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! :)