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!

Digital Storytelling - Where Is Our Book?

    Hello again,

     

    I hope you're all doing well. This week I'll be talking about the digital story I made with my dear friend Cansu. The story is titled Where Is Our Book. It's meant for younger audiences. My friend mostly handled the creative part while I mostly handled the digital part. And, this was by far the longest task we had to do and the process was the most complicated one, so I'll go over it step by step.

    Firstly we wrote the script. Then we used a website called storyboardthat to create the visuals. Then we used Adobe Photoshop to cut and resize the images. After that, we recorded the lines and chose the background music. We used Audacity to edit the voices. Then we used a video editor that comes free with Windows 10 to create the video, add sound and special effects. Finally, we used another editor called FilmForth to add transitions between the images and for a few finishing touches. 

     

    While it took time to prepare, as we had to watch a lot of tutorials on Youtube, it was one of the tasks I enjoyed doing. Creating digital stories can be a good way to teach students English, especially to younger learners. A digital story like this can get students attention easier than another classroom activity. And with older students, they can prepare their own digital stories on whichever topic they want as long as they do it in English, and I would tell them how to do so, of course.

    Anyway that all for today, take care!

Making An Infographic

    Êl síla erin lû e-govaned vîn, gi suilon!

    Hello, my dear readers. I've been practising my Elvish as you can see (time spent productively in my opinion). 

    This week, I come to you with an infographic. I initially wanted to use Canva but I decided to use Adobe Spark instead as its interface is more user-friendly. As I said, countless times by now that ease of use of tools is very important in digital tasks.

    

    The process was pretty straight forward. I gathered data, as usual, and then I came up with a design that is easy to understand. Selecting the right colours was important since I achieved easy understanding by separating the subtopics with different background colours. 

    Regarding the usefulness of infographics, I believe this short digital task could be a very good way of getting students to prepare for a more extensive assignment.

    That's all from me today, namárië!

Digital Poster - Magazine Cover

     Top o' the morning to you ladies and gentlemen,

    I once again come bearing news of my newest assignment, and this week it is, drum roll please, designing a magazine cover. A digital poster technically but, then again, everything is digital these days. Anyway, as usual, I'll start with explaining the assignment, talk about my experience and finish with a few concluding remarks.

   I used this website called postermywall to make the magazine cover. I picked video games as my theme since it was an area I am familiar with and there are a lot of examples I can look at. I picked a very recent game which released just a few weeks ago, Cyberpunk 2077 as the background of the cover. After selecting everything I did a short research on the reviews of the game and selected two to put on the cover. The website I used was very user-friendly. I made the whole thing in a few hours thanks to the website.

    All and all this was a fun assignment and I plan on using this later. Another thing I want to talk about is this year. 2020 was, to put it mildly, not a pleasant experience. All generations had to endure hardship but few experienced it on a global level like this. But the darkest hour has passed and 2021, a new year is awaiting us.

    Stay strong everyone and happy new year to you all.

Internet-Based Project - Padlet

     Minasan, konnichiwa!
    

    And hello to people who can speak English. I hope you are doing well. This week my friends and I worked on a project, a padlet. We had a few topics to talk about and we chose education. We discussed lack of education, how and why this problem exists, what we should we do to prevent it, we gave some statistics and some facts about education in general. 

    Overall, it was a fun little project we worked on during our exam week which helped with (at least it helped me) stress. The project was very quickly and easily finished as the padlet has such a user-friendly interface that even my grandma could do it no problem. We added visuals and embedded the links of our sources. 
    

    As to how the project or the usage of a padlet to be more precise could contribute to the development of 21st-century learning skills, I believe that the answer is quite obvious: It's the easiest software I have used yet. As I wrote in the paragraph above if something is simple, everyone can learn how to use it with no problems. So my general point is that simplicity is key to developing 21st-century skills in not just young people but everyone living in the 21st century.

    Anyways, as always stay safe! 

Update: I forgot to give the links of the padlet and my friends blogs because apparently, I have 3 brain cells left. Here are the links:
                                                  

                                              The Padlet - İlayda - Şayan - Cansu

Wiki Assignment - The Giver Book Review

    Hello again,

    Today I'll be talking about my wiki writing experience. Honestly, it wasn’t the most exciting activity I’ve done, podcasting was much more fun for comparison but still, I got to read one of my favourite books again and also reading other books reviews was interesting.

    Here's my review.

    The task was simple, write about your favourite book. I initially wanted to write about The Lord of the Rings as they are my most favourite books, but I decided to write about the Giver instead as it was shorter and had a similarly interesting theme. I wrote an overview of the book along with its author, page number and genre. Then I asked some questions about the story that would grab the reader’s attention. Then I wrote why people should read this book and finished with a closing statement.

    All and all, my wiki writing/editing experience was not bad, but it’s not something I would want to do regularly.

    Stay safe!