Artful storytelling by using "Storybird"

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Hi! Not so much time has passed and here I am again this time with a tool that I learned from my classmates Ayşe Soy and Gül Üney's presentation. To me, stroies have a big role in our memories when we try to keep something in mind both inside and outside the classrooms. The part we are interested in as teachers is the one which is implemented in lessons naturally. In general, stories are given to students and they are to answer some basic questions so as to test their comprehension; but what about their imagination, their abilities to create something different and special to them? Restricting them brings improvement neither to us nor to them. If we encourage them to make their own stories, they will become more engaged in their learning. To sum up, I believe that we need such a tool like this, especially these days that technology dominates our lives. I think Storybird is a good tool and I am pretty sure that you will enjoy from the moment you begin to discover it. Of course I have some reasons when I say this but firstly I want to explain what it is and then will come the pros and cons.

What is Storybird?
Storybird is a website which enables you to create your own story in a short time. So many people such as writers, readers, educators, students benefit from its facilities so it is a worldwide community.

What does it provide you?
It requires no age limitation, no payment and no restriction when it comes to select a subject for your story. It presents so many artful stuff so that students do not waste time on concerning themselves with pictures as a result they have a great amount of time to work for the content. They can also work collaboratively. Moreover, they can not only create stories but also picture books and poetry. The good side for teachers is they can create accounts and assignments with ease. When it comes to mention about how to share stories, there are so many social media where you can share, for instance facebook etc.

In what way does it limit you?You have to choose only the pictures it gives you.

I really liked it. If you have any experience wtih it or any idea, please do not hesitate to share with me; I will be glad to hear them! See you... :)



 

Powtoon: Bring awesomeness to your presentations!

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       Hello everyone! I have not been sharing any posts recently but now I have such a tool that will make it up definitely; it is Powtoon! I can not tell you how much I feel sorry for the times that I did not aware of it. Well, you may ask me what makes it an amazing tool and there are so many answers I can give to you. How do I know so much about it? Again, thanks to my teacher Gökçe Kurt, I had a chance to meet with this tool during the presentation term. I worked with my classmate Sefa Ünal and we prepared a presentation (by using PowerPoint and Youtube)  for introducing it to our classmates. I think, we indeed gathered some useful ideas for our future teaching. I do not want to make you wonder any more so I begin to explain it in detail. Now sit back and get ready to meet this effective tool!

What is Powtoon?
It is a web application which enables you to create remarkable animated videos. It does not require any special skills in order to use it; even it provides you with tutorials which guide you for a quick start; therefore, it is seen as the world's most user friendly presentation software. It enables you to import images and create voiceovers which allow users to add their own touch to their work, animation. Of course it does not only consist of images and voiceovers; it lets you use the objects and music that are varied enough for flexibilty and creativty. I hid my favourite feature to the last: Its audio/video quality ,unlike traditional presentation tools, moves people away from over-reliance on text to convey ideas and users are able to create more engaging experiences for their audience.

Why is it used?
Powtoon is great for business and education and I want to explain this question with a short answer by using Powtoon's own words: "Every business needs to convey their message and benefits in an attention grabbing and engaging way -and when it comes to education...- it also makes a difference in the education sector and our tool is designed to allow education professionals (and students) to create content that is visually engaging, captivating and fun to make."

How can it be used in language teaching?
Teachers can integrate it smoothly into the existing curriculum furthermore students can implement it as a form of assignment. Here, I also want to add the possible ways to use it in classroom:
1) Teachers(Ts) can introduce themselves to new students(Ss) when beginning to a new term.
2) Ts can give instructions for tasks in a cooler way.
3) Ts can prepare the 5 facts for a new subject.
4) Ts can lay down the classroom rules in an unforgettable way.
5) Ts can make a lesson overview by summarizing key points with a movie.
6) Ts may ease tension and increase interest by introducing the course syllabus in animation.
7) Ss can create cartoon versions of themselves or make the classic family tree task in a more pratical and enjoyable way.

Note: You can find the 1,2,3,4,6 options among Powtoon's own themes and templates and from there, you can begin to create your own animation! For the others, there is also a starting point with ample supporting templates.

After reading all of these, I suppose that you can not wait to see what you can do with it; go and explore it! By the way, here is my outcome. See you soon. :)

Remove gap with a clear app!

When it comes to English lessons, our children have been directed to learn it in a traditional way. Grammatical structure, memorize! Vocabulary items, memorize! Daily speaking examples, memorize! No videos, no pictures, no music etc..This kind makes them struggle and just try to memorize in order to pass the exams. This needs a change, indeed. In recent years, technology has been changing and improving really fast, like our generation. They keep pace with it. As a result, to me, we should supply them with some tools which will help them learn in an easier, clear, entertaining way. One of the tools I can recommend is Duolingo. It is a free entertaining learning English app offering a good amount of foreign languages. I started to use it in my own language so as to see whether it is suitable for the teachers to create a weekly task to our students. The answer is definitely yes! I really liked it. It includes some certain words, pictures for them, pronunciations, translations etc. which means you can find writing, speaking, listening and reading in it. This is really important because as we all know being able to use this four main skills is so much essential. I strongly recommend this app to English teachers who are making some effort to enrich their teaching. For example, each week, students can be given one part of it as a task, then asked to make their own part similar to their homework so this will be a really good reinforcement and active learning. I will share some parts of this app below in order to make my sentences clear for you. :) Please make comments if you use it or have some thoughts about it. I am looking forward to hear them. See you soon!

picture resource: http://www.freerechargetricks.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/140124_TECH_Duolingo.png.CROP_.original-original.png

"How to" Make an Origami Frog

Hi everyone! I am here again. :) My new task is "How to" project. It is about showing ,step by step, the process of how something is done. I made this project with my dear classmate Sevilay Yıldırım. I really enjoyed working with her because these kind of projects requires cooporation, synergy and responsibility. I found all of these in her but despite these, we had some difficulties while recording and editing. Anyway, we tried to find something interesting and chose to demonstrate an example of an origami. Of course you can find so many things which have their origami forms but when it comes to our department, we are as preservice teachers in charge of keeping our students/learners enthusiasm as high as possible; as a result we decided to demonstrate a frog for our younger/adolescent learners. We should note however that the age should not be so little because this activity requires some motor abilities. To mention how this can be implied in classrooms, I can say that a teacher may tell his/her students that they will carry on a task which will make them improve vocabulary and create dialogs in an enjoyable way. For example, the instructions may be like:
-Choose an animal for yourself (frog, dog, bird etc.)
-Search for its features (how many leg it has, what color it is, what special ability it has etc.)
-Give it an additional name next to its real name (my sweet rubbit, mysterious snake etc.)
-Prepare your tools (a paper, scissors etc.) and make it done
-Present it in front of the classroom (important for speaking skills and reducing stage fright)
-For the next week, choose a partner for yourself and create a dialog for your animals together and then  again present it in front of the classroom

By doing all of these, students will not only improve their vocabulary knowledge(adjectives, nouns, adverbs, verbs) but also their communication and writing skills(inspiration, grammar). Moreover, this will happen with the stuff they choose so that they will not feel restricted and will be more active in the process. However, there should be some restrictions in order to produce a good outcome; what I mean is the instructions I mentioned above. If you make a decision about using origami in your tasks, you can benefit from wikiHow or youtube by even just typing "origami" in these websites for plenty examples.

Bye the way, we edited the video by using Movie Maker and here is a part of our demonstration of the origami frog:

You can watch our origami video by clicking here. We hope you like it. If you have any ideas, please share them with me; I would be pleased to have consultation with you so as to create different ways in educational activities. See you soon. :)

AN OBSERVATION FOR AN ELT WEBSITE

Today, almost all of us is a website user. We use websites in our daily lives for so many reasons: searching for what is something, what kind of thoughts shared about it, etc. Recently, I have been surfing for discovering as many ELT websites as I can because I have a specific purpose for this: I am a pre-service teacher and think that if I manage to go beyond the traditional education system and touch some minds and any soul, I will be able to make a change -a big change may be- . Ofcourse this reqires some motivation,desire,persistency,success,abilities and connactions.

While I was searching for an efficient website, I came across with ELT experiences. When I read "about me" section, I paid attention to one sentence: "I have a keen interest in researching teacher methodology, pedagogy, as well as the use of technology and blogging, for both learners and teachers." . The reason why it attracted my attention is because of my dealing with these stuff. I usually think in my mind what I can do in the future during my teaching in a kind of different and enjoyable way. I saw some styles of activities divergent from traditional ones. Just to show an example, here, I will put a screenshot.

I really liked the ideas in this website. Actually I have not been able to read a great part of them as they are written in a long form generally but I will spend some time and try to discover some more different ideas. If you ask me whether I recommend it or not, to me, it is not a fantastic one but deserves observing. Furthermore, as I meant above, they are not out of date; you can see the time when the posts are written. So I will share below the home page in case you want to have a glance at it. Have a good day! :)

Timely updates via "RSS"

Hello everybody! I am here with another topic in this week again. It is "RSS" which is generally called as Really Simple Syndication. What is it? Let me explain it for those who do not know about it. It is something for delivering regularly changing web content. I chose to use Feed Reader. Before I began to take my lesson Teaching Techniques and Materials Desing, I was unaware of its existance. Thanks to my teacher Gökçe Kurt, now I can profit from this perfect tool. You may ask me why I regard it as an excellent stuff so if I should explain the reasons, I can say these :

-You are provided with timely updates from your favourite websites as a result you do not have to manually check those sites in order to see if there is a new content or not. By this way, you gain a great deal of time.
-You can collect data from so many sites. When you open it, you meet with a rich view.
-You can simply scan through the headlines and decide to which ones you will spend your time.

By the way, I would like to mention one of the bloggers I follow: Lisa Nielsen-the innovative educator. She says that she found school boring and irrelevant and that ticked her off; she writes that blog to share ideas to help change that for others. When I read her this about me section, I immediately thought that I could find interesting things which may change my thoughts about education or help me improve my process and started to have a close look at it. You can also glance at her blog by clicking here.

Additionally, I put my feed reader's screenshot here in case those, who do not know it, may want to see what it looks like. See you soon!


Picture Resouce: http://www.123rf.com/photo_5821935_cartoon-illustration-of-blue-bird-on-a-tree-branch-singing-with-rss-icon.html

Wiki Task

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https://filmreviewsformagazines.wikispaces.com/Like+Stars+on+Earth

Hello! I have got another task. This time, I am responsible for making a film review with one of my friends, Kıymet Yasavul, who has watched the same film and is able to share this duty with me. We were supposed to imagine that we were reviewing this film, Like Stars On Earth, in order to post it for our school magazine. I have indeed enjoyed while doing this job because I was not only able to find someone who watched the same film which I like so much (this made my participating an easy one in this collaboration work) but also develop my technological side for my education as a pre-service teacher. When it comes to talk about the advantageous sides of wiki page, I can say that it is useful because you can reach so many examples and searchers can comment on each other's works. However, I should also mention that it has a disadvantage: a work can be deleted by anyone. As a result, if it is used in a good way, efficient outcome can be obtained.

See you soon again. :)