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 :)