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!