Dear langualoggers!

I am going through such an intense and challenging project and homework period, and I apologize for this delay of 1 week. Due to this delay, I will tell you what we did in the project training 2 weeks ago. First of all, I must say that this week in the training enabled me to meet more applications that I have never seen and know. I can't wait to share with you the teaching and learning tools I've learned. I think it would be correct to start with the tools that our dear teacher Melda Yılmaz who is the owner of the project, told us:

1) Edpuzzle: We met Edpuzzle 2 years ago thanks to our university instructor Tuncer Can, if you go to the previous posts, you can see that I mentioned about the application. However, it was thanks to this project training that I started using the site completely, because plenty of interactive video assignments were given during this training process. Anyway, Edpuzzle is a website where you can create interactive videos for your lessons that make activities and topics more appealing to students. You can prepare pop-up quizzes, multiple choice and open-ended questions related to video and topic you would like to teach your students. It is really engaging tool and I highly recommend you to use that too.

2) Animoto: is a video creation tool that provide you with multiple templates to create thematic videos for your specific purposes especially super beneficial for language classrooms.

3) Renderforest: brings it to the next level and offers you such features like creating your own websites, graphics, logos, editing mockups using the templates given and videos. 

4)Thinglink: is one of my favorites since it makes is possible to create interactive videos which you can embed certain links on them to provide further and related info about the topic you teach. This not only facilitates learning and teaching but also adds fun element and make classroom subjects much appealing to students.

5)Tiki Toki: Another useful and interactive tool which helps you to create timelines for the specific topics or events you need to teach in the classroom. I think this tool is quite useful especially when adopting CLIL approach or teaching history and literature and/or visualizing particular grammar items. Do not forget to integrate audio, visual, texts and videos to enhance both your teaching and your students' learning!

6)Weebly: is such an interesting one that gives you opportunities to create websites especially if you do project-based learning as we do and therefore we will create websites focusing different areas that require attention for English language teaching and which teachers of EFL/ESL will benefit from. 

After our project intructor Melda ended introducing these beneficials, it was our turn as groups to bring in different interactive tools that enhance the use of technology in especially remote virtual learning environments.

Seesaw: is a teaching and learning platform that provides all stakeholders (even family members) to share creative activities, get instant feedback and thus make actively engagement in learning possible.

Voscreen: is an app that helps English language learners improve their language their language skills(reading&listening) through short video clips (mostly short parts from tv series and movies)

Quizlet: as its name suggesting, it is a platform that assist teachers to create working sets (quizzes, questions, games) to be studied after a topic is learned in the classroom which inevitably make students consolidate what has been learned in lessons.

Venngage: Providing merely information to make your students make sense of classroom topics is never enough. You have to visualize that information in order for them to be much more comprehensible. Venngage is a tool that offers you plenty of templates to create infographic for your language learners. Integrate infographics in your teaching, I promise your students will enjoy them! You can also use Canva but Venngage definitely has more options.

Ispring Talkmaster: Certainly one of the best tools for creating real life-like conversations especially when genre teaching. It provides you with various contexts to create your dialogs, human characters and add your voice. What more could an English teacher ask for? The only drawback we face as a group is unfortunately it only supports Windows, so if you use different operating system, you are unable to use it for now. 

As skillful teachers of 21st century, there's no other chance for us to learn how to use these tools effectively and integrate them in our teaching. However knowing them is not enough, all of these sites offer a few templates for free, some give a few free chances for a few uses, but after a while they ask you to update your membership and payment to continue to benefit from them. Because they are producing a product, they have a right to ask for money for sure. However, it is obvious that teachers, especially ones who live in third world countries cannot afford these tools which are sold at dollar rate. Therefore, I think that a fund that will enable teachers to continue using these tools should be provided by the state to all schools, so that equal opportunities will be provided in the quality of education.