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.

 Hi everyone,

This week in the project training we have discussed the place of technology in education, its importance and mostly the benefits of integration of technology into our teaching. We have additionally learned new tools that we can exploit in our language classrooms some of them including which we were previously introduced such as wordwall, wordart, linoit, wordclouds that can add interaction and fun element in our teaching using templates they offer to create activities, input, materials, and so on. We are also introduced with concepts like digital native and digital immigrant that were coined to identify people who were born to the world of the internet and computers (digital natives) and people who were born before that era of technological improvements (digital immigrants). I personally realized once again how important it it to keep pace with my future students's vast knowledge on using technology and creating classroom / online activities according to their interests is also important in order not to lose their in the subject and even language learning. Integration of technological tools, materials, having blending lessons rather than merely traditional lessons is a natural requirement of the new world that we live in and the role of globalization is huge and therefore we, as teachers of English as a global language, should always update ourselves to keep up with innovations and new teaching&learning methods, and especially the language that keeps on changing and evolving. 

Apart from these, we also met with presentation and acitivity creation tools that can be used in preparing/planning lessons such as glogster, prezi, and canva. You can click on the links and discover more about them. 

 Hello again after two long weeks langualoggers. At the end of very exhausting midterm weeks, we started to continue our education where we left off. The topic of the 3rd week was digital literacy, which is one of the 21st century skills and also includes information literacy. It was an online training week where we, as prospective English teachers, discussed the meaning of digital literacy, the concept of digital native, having a critical attitude when we reach digital information, and the importance of measuring the reliability and accuracy of the data we are looking for through various filters. Actually, our meeting has started with an online match-up activity which we are all introduced with a new educational tool called wordwall through which we matched related concepts with their definitions. Furthermore, we also learned how we can be critical users of the internet by evaluating information, its accuracy, safety, or checking if it is biased or relevant, etc. That is, in a century where information is so abundant and acces to information is very easy, we have to be conscious users, especially as prospective English teachers. We have to be aware of our rights and also try not to violate others' by paying attention copyright issues (Creative Commons, see if you are interested in getting licences for your creative works) 

We also talked about concepts to be careful about that are under the frame of digital literacy such as cyberbullying, sexting, grooming, online radicalization and access to extremist material, professional conduct in digital environments and digital data security. These can be issues that we may encounter frequently as teachers and we need to pay close attention as active internet users or digital natives and most importantly to be aware of our legal rights and limitations. 

I personally learned plethora of useful terminology and concepts that I will benefit from in my way to become a responsible internet user and content consumer. When creating a language learning material, activity, or a task, I should be meticulous in my choice of content from digital sources because a content is free to access, this does not mean it is free to reuse. Therefore, when using an already produced content, I need to be careful to use a copyright licensed one or I have to state who originally owns the content and where it is taken from. In addition, when creating my own content, I should as well be careful about getting licence for my work, that is, I have to know my legal rights very well and use the content and the internet purposefully.

Lastly, keeping up with the digital world brings many elements with it. The easy access to information does not mean that we can consume or use them that much. Therefore, being digitally native or digital citizen do not only require/offer easy access to information through digital means, but also require evaluation and critical attitude, which is a competence that enable us to distinguish the accuracy, reliability and quality of that information after accessing it. Not only that, but also being aware of the fact that there are some legal costs and responsibilities when using information, so it is also the responsibility of the people we call digital citizens. Therefore, we can only say that a user is digitally literate when these are combined. As teacher candidates and content consumers and producers, we must first be digital citizens that will set an example for our students and guide and project them to achieve these gains.

 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 :)

Hello once again Langualoggers!

I don't know if you checked my Gamification post but if you did, you must have seen the coursera link. Yes, you're right, today I will be telling about these kind of Massive Open Online Courses where you can enroll courses with various content and which fits best to your interests, of course. 

Coursera, Udemy, EdX and Udacity are some of the most common online course websites. They are usually free, otherwise require a small fee for the certificate but even if you do not pay the required amount, you still have access to course materials and video lectures but you cannot have the certificate. -although sometimes it is possible 

I have also taken course from Coursera "Learning How to Learn" from instructors Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski and learned many useful things that I can make use both in my future career and personal life. The course have lasted for 4 weeks but there are many other options and courses who have shorter duration for completion.

I liked very much the idea of taking online courses on different topics that I am interested in, therefore I will definitely habitualize it!

Since I haven't paid any fee, I do not have a concrete certificate but I have received email from my course instructors that you can see below:

Hello once again dear language enthusiasts,

Today I'd like to suggest another useful website MindMeister which you or your students can create mind maps on whatever topic they wish or a complex concepts that they challange to understand to reduce the incomprehenbility.

Mind maps are always useful and rather than drawing them on the paper, creating these maps digitally and adding colorful details on them are much more beneficial and helpful for one's learning and even teaching process, I guess. Creating these maps also enables learner to remember topics easier.

You can go to the link and may be think of a concept that you hardly understand and create a useful mind map involving certain key concepts about the idea you're trying to grasp. Then check if you get the idea better...
  https://www.mindmeister.com/folders?gclid=Cj0KCQjwla7nBRDxARIsADll0kB1hBhdzUsfhP6fFG9_Ce_rmYW05LyWs96qATjiuiH8h3VyUyPI8WIaAiW2EALw_wcB&utm_campaign=world_en_search&utm_content=mm&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google

I've prepared a basic map which belongs to Kachru's identification of World Englishes:

https://mm.tt/1273753195?t=NJTpjSqyw5