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 :