TECHNOLOGY CHANGES PEDAGOGY

Hey teacher!!Stay where you are!!I will give you a secret !!Technology changes pedagogy!!You may improve your students' learning..

-Decide what kind of an outcome you are aiming 

-Decide what kind of a tool you need for your goal

-Calculate affordances and constraints of the tool

-Guide your students and see the miracle..

Today I will introduce you an enjoyable website

                                          makebeliefs comics website

MakeBeliefComix is a website that enables us to create our own comic.There are 51 human and animal characters each showing different emotions for a total of 204 choices in the site.It supports creativity because students put their own words in the talk/thought baloons of fun characters.Everybody loves comics and even if you don't have the ability to draw you can come up with a whole comic book.It is used by families and educators in morethan 180 countries.

                             

                            everybody loves comics

Using comics promotes positivity and self-expression.Expressing themselves is a strong necessity for todays children.Google and unesco selected makebeliefscomix as one of the world's most innovative web sites in fostering literacy and reading.

                         HOW TO USE THE WEBSİTE

                           

Choose a character and emotion.

Add thought and/or talk baloons and start your character talking.

Add other characters and more conversation.You can also add colored backgrounds.Add objects and panel prompts to keep your viewers interested.When you are done print or e-mail your comic.It can be considered as easy digital story telling .Story telling is the primary focus because this skill prepares students to work in any genre

     GREAT IDEAS TO USE THIS TOOL

                                 IN ELT    

  -Students can improve their writing skills while filling up  thought and talk baloons.Give your students empty templets and ask them to fill in them.Do not forget to give as much guidence as possible.You can print and hand out your empty templets in  classroom..

-Students can describe their feelings in unfinished comics or can view writing prompts to get started.To improve narrative skills prepare half finished straps and ask your students to finish them.What happens next questions improve speaking skills..

-Promote metacognitive learning..Give guided tasks and ask students to create their comics.İmprove their understanding to develope a story in a logical sequence..

-Tool is very suitable for colloborative work.Define a story.Make each student prepare three strips about this story..Link them together and create a comic strip book at the end of the semester.Print and publish your book as a class publish.Make your students sell their book or give as a gift to other classes.Make your work authentic..Weekly strips prepared by your students can also be published in school newspaper...

-Give 5 new vocabulary..Ask your students prepare comic strips using these 5 words.Leave character choices and color choices to them.Make them read their outcomes at class..Choose the funniest one and promote.

-Make your students write a letter to their parents using comics.Restrict their work in limited number of words.Make them e-mail their outcomes to their parents after reading at class.

-Great for building up schemata for pre-reading and pre-writing..Join your tool with other tasks..

-You can also teach literary terms by using your tool.

Although it consists of  small stripes, it has a main idea,a protagonist and a theme..

-Use your tool to teach allusion,satire,parody,climax

-Works great on childrenwho don't like reading as readers rely on pictures instead of long texts..

-Use to teach punctuation.Alot of punctuation is needed to create a speech baloon..

And create your own ideas as many as possible to open new horizons in your student's learning....

And I would like to finish my  writing by creating my own comic stirp and I would like to thank  to my teacher Ms.Gökçe Kurt who opens a new window in my teaching pedagogy....Your lesson was the most amazing journey that ı have ever had in ELT..And I feel more powerful in teaching English now..Thank you....

          my own comic strip creation

                    ONE STEP BEHİND 

CREATE YOUR MOVIE BY USING ZIMMER TWINS

Iwould like to introduce you another website today which I loved a lot..Zimmer twins..create your movie..Very easy to use but it is real fun..İf you are bored with one dimension comic strips go a step behind and create your movie with audio and movement..Real action..

                      a sceen from zimmer twins

In zimmer twins there are three characters :a boy ,a girl and a cat named thirteen:)Students can create movies by using these characters.Again it is another way of digital story telling which improves four skills .Site can not be embeded but shared.Also pre-prepared movies can be used.

                                What happens next

What happens next option is very suitable for creating tasks and  activating schemata.Teacher can use this tool to teach vocabulary.Teacher can ask students to write dialogues to improve their writing skills.Teacher can show a starter video and asks students to predict the end to improve their narrative skills.

             what about some authentic work

Teacher can ask students to prepare special movies for special days as in the example above:happy mother's day...and send their outcomes to the website..Their work becomes authentic and can be sent to their parents and can be watched during the lesson in the class..Authentic outcomes always motivate students...Let's finish our blog by saying :Teachers do not ignore the power of technology in ELT..You can find hundreds of tools to make your classes more effective..Just decide and google google google....see you on another post...byee..

              ALMOST EVERY APP CAN BE APPLIED TO 

               ELT BUT THE REAL APP IS THE TEACHER

                                    HIMSELF/HERSELF

Hello everyone,

Technology enables  teaching  language but only if the pedagogy changes.It is inevitable for today's teachers to use the technology but it depends on the teacher how much he or she benefits...All kind of technological tools are good sources of material for talented and enthusiastic techers..

In this blogpost we are going to evaluate how to  adapt a communication App called :VIBER into an  ELT  tool.

VIBER

USING DIGITAL STORYTELLING IN ELT

Hello again my blog readers,today we are together again with a new topic:Digital Storytelling(DS) in English classes...DS is a great tool in ELT both for students and teachers but what is it?How can it be used?Are there any  specific rules in creating digital stories..Let's have a look at all of these questions while having a detailed x_ray examination of DS...
        Ds,in short,is telling stories of all kind by using digital multimedia such as images,video,audio and combining them with digital graphics such as text,narration,music,slides to present information on a topic.Ds can be categorized in three major groups yet there are many different types of  digital stories.1-personal narratives 2-historical documentaries 3-stories designed to inform the viewer on a particular concept or practice..Türkan -my pair-and I choosed the third type and prepared a digital story of liquid soap making process.
    As in all digital story making processes our first step is to come with an idea:how to make liquid soap at home:))..secondly we searched and gathered information about the process..thirdly we wrote a script about the process..step four was planning a storyboard which was the skeleton of our body...step five was taking pictures while doing real soap at home and combining them to become a slide show..than we attached the most suitable lovely music to our work and some graphic images to attract more attention...step six was putting all the material together to create a visual feast...after many corrections and small changes when we came to the conclusion that our work deserved to be shared we published it in you-tube..I would like to share a small secret about our video is  that the little girl in the video  is my own  seven years old daughter so we had the chance to create a tight budget work:))
       We are so lucky that there are enormous numbers of free and handy tools in the internet to produce professional digital stories..In our work we used PicLab to write on the slides colorful texts and we used VidLab to gahter the slides as a movie and add music.We also used a software called Proshow to organize all the staff..At the end you tube channel helped us to broadcast our work..We didn't have any difficulties except squeezing our work into two minutes as it was the part of our task and also digital stories' nature is not to take so long..Moreover we enjoyed a lot while creating our story and we explored a lot..Collaborative work also allowed us to ease the work and shared ideas added richness to our work.At the end we prepared the same video by using different tools and wished to show you how you can varify your production  using different tools..Please watch the same video in different costumes..
          Today's students are digital natives..They are kinestetic learners.Teachers should not overshot the opportunity to provide their students with high-technologic,rich content tools such as digital storytelling...Teachers with a little technologic knowledge can also achieve this..Most important is the courage and wishfulness of the teacher..You can watch our digital work below..You can also reach may pair's Türkan's blog here.. see you on the next blog...bye..

                                 our digital story

                                                      ''  HOW TO MAKE SOAP  ''

    ELT BLOGS:BRINGING THE WORLD 

             

             INTO THE CLASSROOM

         Hello everybody!!There are lots of English Language Teaching blogs arround and they are becoming increasingly popular as a language learning tool.Today I am going to introduce you one of these blogs :www.raz-kids.com.You can reach the site for a quick look by pressing here.
            Raz-kids is a product of a learning company called:...It is an American company in Tuscon which is founded by Bob Hall who has a 40+ year career in education-as a classroom teacher to executive leadership at many companies..
             Spanning three key content areas- Reading ,Writing, and Science -Learning A-Z websites ,Raz-kids is the Reading trivet of it.It consists of many leveled eBooks and eQuizzes for interactive reading practice.

             an example from the e-book gallery of the site
               Raz-kids is like a digital library .It can be used from kindergarden students to 5 th  grades-a wide range of classes.There are also helpful tips for teachers.To improve reading and listening skills students can record themselves reading a book from their home computer.Although there is no date shows when the site has been updated,there is an online column which shows the books read and readers online on that moment which makes the site vigorous.The site is prepared very professionelly,no errors or broken links occurs.The images are very high quality and as it srikes pre-students fancy it is very colorful and full of entertaining images.

students can create robots and rockets

Raz-kids deserves to be used in EFL teaching and I highly recommend it to the teachers.It makes students to read for meaning because it asks questions at the end.The books are also full of images so students can easily understand the unknown words visually.There are also songs to be used on an interactive whiteboard during class hours.Books are also tape recorded for students to hear modeled fluency for pronunciation.Teachers who want to use raz-kids in EFL teaching can also wisit the teachers corner to get the teacher tips available.Raz-kids is an award wining ,high quality website which is beneficial for both teachers and students..see you on the next post...             
 

            your class deserves to be here use EFL blogs efficiently

Subscribe in a reader       RSS

  A USEFUL TOOL TO MAKE YOUR LIFE 

                            EASIER

    Hello everybody!!It is nice to see you again!!

I know you want to be the best ELT teacher in the world. There is too much source arround and you are wondering how you are  supposed to keep track of all the news.Stay tuned!!Today I'm going to tell you about RSS<<Rich site summary > or <Really simple syndication>

  RSS feeds give you a method to keep up with your favorite blogs and websites.You get brief updates and good new is that you don't have to visit  each blog and search for what is new but info comes to by itself..

  You may use many services for RSS..I am using ''feedly'' in my own blog which is free and its simple interface is a perfect solution to see all of your favorite websites in one place..

  I'm following a lot of blogs about ELT,arts and news.Blogs in English are providing real authentic content for us.First of all please diagnose your interests,your weak points and choose blogs to follow.To give an example my weak point isusing technology in ELT.I have explored NIK'S LEARNING TECHNOLOGY BLOG'.He is integrating ELT with the latest technologic improvements.I learn a lot from him and with the help of RSS I never miss a post..

  To create a big world in your small classrooms I recommend you to follow Nik's page and more blogs as much as possible..

 See you in the next post....Bye..

        BELOW YOU MAY SEE THE BLOGS THAT I AM FOLLOWING

                          you can reach my RSS list here..click click

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                 WIKIS                         WIKIS 

              WIKIS            WIKIS                WIKIS       WIKIS                                                                                                                             

    Hello everyone!!
Today our new task is creating a wiki-page and writing a film review in pairs..We used www.wikispaces.com for this task.Writing film reviews is an enjoyable task.A film review consists of three parts-intro-main body and conclusion.Using a lot of adjectives,writing about the plot,settings,starrings and at last giving an idea of recommending or not recommending the film are the constituents of a review.We worked in pairs in this task and it contributed a lot to our work.First of all we have different  viewpoints which feeds our review bilaterally.Secondly we supported each other 's technical knowledge in creating our site to make it error-free.Brain storming is another advantage of working in pairs.
Finally we gather our reviews in our classroom wikipage.A wiki is a collaborative tool which provides an opportunity to create together in class.Wikis provide an authentic content because the readers are real people and this is 'sine qua non 'for ELT.Although Wikis require students to have access to computers and an internet connection something not all students have and may seem luxurious for some parts,teachers should push the limits to create a chance to provide these kind of tools in modern language classrooms..

You can see my page by clicking  here

And also my partner-Türkan's blog can be reached by clicking  here

See you in the next blog.. Bye..

                     A screenshot from my Wiki Project....

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help on how to format text

                                                            art of Jane Malay-cats-pinterest
                                                   
                            LET'S IMPROVE THE WORLD WHILE                          
                                     IMPROVING OUR ENGLISH

    Hello again English travellers!Today we have an incredible idea of improving the World and it only takes 60 seconds.:))That simple.. This is a co-production of Turkan and Ebru and by clicking the link you may listen to our podcast..
   Podcasts can be used  in every level of ELT yet ours is suitable for intermediate students.Podcasts provide a large flexibility to the teachers and a very authentic material..They can be easily prepared by the teacher or can be adopted many kinds from the internet..Today we came up with an inspiring idea to make the World a better place to live and explained it in 60 secondsThe main idea was simple yet striking:each family living in the city would adopt a Street cat until non exists outside and the government would support thıs wıth tax reductions to these families.Teacher is the main source for the students.By creating such podcasts and encourage the students to create their own ,can improve their listening skills,speaking skills and ends up improving the writing skills as well.Using podcasts is an all-purpose  task based activity which all teachers should benefit to create new horizons  in a small classroom.
 While preparing our podcast we didn't face too much trouble ,many tools can be found in the internet to create a  rich content..A teacher  with a limited knowledge of computer programming can also use these tools easily..So don't hesitate to use podcasting and bring the World to the feet of your students..See you on the next post./you can see my pair's page here





60 second Ebru-Turkan pair-work