice it with a partner.

   My partner was Muhammet Berkay Seçer again, as we did all pair and group works together. You can check out his blog here.

   The story task required us to use 5 words from a list and 10 sound effects to add to the mood and then voice it.

   The whole task was overall pretty easy. The script didn't take too long to finish. Voicing the story was a bit weird. Because we are not used to hearing our own voice like how other people hear it, we couldn't help but feel awkward while listening. The editing part took more time than the others but my friend Berkay was experienced in editing so we didn't sweat a lot during that part too.

   As a future teacher, I will definitely give my students a project to do a podcast. It was really fun and helpful in many ways but it was a bit complex too. I will definitely try to give this kind of project to more older students because younger students would not be able to do it by themselves.

   Overall podcasting is pretty fun and I would recommend it anytime.

   You can listen to our podcast here.

   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.