At the top of creativity!

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Hello again!

Because we have lots of opportunities for creating a businesslike atmosphere in our classes, I have an example that we can use in our class. This is a  web site and called storybird. With this site you can create your own stories and publish them also use in your classroom. We will learn more in detail about this useful site. 

First you can start with signing up. This is totally free. Even you haven’t signed up you can create a story but you cannot save it. But you can do something good like reading stories other users’ created before. Because our aim is to create a new one let us sign up. I create a student account. But as a teacher we can create a teacher account, after you create your account you can give your students a classroom code, their works will be appeared on your page and they can see each others' products. But you should pay for it. 

After signing up you can create a new story. As a story we have two options: long form and picture book. In the long form you add less picture, more text; in the other one, less text and more pictures. We have poetry section, in this section you choose a picture, then related words are listed you can combine them and create your work.

After choosing the picture you want
you can use the picture for your work.

First I create a picture book. Then I begin to create my story. After I choose the picture, put that picture in the page and write the rest whatever I want. I can add more pages, change their order or delete. When all the pages are done, the cover page should be designed.  As  I said before if you want to publish your story you can see the choice as 'public' but if you don’t, you can click on ' private.'

Here is the link for this work which is so simple example of a picture book.

For the long form, like the picture book, you chose the image you want and begin to write your story. You can add chapters and write as you want.

You can see from here the introduction of a longform story.

For the poem as I mentioned before, you choose a picture, then some words come automatically. You combine them and have fun.
You can see this poem example from here.

You can see your own products from ‘you-your staff’ section. If it is necessary you can change them an also rewrite them. You can share via e-mail and link. But if you want to download or print, you should pay for it. 

Okay we have learned how to use but what can be done for a learning activity? Let us create some activities.

First determine a topic:

• After school, Jessica and Tom want to do something.

Give some specific ideas about the story, tell students: 

• Write a plan for them
• Use 4 of these words in your story:
• Think, happy, sad, tough, enough, teacher, turn back, outside, wait, calm down.
• After you finish, send me via e- mail.

Another example:

Last week you lectured the simple past tense and you are certain they understand well. 

You can want them to write a memory which they felt so happy and determine borders like one page long etc. 

Maybe this is not a creative activity but activities like this develop students knowledge. You can adapt this kind of activities to lots of topics. 

For a creative one we can give a homework like:

Give a prompt:

• One day, sally was so sad. Her mother came to her and said: ‘what happened sally, why are you sad?’…..  (Continue this introduction and think a solution for Sally to be happy. )

You should give more specific guidelines for them because it is hard to write someting without knowing what is supposed to do. Be clear when you give any assignments.

With the help of storybird  they can:

• write their routines, wishes, 
• introduce a cartoon character 
• rewrite a story which is written by known authors,
• create their utopias so on an so forth...

As you see there are lots of activities can be created. You can say that 'I can give like these assignments without using this site and I can say that ‘write your stories on a paper or word document.’' Is it the same? I think it is not. In this site you see lots of images to create a new story also you can see your other stories and see differences before and now. This is so motivating. Also we can use for all age groups, according to their level different activities can be created.

What are the advantages?

• Students’ creativity is developed.
• Writing is fun.
• Writing and reading skills are improved.
• They can learn new vocabularies and idioms from others’ stories.
• Homework is more meaningful. 

As I always mention it is important to use creative tools in the classroom. Otherwise there is no difference between robots and us. If we conduct a lesson and go, this wouldn’t be fair. Enriching our techniques and classroom activities is beneficial for students and teachers. See you…

Both enjoyable and meaningful?

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Hello everyone!

It’s been a long time to share new tools. Today I am going to introduce you a useful tool. In the class we have presented this tool with my partner Neslihan Civelek. Let us learn about this more in detail.

This tool is a website Bitsrips. With the help of this site what we can do? This is the very logical question. This site helps you to create your own character and avatars also comics. Basically these three are used but you can see lots of comics which are made by other users you can also use them for your classroom activities even you have not an account. But if you want to create a new comic, character or avatar and save them, you should have an account. I will show how to create one but first I am going to explain step by step what can we do with screenshots and then I have lots of ideas what can we do with this site.

As you see, even if I did not sign up first 

I could see some comics which were made by other users.

You can see the sharing options at the bottom of the comic.

Let us begin with creating character. As you see, there are lots of options which are easy to understand. You should begin with selecting gender. Then you can move on and finish your character. As I said before you should sign up for being able to save your character. Your characters will be seen on your profile page.

At the top of the page you can see options such as; hair color or type, eyebrow style, eye type, color etc.

Here is the profile page.
You can see the options like 'my characters, strips, scenes, favorite friends'
You can find your friends via e-mail. and visit their pages.

For creating a new comic you begin with selecting your panel number then stage and characters as you want you can want whatever you want according to your topic. You can add text bubbles. There are lots of opportunities which are waiting for you. You can just pick one of them and enjoy.

After choosing the scene, you can add a character and change it's clothing

You can add text bubbles as you wish

Here is the example of a comic

You did all these things and what then? How can we integrate these into our teaching? What if they don’t work? First we cannot know what happens without any attempt to try. We should know how to. Let us think some activities.

Everyone knows remembering vocabulary, idioms, proverbs is difficult.  As a teacher you can create a comic which is included a vocabulary with the right scene and text bubble. Share on your blog or show them with the help of your projection or print it and give students, want them to use that vocabulary in a sentence. Then that vocabulary will be remembered because using visuals is really a good way to learn. 

After you save your comic you can see the option of 'print' you can easily use it.

The other options will be demonstrated after clicking on 'share' button

You can also want them to create a new comic after giving a topic. This will be fun for them because they use computers for this activity and create new things and easy to create. They will love it. I have some activity examples here:

• Introduce yourself

You can do this from the very beginning of your class for knowing them better. In this activity, students design their character and create a comic strip introducing themselves.

•  My summer holiday

Students practice their skills by showing what happened on the best day of their summer vacation.

• School rules 

Students choose one of your school rules and show their avatar demonstrating why the rule is important.

• Classroom rules

Students consider the rules of your classroom and create a comic explaining their thoughts on the 3 most important ones. 

You can also create an activity after creating a comic: ‘Writing a short story’ again you can share your comic on your blog or print as you wish. After giving a prompt and picture you have created, they can write the rest. This wouldn’t be dull like the other writing tasks. 

What are the advantages?

• Learning is fun.
• Some difficult vocabularies are easy to memorize.
• Creativity is developed.
• Reading and writing skills are developed.
• Preparation time is reduced.

What about disadvantages? I observe some disadvantages such as:

• Inappropriate comics.

I saw some inappropriate comics which have some inappropriate words or scene in the main page. This is not acceptable to use for young learners. We should be careful about that.

• Being not able to sign up with e-mail. 

There is a one option for signing up with facebook. But we see a log in choice as ‘log in with e-mail.’ This is a bit confusing. For example I have not a facebook account but my friend has,so I used this site with my friend.

 I want to share a video which involves comments about bitstrips for schools.

If you want to make you class more enjoyable, different from others then you should use this web site. Even you are not confident, you can start with the comics which are made before. As I said you cannot know what happens before you do. I am sure you will try. Thank you. See you!

Using apps for education

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Hi!

We all know that in the near future we all have students who cannot think even a minute without mobile phones. Why don't we use this for good? If they integrate mobile phones into their lifes then let us do it for lessons too.

Today I am going to introduce you a useful app for young learners "Fun English." This app is available in googleplay and appstore. Now let us look at how it works.

This app is easy to use actually, when you download it you see instructions part and explains the steps. As you can see here there is an order and if learners do lessons regularly then 2 lessons and a game are added.

At the beginning you have two categories (colors and animals). For better understanding there are lots of exercises. I tried all of them and I liked seeing different kind of activities because they improve students’ listening skills and by recording their voices they can learn pronunciation. Furthermore there is a song for colors and animals with subtitles . Let us look at colors' activities:

   In this exercise, first
   you hear the color's name
     and choose the correct
ball.

First you hear the pronunciation 
then click the first consonant or vowel,
then hear its pronunciation.

After click on a card, you learn what
it is and try to find the same color.

 In the animals activities I saw nearly same exercises. Listening and understanding was the goal. Again a song was there. It was really memorable. Leaning in this way is easier and better I guess.

You listen the voice,
 then record your voice

Here is the spelling section

As you see these different categories, generally you first listen, then do what is wanted. Differently in this part you can see that there are exercises to better understanding of "plurals."

Here the song about animals like
 colors you have choices
(with subtitles or not)

I should mention that there is a section for parents and teachers in the app. If you want to contact with the writers you can and there are steps and explanations for better understanding and guide how to give the students.

With this app, 
- We can give them homework to gain a new lesson,

- Because they listen some songs about what they learn, we can ask them to create a new one,
In fact I would not use in the classroom because students progress would be different, so better if they use on their own maybe at home but we should check their progress.

Finally we should get the idea that teachers should aware of this kind of apps and use appropriately.

See you soon...

Listen to our story!

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Hello again!

This week we have a task as usual and this task is “digital story telling.” I think it is like podcasting. We recorded our voices and had a background music but in this project we used photos and some description on them.

For this task I worked with my friend “Neslihan Civelek.” 
In this task we had 3 choices and we were asked to choose one topic.  We chose the topic whose name is “What it means to be good friends? “ At the beginning of the work we chose our photos and wrote about our memories, ideas about friendship. While we were talking about the “friendship” term, we considered our friendship as well. Because this topic was familiar to us, thinking about it was not difficult for us.After we prepared writing a script then we recorded our voices but we had some difficulties not like in podcasting because we were better from our first experience. We recorded our voice three or more actually not so much and in first place we recorded together but after we listened, we did not satisfied at all and we decided to record our voices separately. This was time consuming but after realizing we did better, we started to integrate all our components via movie maker program. While we were using the program, sometimes it did not respond and we did the same process again. But if we do not think that side, using movie maker is easy. You can give time limit for every photo and add music and your voice into the background. 

How we can use digital storytelling in the classroom? 

In fact after we introduce what we expect by saying digital storytelling and how to do it, we can give students different topics and want them to create. By doing this, they improve their skills such as speaking, writing; if we want them to look at their friends’ works, listening and reading skills. By giving a task, students’ skills develop. I should mention that working in pairs can be a logical choice at the beginning because students can learn from one another peripherally when they work together and maybe some of them feel better and will be more ready for other tasks, at the same time working with a friend is fun. As I said before I also worked with my friend and we had not much difficulty. We shared our ideas and corrected each other’s mistakes.

As you see there is nothing to worry about being novel and doing different activities. Do your best for a better learning and teaching activity. See you in another post...

You can see our video from here...

How can we use web sites?

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Hello!

Today I am going talk about web sites. We as future teachers should use some useful web sites in our classes. But how? How can we decide this web site is credible? How we can integrate into our teaching? For answer to these questions, I made some research and analyze a web site. 

Let us look what we can do for rich teaching and learning.

As I said I have made some research to choose a useful web site and I find Cambridge English.

This site is about English language learning and teaching. It consists of different skills for different levels. In this site you can find different subjects you interested. For different levels there are different activities and skills. As you can see here, you can choose levels, time, skill and filter. This makes the usage easy.

There are lots of experts who write activities and prepare exams, videos etc. You can see their department know about their proficiency. You can see from 'about us' section lots of information. 

There are levels for every learner and you can easily find these. Pre a1, a1, b1, c1 etc. You can choose according to your students' level.

Here is an exercise example. This kind of exercises help teachers because they can use an exercise from this site after explains any topic. Students can understand more in detail what they have learned at the same time.

When you visit this site you will see how this site is but there are lots of well prepared works and generally none of them have accuracy problem as I see. There are not any broken links in this site. We can see lots of images and videos especially for young learners. But as the level gets high, the number of images becomes low. But I would want to see more and more activities, videos, songs for children. There are limited videos and songs. Nearly no videos are available for the other groups. I see activities which include different skills like vocabulary, reading, writing, listening, and pronunciation. Students can do some exercises according to your choice or they can find any activity according to their needs. 

I find this site so useful especially for young learners. For example there are songs we can use in the class and as you see from the screen shot there is a file about the song’s activity. This is a ready document. But as I see this activity document just for songs because I could not find different kind of activities. But we can create our activities of course. On the other hand there are some activities which improve some skills. We can give as homework for the students. They can improve their skills even they are not in the classroom. 

So we should use this kind of sites because our lessons should not be dull. It should be both fun and useful. Otherwise students get lost in difficulty of the lesson. We should use different ideas, tools to make our teaching better. 

A facilitator: "Rss"

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Hello! 

Today I am going to talk about lots of things. Rss reader, why we use it and how, bloggers I follow, who is my favorite. 

First I want to talk about Rss reader. Rss reader is a helper that shows you as a blogger you follow and sends you notifications which remind new or unread posts of the blogs you follow. You can mark the post you read or you can give the posts you like star and see these posts in different category as “starred items.”  I think this is a big opportunity to know what is new and posts we liked much before. Otherwise it will be difficult to find new posts and remember which one you have read before. This service is easy to use. When you write blogs you follow, it comes automatically. It has option as online and downloaded program. I use online feedreader. There is no difference between them you can use one of them as you wish. I share with you a screenshot from the online reader.

Let us talk about blogs I follow. Because of my department, I follow some educational blogs and following some inspiring blogs is so useful for me. When you read something different, you want to know about it more in detail and make some research. Knowing some different ideas develop the way you think. And of course affect your job. In teaching you should always be open minded. In my opinion these blogs help me to do all these things.

As I said I follow some blogs but I think I have a favorite one. When I read her posts I like her style and suggestions. I am talking about Özge Karaoğlu’s blog. She is an English teacher and writes about English language teaching.  She shares her ideas, new materials, her suggestions, experience, how we can integrate the technology to our class. While technology is widely used these days, knowing how to use it when you teach is an excellent chance and her ideas are really helpful to develop views. She is really active and this is another reason for me to follow her posts. If you are interested in having new ideas then you should visit her page. 

See you in another post!

What about a review?

Hello again! I am here with my second assignment. For this assignment I worked with my friend Neslihan Civelek.

This assignment is about “wikis.” A wiki is a website which consists of several pages that anyone can add and edit contents collaboratively. In this project we wrote a film review on Wikispaces. Our teacher created beforehand the wiki and then we worked on the same page. Writing a review on a wiki was an enjoyable task for us. The film was our favorite so this task was not so difficult. At the same time working with a partner is an advantage for this task. We shared our ideas and it was useful.

Besides learning the wiki usage, we have learned how to integrate wiki to a class. We as teachers can use wiki for lots of tasks. For example students can write about their future plans or holiday memories, vocabulary activities, book summaries and so on. These activities develop their writing skills and they can think more in detail.Students can see contents they create and edit their friends’. I think this is a big opportunity to have contact with all students for a good purpose.

You can see our film review from here. I hope you enjoy!

Let us sing this song together!

Audio recording software >>

Hello! I am here with my first assignment. The topic of my assignment is podcasting. In this assignment I worked with Neslihan Civelek and we used the song we wrote about “The Little Red Riding Hood”. I think this song will be useful for young learners and fun. There are two characters, one is The Wolf and the other is The Little Red Riding Hood. We wrote this song as a dialog and in my opinion listening to this song after reading the story is better for children. They will remember the sequences and have a listening activity. This song can be used with lyrics. Maybe the teacher can choose two students and want them to sing this song as characters do. They will love this activity. Lots of activities can be created for an enjoyable lesson. I share the lyrics of the song with you.

There is a little girl over there among trees.
I can make her believe that I am trustworthy.

I am Little Red Riding Hood among the trees.
I love singing in lovely days with these birdies.

Hey little girl what are you doing here alone?
I can help you if you tell me where are you going?

Sorry Mr. I don't have time I need to hurry.
Grandma waits me and she is really hungry.

Better if you pick some flowers to give her.
Your grandma will be happy ever you can see.

Flowers smell good and my grandma will be happy.
I'll ask the wolf maybe he can help to me.

This girl is naive enough, and she has believed me.
Now I go home before her and wait my little girl!

-Nock Nock! Grandmaaa! I bring you something to eattt!

Hello my little girl welcome to my home.

The door is open come in and bring them to me.

I miss you Grandma I am coming now.

-Hiii! What happened to your teeth? I can't believe!

My teeth are maybe long and sharp.

To chew you better darling when I eat you! Wrrrr! 

I think that teachers can use podcasting in the classroom. They can record their voice and also want students to prepare their own podcast. But when we prepared this podcasting we had some difficulties:

-Recording our voices was not an easy task because we recorded again and again until we liked our voice. This took time.

-We used a melody through internet connection. Sometimes it didn’t work so this took time too.

-Because we recorded again and again, our voice became tired.

-Writing the song’s lyrics was not easy for us.

I hope this is useful for you. See you soon!

From a student's point of view

Hello! Welcome to my first blog!

I have a long time to be a talented teacher. In this time I want to improve my teaching skills. We as future teachers should make the teaching process enjoyable and memorable. In this blog you will see my assignments and some ideas from a student’s point of view. I will try to be rational and share some ideas for better teaching and learning. I hope you will find my assignments useful. Your comments are important for me, they will make me more courageous so please let me know your precious ideas. Let us keep going together!