Hello once again Langualoggers. As I promised, I'm here again to tell you my experiences about the research project I recently participated in. We have made our second Zoom meeting last week on Friday and it was an exciting one which we were introduced with a new online learning website and also we did some activities and discussions.

As the theme of the research project is 21st Century Skill, our focus was on Collaboration skill this week (Last week it was critical thinking skill) and we have been introduced with a website https://en.linoit.com which we can facilitate our collaborative activities with and which also we can make use of stickers and canvases that help us create meaningful activities in/outside the classroom.

Besides its usefulness in teaching, we, as prospective did also some activities that boosted our collaborative skills. Firstly, we were shown and an angel image with a plenty of words on it and asked what they might be stand for. (They were the words that continue the lyrics of a song,"Ed Sheeran A Team" Our researcher teacher divided us into private Zoom groups and asked us to make up a story together by picking up 15 words from the image. We actually did a good job in creating a romantic and a poetic story together. That activity was a more of a warm up of a team work, as well. In the second part, we did another collaborative group work in which our aim was to 'find the murderer'. Previously, we have been already given some cards, -statements of the suspects of the murder on them- and we tried to make sense of each statement, going one by one, sharing ideas on who can be the murderer, etc. Unfortunately time was not enough for us so we ended up with 0 finding. It was really fun anyway. In two of these group activities, negotiating ideas, sharing anecdotes and trying to come up with a single work in relation with many contributions among group members was great to me. However both of these activities required more time and the time constraints were a problem to me and to my group members. Perhaps we need to develop our time management skills the time that is allocated to the activities should be considered as well.

We also discuss last week GELT, that is, Global Englishes Language Teaching, its importance, a need for integrating it to our teaching methodology, so on. If you are not familiar with the term, you can check "Kachru's notion of World Englishes". GELT requires much attention, especially in an increasingly globalizing world that there several types, ways of how English is spoken and therefore myriads of dialects, accents, etc. We cannot expect everyone to speak an identical English since everyone brings their own culture, customs, their first language into the global language, English. 

I have to say that I am really appreciated that I am part of this project and it has really contributed to my awareness both of teaching and of my perception of other notions, skills that require much more improvement. 

 Dear Langualoggers! It is really nice to be back after such a long time. I am sorry that I was not able to write any entry since one of my dear professors Tuncer Can's classes.

Now, I am here again for a different and a good reason. I have participated in a research project on "21st Century Skills" initiated by the researcher teacher Melda Yılmaz. It will be qualitative research; therefore, we are, as participant university students, attending weekly discussions on Google Classroom and Zoom  meetings. The project training which will continue for 5 weeks just started last week and I would like to talk about here as well my personal experiences, opinions on certain subjects that we covered and will be covering and also what I have learnt including some conceptions and the new digital tools that we can integrate into our future teaching methodologies.

Last week, on Friday, I have learnt about the conceptions of Critical Thinking Skill and English as a Global language, and we made discussions on them in groups of 4 and at the end with whole attendees and the researcher teacher. The one thing I have learnt about Zoom that we can actually divide into specific groups and have our talk privately. It was really interesting because before that I was not aware of that Zoom has such a feature although I am familiar with it for half a year due to the global pandemic.

As I said earlier, firstly we had our discussions on critical thinking, starting from what it means, who can be good critical thinkers and who cannot, what are the aspects of critical thinking, etc. It was really contributed to my understanding of the concept itself as well as other constituents of it. Then, we had another discussion on the status of English as a Global language which earlier we are assigned to read a related reading written by one of the famous linguists David Crystal, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=5Kvs8SxN8mc (you can also find the video that we have watched before training session, if you are interested) 

One of the tools that we have used in the training was Polleverywhere (which reminded me of Kahoot) that via we had a competition at the end of the session on what we have learnt so far. It was such an engaging and entertaining experience though. 

I will be updating here every week on what we have done in our weekly discussions and what I personally learn, think and my reflections on the topics, concepts and possible realizations of these sources in the modification of my teaching. Please take good care of yourself in this critic period of time :)