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...