EXPLORING TOOLS 2 : MAKE BELIEFS COMIX

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Hello everyone !

Visuals and funny materails are always really supporting in language learning and teaching. As a result of that, in this post I will introduce you a tool : MakeBeliefsComix, which is presented by my two classmates, Türkan and Ebru, in class.

Make Beliefs Comix is a website which allows its users to create their own comic strips. There are a number of characters, objects, scenes and speech bubbles. Let’s take a closer look now !

This website is free and you do not need to create an account to use it and actually that is why you cannot save an incomplete work. By the way, as this site is completely free, there are ads but they are not that annoying in my opinion.

To create your comic, firstly you click on ‘’Enter Here’’ from the homepage.

This is the main page in which you create your comic.

Then you can start with choosing your panel which means that your comic can be 2,3 or 4 panels.

After that you should decide whether you will use colors in the background or scenes.

Next, you add your characters and you can change the poses of your characters by using arrows.

Also, from the left side of the page you can make changes that you will see below.

Then, add talk balloons or thought balloons and write what you want your character to say. Also, you can add objects, panel promts to make your comic more interesting.

When you complete your comic, do not forget to give it a title and put your name,too. Then, click on ‘’Next’’ and from there you can print the comic or save the image to your computer. If you want to, you can email your comic to yourself or to a friend.

The Process of creating a comic is really easy and you can see the comic that I created below :

How this tool can be used in language teaching ?

- Students can create a comic about themselves. For example, they can write about their favourite things to do after a lesson in which they are taught activities and hobbies.

- At the beginning of a school year, you can ask your students to create a comic describing their holiday.

- You can use this tool to practice new contents. You can ask your students to use newly-learnt words or a specific tense in their comics.

- Also, as a tip you can print the templates to use in the classroom if you do not have enough computers for every student to use.

These examples can be enhanced as long as you are determined to teach your students English in a way that they will enjoy and learn effectively, benefitting from technology. MakeBeliefsComix will definitely arouse interest among your students with its fun characters,objects and scenes.

Hope that this is useful, take care !

EXPLORING TOOLS : STORYBIRD

Hello everyone !

My friend Ecem and I gave a presentation about Storybird and in this post I will inform you about it and hopefully it will give you some ideas on how to encourage your students to develop writing skills without boring them.

Storybird is a simple tool which allows its users to create visual stories. You can put your imagination into words using different artworks provided by artists on Storybird.

Firstly, you have to create an account to be able to use this tool and it is free. After signing up, you click on the ''Create'' at the top left of the screen. You will see many different pictures and you can also search for certain categories like ; summer,holiday,animals etc. 

Once you choose the artwork you are interested in, you click on the artwork and in the following page you select the book format by clicking ''Use This Art''.

As you can see, you have three options. Briefly, a longform book has chapters and less artwork, a picture book consists more artworks and a low word count and lastly a poem is a single image with selected words.

After choosing the book format (I chose the picture book format to show you), you are provided with other pictures related to the first one you chose. You drag other pictures as you write the story, adding pages.

Also, for the cover of your book, you have four different options.

When you complete your story, you click on ''Save and Exit'' and publish it. You can share your story privately or publicly. You can write a summary of your story. You can always edit your story,too.

To share your story, again from the top left of the page, you click on ''You'' and then ''Your Stuff''. After selecting your story, there is a share button. If your book is private you can share it via e-mail or with its link. If your book is public, you can also share you story on social networks.

The final product can be printed or downloaded as PDF but you have to pay for these options.

We created a picture book story for our presentation,too. As our story is private, I can't embed it here but I will share the link of it : Precious Love

Longform book example

Poetry Example

How this tool can be used in language teaching ?

- Firstly, teachers can create a class system on storybird and give students a class code so that they can work together.

- As a teacher, one can upload a specific picture and then ask students to create a story based on this picture. You can also specify a theme for them.

- Students can create their novel stories. After choosing a picture from the Storybird collection, students can build a story around the pictures which are related to first chosen one.

- A teacher can start writing a part of the story and then ask students to continue writing on it respectively. This is also possible for a student, he/she can begin with one sentence and others continue.

- They can be given certain words to create a poem, using a related picture. For example, you can ask them to choose an emotion and create a poem describing it.

- Students can be organized in pairs and then they can write two different stories. Students can invite one another to their stories. After finishing it, students can edit each others story and also comment on it what they like or don’t like about it. They can find each others mistakes like grammatical ones or misspelled words.

Storybird is a really fun and effective tool for students to develop creative thinking and writing skills.They learn how to write a story, like story flow or using descriptive language for stories in the target language. Also it encourages collaborative working and students become connected with each other which creates a more comfortable learning environment. So give it a try if you have not yet !

I hope that this is helpful, I will be talking about another useful tool in my next post, do not forget to check it !

MAKE GOOD USE OF YOUR MOBILE PHONE WITH APPS !

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Hello everyone !

Over the past years, technology has developed so quickly and this has affected everyone. Its influence upon education has been immense for some time now. One of the ways for practical usage of tech in education is applications. Especially, in language learning/teaching, it is possible to find hundreds of apps. Apps come in handy to provide support for language learners now that we live in an era where people sleep with their mobile phones and wake up with them.

This time, I will introduce you an English learning/teaching app called: English Class Lite. Let me say you first that this app is completely free and does not requires any payment after using it a few times.

Also, you can check the app's web site here. You can download it from App Store or Google Play.

         

This app has grammar explanations. It also has vocabulary, verbs 
and phrases sections but there is not an actual explaining for them. It shows commonly used examples for each category. It allows you to listen to these words,too. You can switch between British English and American English for pronunciation.

However, when it comes to practicing, this app has many exercises for each category, including 
listening.


You can choose the topic you want to practice. For instance ; if you want to have a grammar exercise specifically focused on one thing, you can choose it. You also have options on how many questions you want as you could see in the left column. These are all valid for each category. It has a result section so that you could see which exercises you completed. 

Also, I recommend you to use this app with kids whose are in the beginning or elemantary level.


This app can be given as an extra source for both learning and practicing to students. You can specifically choose a category and topic for them to practice. After finishing, you can ask students to point out their wrong answers and instead of making an explanation yourself, you pick one of the students who get the correct answer. By doing so, students actively show you how effectively they understand a topic and also you can get a chance to listen to them speaking in target language.

Do not forget to explore some other applications for your students ! See you in another post.

  

TECHNOLOGY IS UNITED WITH STORIES !

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Hello everyone !

It is always nice to listen to stories regardless of the topic. Thanks to the advanced technology, it is possible to listen and watch stories on your computer or any other mobile devices via internet. Of course, this development can be used in education, too.

In this week’s project, we were assigned to create a digital story in pairs. My partner is Ecem which is not a surprise. We were given three options to choose the topic of the digital story and we chose telling about being good friends.

We did not have many problems creating the story because when you are good friends in reality, writing from experience makes things easier. However, we had time limitation for the stories so writing something two-minutes long at most restricted us a little bit. We were supposed to use photos so we used our own photos and also, this part was easy as Ecem and I have lots of photos together.  We picked four insrumental songs accordingly to the parts of the story. Also, we recorded the story and this was not hard to do as we had experience from our podcasting project. I can say that it was neither too easy nor too difficult thus far.

On the other hand, combining all of the materials to create the story was the difficult part. We used Windows Movie Maker for this step. Even though it was not something new to us, because we had lessons on how to use it in the first year of the college, recalling the already-existing knowledge took some time. Adjusting our recorded voices and the duration of photos and also adding music to them was difficult to achieve in the beginning. Also, we had dificulties when adjusting our recorded voices and music so that the music would not be louder than our voices.

Of course, it would be harder to overcome these difficulties without a partner. Having an another opinion on writing the story, preparing the materials and overcoming the difficulties makes everything two times easier and less exhausting. The outcome is checked two times from two different points of view and this makes whole project result in a more convenient way. Collaborative working definitely is a plus in the preparation of such projects.

So, how digital storytelling can be adapted to education ?

Students can create their own stories, using the topics given by the teacher. These topics could be related to the one that we created. They can create stories that inform or instruct. They can create fictional stories which draw the attention of all learners, especially of young learners. Of course, before giving them this assignments, you must show them some examples accordingly to the each category that you will give them to create their stories. Since visuals and sounds are combined in digital storytelling, students will be more interested when creating their owns and watching other stories which will eventually result in a development in their foreign language learning. Also, creating something that is truly theirs always will be enjoyable and promotive for their learning process. Just do no forget to give them some time for this task, it cannot be completed in two days !

There is always a way for a better learning environment as long as you seek for it, I'll see you in my next post !

Here is our digital story :

LET IT GUIDE YOU : WEBSITES

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Hello everyone !

It is an undeniable fact that benefitting from websites for education is really common for a long time since using them is fast and costs little. Also, websites can be used anywhere and anytime as long as there is an internet connection so  you can always have an access to information which makes learning process easier. 

Language learning is one the main branches of education in which learners prefer using websites frequently. There are many different options on the net and choosing a website to guide you can be really difficult. 

In this post, I will introduce you a website that you can benefit from. It is directly related to EFL : ENGLISHGRAMMAR

This website is authored by Jennifer Frost, an English teacher located in Chiang Mai, Thailand.( Her Google Account, if you wonder). When you first enter the website, there is a long but really explanatory welcoming post so that you can have a general idea about the website. Here is the home page of it and because of the clear explanation on how to start using the website, I will not explain it again.

This website is really rich in terms of content, especially if you are looking for grammar resources. It provides you a great variety of grammar explanations, vocabulary exercises, writing guides, online exercises, etc. There are also downloadable lessons and once you download them, you will be able to study whenever you want without needing an internet connection.  There is not any listening and reading material, unfortunately. You can see the ‘’Topics’’ on the left-side of the page and choose the one that you are interested in. 

Considering the materials on it, this website is useful for both native speakers and EFL learners but as this website is entirely written in English, it is more appropriate to EFL learners who have already reached a pre-intermediate level. The target audience, on the other hand, is young adults and adults. Even though the content is also proper for teens, maybe some of them may not use it as the design of the website is not really colorful and full of different  visuals. Of course, I would not recommend this website to kids because it will surely look dull to them and it will not draw their attention.

The purpose of the website is improving your grammar skills from simple to complex and at the same time, supporting this process by developing your writing skills and helping you understand confusing words more clearly.

One of the things that might bother learners when looking for websites is the last update time to know if the website is still active. EnglishGrammar is an active website which is updated constantly and because of that there is no broken links that I came across while exploring it. Also, I did not notice specific errors related to grammar or spelling as I think because the author of the website is native.  

There is not any images on the website except the writing guide section. There is an image for each guide as shown below. However, as the target audience is mostly adults, it is not a really big problem because the older we get, the more we focus on the information, not on the pictures or animations. By the way, you will not get any images of distracting advertisements which is a plus because they can be really annoying.

As an English teacher, you can apply this website to your lesson plan in various ways. You can use this website to assist you with grammar and writing. For example, after explaining a grammar rule to the class, your students can read the related material on the website for a better understanding of the subject, then they can practice it using the exercises on the website. Also, it can help your students with their writing development, guide them step by step on a spesific writing task such as creating a short story.

Moreover, as a teacher, you can realize a different point about a specific topic that you have not known before and add it to your teaching material. Maybe you get inspired and even one day, you create your own website, why not ?

I’ll see you in my next post !

KEEPING YOU UPDATED WITH RSS

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Hello everyone !

One of the beneficial things of the internet is that you can follow blogs or websites for getting new informantion and interesting ideas about many different things. However, following various blogs and websites makes it difficult to catch up with the recent content of them. In this case, let me tell you about the RSS(Really Simple Syndication)feed as a solution for that. It is a format that keeps you informed about the continually changing contents of the blogs and websites so that you do not have to visit every single blog and website to see what is new, instead you can see all of them on one page.

There are many RSS Reader options available on the internet that you can either download or use online. I prefer using an online service which is called FeedReader.  You can sign up for it or just use your Google/Facebook account to sign in. Then, you write the names of the websites and add their feeds to the list. You can categorize these feeds according to their features  such as education/travel/fashion etc. You see the numbers next to the blogs' name and understand that there is something new. Also, the posts that you do not read remains bold so that you could see how many of them left to be read.

As you can see above, I follow several blogs and FeedReader helps me a lot keeping up with the latest posts and it is really simple to use,too. Among these blogs, I have a favourite one that I recommend for EFL teachers to check : Özge KARAOĞLU

This blog is created by Özge KARAOĞLU. She is an English teacher, teacher trainer and educational consultant. Her blog is one of the best examples of tutor blogs where you can learn how to integrate technology into education and of course in our case mostly into teaching English. Teaching with the web-based technologies is the main concern of the blog so you can find many teaching tips whose aim is to combine tech and education and create effective ways for learners in the process of language learning. She recommends different web tools and applications for vocabulary exercices/creating online stories/listening activities etc. She also provides lesson plan samples for different topics. The resources that she shares on her blog are definitely useful for EFL teachers and they encourage you to use technology in teaching and make lessons more enjoyable for your students. Explore her blog and I am sure that you will be inspired and add some of the things that she recommends to your teaching materials.

See you in my next post !

LOOKING FOR A VIEW ?

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Hello everyone !

I’m here with my second project and I worked with my friend, Ecem AKGÜL in the preparation of it.

This time our subject is about ‘’Wikis’’. A wiki is a website, consisting of several pages that anyone can edit a content.

We wrote a film review on Wikispaces. This Wiki is created by our teacher and we shared our review on a one common page. This is a rather easy assignment considering our previous one, podcasting. We did not have any difficulties in the process because the film is one of our favourites so we enjoyed writing about it. 

Working with a partner for such tasks helps you see the other aspects of the things that you do not realize and also it makes is easier to cope with the difficulties that you might have during the preparation of the task.

You can also use wikis in your EFL class as they are easy to use but still effective. You can want your students to write about their favourite books, countries they want to visit or they can create a short story in pairs, etc. They can develop creative thinking and improve their writing skills by doing that. Also, students can edit each other's pages or comment on the content so that they can share different ideas together which is something that is not always possible during the class hours.

As an example, you can check our review here. Also, the screenshot of our review is available for those who do not have an account for Wikispaces.

Hope you like it !

AUDIO FUN : PODCASTING

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Hello everyone !

Here is my very first project which is created in collaboration with my dear friend, Ecem AKGÜL

Online recording software >>

Our project is podcasting. A podcast is a digital recording audio, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player such as a computer or a mobile device.

For our podcast task, we wrote a two-minutes-long story by ourselves and recorded it. We added different sound effects for the liveliness of the story and we changed our voices accordingly to the mood of the characters to make it more realistic. Considering our choice of vocabulary and the way we pronounced them, this podcast is more suitable for A2/B1 level of EFL students/teenagers. One of the diffuculties was creating the story with the limited number of words given for it but it helps you to enhance your imagination, of course. The other one was the recording part. We recorded our voices for several times until we could give the emotions to the characters properly. However, we had so much fun in the process and this is one of the main things which makes podcasting really suitable for education.

As podcasting is a audio system, it draws students’ attention much more quickly than a classical way of teaching and makes the lesson more enjoyable and fun. It helps students enhance their listening and comprehension skills. It also provides opportunity to improve their pronunciation of words.

We see that there are many advantages of podcasting so it is quite suitable for EFL teachers to use podcasts in their classes to make lessons more efficient. In this case, our podcast can be a good example for you to use because we are sure that your students will enjoy it and you can create different activities based on this podcast. You can also create your own podcast or you can even help your students to create theirs which will increase their interest for language and will make a positive effect on their learning process.

Let’s get one step closer to the technology usage in language teaching with podcasting !

THE FIRST STEP OF THE JOURNEY

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Sharing is caring ! Here, in this blog this is exactly what I am going to do, sharing my tasks as a student and developing ideas and new ways to teach more efficiently as a teacher. One of the main focuses is technology in this process. Since we live in a technological era, students increasingly use the Internet. While they are so interested in social media and technology, as English teachers, why don't we integrate technology with education ? If you are interested in making learning and teaching process more enjoyable and efficient through technology, then I hope you can find useful materials for yourself and your students on my blog. Also, your comments are really important for a mutual improvement.

Let’s start our long and fun journey together !