Final Post

 Well... This is awkward.

    I had actually intended my last post to be my... well, last post but I just learn that my last post is supposed to be my last post... postception. Anyway, so hi again everyone. In this final post, I will be talking about this term and all of the tasks I completed. Now, I will be keeping this post brief as I have already mentioned my opinions in a detailed manner in the respective posts of the tasks.

    This term was interesting. We studied and learned from our computers, so for most courses, this wasn't all that productive but this course, Material Design, is a technology integrated course, so one could say that having the course during the pandemic turned out to be much more productive than it would've been in a classroom, then again that's only my opinion and I don't actually have an idea as to how this course would be conducted in a classroom setting. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this course, as much as the previous Educational Technologies course. My main reason is that this course, in fact these courses, are highly product-centred. Other courses are more subject-centred and this causes them to be nothing but a list of items to memorise for the midterms and finals, but Material Design has taught me valuable items that I can, and will actively use in a classroom environmentö which brings me to my next point of discussion.

    My absolute favourite task was the Augmented Reality task. Such a simple process, only adding a picture or a QR code for learners to scan and suddenly the entire task takes a whole new level, with different ways of approaching it. Students can travel around a bit first before answering the questions, do some research about the land or the building, talk with their friends, etc. The communicative aspect of the task, which I greatly value, increases by an immeasurable amount with this simple method. Flipped Classroom is also a very interesting method, one I would like to try and experiment with, as it allows to use the valuable class time with correcting mistakes and errors and focus on communication. In light of these tasks, my least favourite would be the Language Awareness Task, or the Corpus Task, as I like to call it. Maybe I couldn't use it to its full potential but the whole idea seems far-fetched to me and I don't think many students will effectively use the corpus for its intended purposes or they simply won't understand it as a concept.

    それでも, both the term and the course turned out as good as I expected them to be. My experiences from the Educational Technologies course last semester really helped me out (I mean, I re-learned Photoshop and learned Audacity, pretty useful stuff). As a special thanks, I would like to thank my friend Cansu Yılmaz again for her support and partnership and my lecturer for both Material Design and Educational Technologies courses Dr Gökçe Kurt Tiftik, without whose instruction and feedback we wouldn't be able to complete these tasks and know these instructional strategies of the modern age.

    Thank you for reading, stay safe!

Creating A Webquest

“Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.”

 Hello everyone,

    This will be my last post in which I will be talking about a task. I may continue this blog if I do other things about educational technologies and material design... I dunno we'll see. So, this week I will be talking about our Webquest. As always, Cansu and I worked on this enhanced project. I say enhanced because our task was to pick an existing project from the coursebook given to us and enhance it to be used with technology. I won't lie we may have gone easy with this one, we picked a project in which you already have to use some technology - making a vlog about your family. So we added an extra task, creating a family tree. We also asked the students to upload the video on Youtube.

    We used QuestGarden to show the introduction, instructions, the process and the evaluation table. I don't want to talk about it much but the website is... verbesserungsfähig. We had some problems while trying to save and add pictures, which was really annoying since the website only accepts 500x500 images that are less than 140kb. Despite these technical issues we managed to complete the task; I mean at this point, having dealt with so many technical issues in the previous tasks, I believe we can even bypass a firewall or something. Anyway, we also used videos to explain the processes as a visual task such as this can only be best explained with visual instructions, we also added some tips for the pre-recording, mid-recording and post-recording phases of the vlog.

    And that's it. Wow, another semester, gone, never to be lived again. I gotta say this pandemic sure wasn't great but at least we got to live through and experience something that most people that have lived never experienced. It also showed how disastrously unprepared humans were for a global emergency, but hey I'm getting ahead of myself. I wish nothing but the best for all of you.

Edit: It wouldn't be right if I didn't forget to give the link to the task.

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Augmented Reality

 みなさんこんにちは!!!

    今日はARに関する私のプロジェクトについて話します。I'm sorry, I'm just a little bored :)

    Hello again everyone, today I will be talking about my Augmented Reality (AR) project (that's what the Japanese text above says btw). It sounds really cool and technological ('cause it is) and a bit complicated but in actuality, it is pretty straightforward. Essentially you are creating a worksheet with added modern and technological design features. I'll go over these features in a minute but first I will explain the concept and the process of completing this task.

    So let's make one thing clear first, how is AR different from VR; virtual reality? With VR everything is made in and formed around in a virtual environment. AR uses a real-world setting. Of course, that doesn't mean AR is changing the real world around you, it just... enhances it. I believe the best way to demonstrate this is using Google's AR website. Google explains AR by saying "Augmented reality overlays digital content and information onto the physical world — as if they’re actually there with you, in your own space." Another difference between AR and VR is the devices that they require. AR doesn't need any special devices besides your phone and a QR code reading app, but VR requires a headset and other tools like controllers to enhance the experience. 

    Now let's talk about the task itself. As usual, my dear friend Cansu and I worked on this project together. We chose our city to explore to be Tokyo because... いいんじゃない? The original plan was to use 3D models of the places that we wanted the students to visit but unfortunately, most of these places were either too big to be modelled or they simply did not have a model that we could use. So we decided to use QR codes instead. Using QR codes made the whole process so much easier, but again it had a downside. The AR aspect of the work was not enough so we used 360 videos from Youtube instead. I believe in the end this turned out to be a better option as it would be very difficult to show most places to visit in Tokyo with 3D models only as the city is famous for its streets and stations. The rest of the task is pretty standard, a worksheet in which students answer some questions. We wanted this task to be as communicative as possible so we mostly asked opinion questions and allowed students to consult the internet to find the answers that they are looking for. There was also a second part of this worksheet. We asked students to create a poster as a project. Ideally digital but a normal poster would be fine as well. 

    I find this method, including AR in the worksheets, very interesting and I'm surprised that I haven't thought about this before. It's simple and definitely attention-grabbing. I will make sure to incorporate this method in my worksheets. 

That's all from me now, you can find the worksheet here. Take care.

P.S.: Give it a few seconds for the website to load all pages fully.

P.S.: Don't panic if the QR code for the third question isn't working, you might be viewing it too small. Here's the link of that code.

Edit: Here are the images in case the link isn't working.

My Flipped Classroom Experience - Grammar Video

 "...now that we know how to do what, I expect we can do it in less than a day."

Your honour, I wish to retract my previous statement.

Hello again everyone,

This week I continue to talk about my flipped classroom experience. This week, Cansu and I created a grammar video as our task. I will mostly talk about the process of making the video this time as I already talked about my views regarding the flipped classroom method, you can check it out should you wish to. Making the grammar video took way too longer than I initially thought it would. There are several reasons as to why it took too long, but now I will explain them one by one.

So firstly, we underestimated the task. I won't lie, after making the vocabulary video within just two days, we thought the grammar video would be easy as well, but alas it wasn't. We picked the topic after looking at the coursebook that was provided to us. The book was for prep. year high school students. Anyways, after selecting the topic, comparatives and superlatives, we concluded that we should make an animation rather than a real-life video of ourselves. Our initial thought was that since our topic was about comparing things we thought by animating we would have an easier time. We used Animaker as we'd done previously, but it turns out that this website isn't suited for long projects. We used Audacity to edit our audio and Photoshop for some images, but lining up the audio and the images proved very challenging. Thankfully my friend Cansu understood the program better than I did, so she turned the mess that the whole project was into a much better, five-minute video. Anyway, another difficulty was that the coursebook limited us rather severely. We, inevitably, had to add a few extra things like other words that weren't in the book, but we remained faithful to the coursebook for the most part. In the end, along with the online exercises that we made, I believe this turned out to be a fantastic piece of work.

Here's the video: Comparative & Superlative

Here are the exercises: Comparative

                                      Superlative

                                      Exceptions

That's all from me, goodbye!

My Flipped Classroom Experience - Vocabulary Video

 Hello again everyone,
    

    Today, I will be talking about my flipped classroom experience. Before I begin explaining the concept and the process I have to say that this has been the most novel project I have worked on by far. The reason why I place great value on this task especially is that it is highly effective and much more student-friendly and I'm saying this because I tested it on my little sister. After my friend Cansu and I finished the video, I showed it to my sister, who is in 6th grade. She immediately showed improvement in her spelling (I value the speaking ability a lot, hence why I was very pleased) and when I asked her if she liked the concept her reply was positive. I hope that one day I will be able to try this method on my students also.
    

    The flipped classroom method reverses the activities made inside the class and outside the class. The teacher prepares the lecture prior to class time. The students watch the lecture material, multiple times if they believe they should, and come to class knowing most, if not everything about the topic and they spend the class time improving their understanding by completing tasks individually or in groups. The best aspect of this method has to be that it gives so much freedom to the student. It mostly eliminates the difference factor that the students have. For example, if the student prefers to study at night they can do so freely and they can rewatch the lecture multiple times. In other words, if the student isn't an attentive listener they can rewatch the part they didn't understand the first time until they understand. Of course, this also puts a great deal of responsibility on the students. Some students may not watch the lectures but there are a few possible ways to prevent this. One way is that preparing the activities to be finished within the classroom in such ways that they can only be finished after reviewing and understanding the material and the lecture.
    

    As for the flipped classroom video we've prepared, it's a vocabulary video about breakfast items. We used a website called Animaker. It was fairly easy to prepare the animations and the voices - we didn't have to add the voices separately, which was nice. We also used Photoshop, as we always do while making these projects, to crop/edit some images (like the sausages and olives for example). It took us around 3 days from start to finish the whole video and, now that we know how to do what I expect we can do it in less than a day (an a half to be safe :]).
    

    Overall, the flipped classroom method has greatly changed my view on how teaching can be accomplished remotely - should I face a second pandemic after becoming a teacher, I know how to continue teaching, but this method can also be used in regular teaching too. Not only will it be a novel and interesting experience for the students, but it will also be much more productive for them.

    That's all from me today, take care!

Edit: I forgot to add the video. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...

Guess Who's Back? - Creating A Language Awareness Task

     Hello again everyone,

                I hope you are all doing fine. After a long break, here I am with new tasks to finish and write about. So, I spent my last two weeks preparing what is called a Language Awareness Task with my dear friend Cansu. Before talking about the task itself, I should probably explain a few terms.

            To begin with, this task is part of a grander approach to foreign language learning called Data-Driven Learning, in which students are not only listening to a teacher but actively searching and discovering the rules of the language they are learning. Students do their research by using corpora, which are tools used by linguists for a multitude of purposes.

            The topic of our task is prepositions of time. We selected this topic as these prepositions; in, on and at to be precise, are often not used correctly. In addition to being prepositions of time, they are also used as prepositions of place, hence the confusion. You should also keep in mind that in, on and at aren’t the only prepositions of time but the coursebook given to us only included them probably because they are the most commonly used ones. As described, this is a Language Awareness Task so the use of corpora was encouraged. The corpus we chose is the Corpus of Contemporary American English. This corpus provides more concordances and it is better at searching prepositions. It may seem difficult to use but young learners, being digital natives, won’t have any difficulty after one or two tries.

            To conclude, my view regarding DDL is... complicated. It’s a very unique method for me. It’s also incomplete, if I ever teach using DDL I will also be learning and discovering new things with my students.

                This is all for today, stay safe and goodbye.

Edit: You can view the task in Canva as well.

                

Final Post

 

    Hello everyone,
    

    Here we are, one more time, for the last time. I’ve learned so much from this course about how to integrate technology into my classroom that I don’t even know where to begin. Before this course, all that would come to my mind would be watching a movie or playing an educational game like Kahoot, but now I know that there are so many things that can be done; wikis, digital stories and posters, infographics and, my favourite, podcasts. But before I get into all of this, I want to talk about my observations and thoughts regarding the use of technology in classrooms back in my day, today and the near future.
    

    My sister goes to the same school I went in 6th grade, 8 years ago. I had pretty regular classes but my sister has coding classes at that same school now. Combine this with online education and you can easily say that they are having the most technologically advanced education we have ever seen and this along with the fact that we’ll be seeing virtual reality in classrooms in a few years simply amazes me.
    

    I’m aware that this isn’t the case for many classrooms in Turkey but still, even with just one computer and even without the internet many things can be accomplished with students creativity. One of the things I’ve learned from this course is that no problem is without a solution and every situation can become an opportunity for something greater.
    

    Now about the things I’ve learned, the formula is pretty simple: easiness + fun = learning. I don't have a least favourite task but my favourite task (the most fun one IMO) was creating a podcast because I like speaking and the tools made everything super easy. I will use this in my classes.
    

    To conclude, this course was one of the most unique I’ve ever had. I only wish we could have some Zoom sessions but alas... I finish with a scene from my favourite show Doctor Who.
 
            Take care, goodbye!