Farewell!

Goodbye Friends!

            What a wonderful semester! Time passed and this year comes to past just like the other years! I have done lots of task and completed assignments for this semester. I will summarize what I have completed and learned, as well as I will tell my strengths and weaknesses.

            The course’s first assignment was creating a timeline which was an easy and a quick task. Secondly, we created a corpus which is a kind of a complex language dictionary. Thirdly, we made a flipped classroom video which can be considered as an asynchronous video that aims online teaching. Then, AR/VR integrated teaching material had been developed. Lastly, we created a WebQuest task which is sort of online tasks requires to follow guidelines according to some webpages and online platforms. While doing most of these tasks, I did not work alone. My classmate Burak and I worked together to offer our students these materials.

            For the evaluation part, I inspired by some questions I found on the internet. I will use the question from this page to make my evaluation.

• The instructor stimulated my interest in the subject.

Yes, she did everything to make the topic look catchy.

• The instructor managed classroom time and pace well.

Besides traffic issues (that she has no power over it) there were no such a problem.

• The instructor was organized and prepared for every class.

She the most prepared instructor I have ever had. She always ready and knows what she will do.

• The instructor encouraged discussion and responded to questions.

She encouraged us, but she should have known that our generation is very depressive, and our anxiety could be triggered so easily, I would like to see that she would use more passive ways to involve us to her class.

• The instructor demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the subject.

There is a reason why she always give such technology related courses.

• The instructor appeared enthusiastic and interested.

As I had had a teacher who has his courses like he were in a funeral house to normal “enthusiastic” teachers. I know that difference, and I think she is really interested in her courses in natural way rather than seeming like roleplaying.

• The instructor used a variety of instructional methods to reach the course objectives.

Her aims and objectives were clear, and her methods were understandable. Just I wish she would be more volunteer to offer more options in her assignments.

• The instructor challenged students to do their best work.

I usually do not like challenging task; however, her challenges what makes me improved. I believe that even there were some hard parts in those tasks, getting over them gave me significant experience.

            As for the last part, I will demonstrate my strengths and weaknesses. My best strength is I think I am able to understand quickly that what my instructor really wants me to do. I can figure out fast, and complete my tasks. Besides this, If there are some mistakes, I can redesign my work accordingly to feedback I am given. My worst weakness is my anxiety. If a task requires to show myself (not even my face but my body silhouette or voice), it becomes so hard for me to complete as I overthink about what people could say about my work. So, by the light of this knowledge, the easiest task was timeline as it merely required any group work or effort. And the hardest task was for me is the flipped classroom task as it required to dub the classroom with our real voice.

            Overall, I really enjoyed and appreciated this course and really believe it gave me very useful experience. I also feel myself lucky for having a good instructor for such a course. I hope I will get more knowledgeable about using technology in my classes easily.

WebQuest Experience

 

Our WebQuest Experience!

            Hi All! I hope you are doing well! I am here with my last assignment this semester. And this time, I and my classmate Burak created a WebQuest for you. As you wonder what it is a WebQuest, here the description comes: A WebQuest is an online learning activity where students follow a structured inquiry process to explore a specific topic using internet resources. It typically involves tasks, resources, and evaluation criteria, fostering critical thinking and collaborative skills.

            While we are creating this masterpiece our reference has been “Ortaöğretim Genel Müdürlüğü”’s “Hazırlık İngilizce” which is one of the interactive coursebook it offers. In that book there are units, and we chose unit 14 “Travel”. We created our WebQuest in the theme of traveling, and our work mainly focuses on exploring. We used Zunal for our WebQuest.

            As I mentioned before, this was a pair work, and I and Burak created same WebQuest with different blogpost. (You can see his post by clicking here.) Also, you can see our work by clicking here. When it comes to write about our process, it was getting easier and easier. As we get aware of how we can complete our task more fluid and organized, I have not faced crucial difficulties during creating this task. Our strength is we did everything according to rules we had given. And our weakness is we might spend so much time on details. Overall, it was an enjoyable task, and if I had the chance, I would use WebQuest in my class.

My Corpus Experience!

Using Corpus in Language Teaching

    Hi All! It's me again.

    This time I assigned to use a corpus and creating a teaching material to use in my classroom. If you ever wonder what it is a corpus, I can simplfy it by defining it as a database of a language.

    To be honest this task has been very confusing because interface of most of the corpura (plural of corpus by the way) is very sloppy, and they seem very far from catching my attention as a teacher besides my students for now. If you interested in  taking a glance at the corpus I used, you can click here.

    I completed this task with my fellow teacher candidate friend. We took our inspriation from MEB English course book. You can see the example exercise below. We created an in-class material that make our students to use corpus we showed them how to use. They would need the corpus not only for doing the exercise from MEB book but also for the worksheet we integreated as well. You can see the material we created by clicking here.

    Even if this task was confusing to complete, it was a good experince to learn things such as corpora are exist. They make you feel very professional when you learn how to use them correctly. But when it comes to if I want use this material in future, my answer is no as there has to be much more simplier way to make my students inductively learn by their own in my opinion.

    Our process of preparing this material was very slow at first. After getting feedback from our teacher we finalize our work much more easier and fluently, so we integrated our focus and theme each other very well.

    And my opinion about how data driven learning could benefit language learning is that it is must not an option in our times. "Data administration" is an undeniable concept for our generation and no doubtly it has to be integrated in education as well. So corpus learning is a way our yeacher showed us. However as I said I would try finding another way rather than this method as I do not like it very much.

    Before forgetting, you can also read about this experience from my friend's blog right here.

Timeline!

 

A Quick Look of History of Teachnolohy in Education and its Basic Contribution to Language Learning 

    Hi Again! This time I assigned to create a timeline based on advacement of technology in education. A short, timeline which inclueded basic steps in language learning. History of language learning is improving more rapidly day by day and it is very fascinating to witness the process.

    I liked to desing my own (not completely my own, to be honest I used a prototype I liked a lot) timeline using Canva was a nice experience, I feel I get used to use these kind of staff more and more, and I very like ideea of being able use more by the time I graduated to serve in real teaching environment.

    I did not like the there were not such a wide range of knowledge, almost every site I visited and every articles I scannned more or less offered similar facts. I was suggested to check some articles which my teacher imformed but I was unable to reach them as I have not had these materials yet.

    In the end creating a digital timeline was a good improvement in my opinion and if you want to take a closer look of my infographic you can go there clicking here.

Hi Again!

 LONG TIME NO SEE, RIGHT?

    Hi all! I returned to post something in my blog again...

    Yes, there is long time you see no post from me, but now I will be posting about educational material and technology integration. I hope it will be good experience both for you and for myself.

Video-project Experience!

 

I will tell the truth; this task has been the hardest one I was asked to do. I did this task with my dear classmate Burak Haşlak (you can see his blog here.) We did not have so much fun while doing this task. Because of the hardness of the task, I did not enjoy doing it. Unfortunately, I could not use or give the same task to my future students. By the way, you can see our product here.

We have done our task with our own video editing programs. Majorly, editing was part of Burak, and I took the responsibility for the script and written works. The good points about our tools are they had no cost (at least for us) and we had no trouble after finishing the task. The bad point about the tools as it was very hard to figure it out. (Fortunately, we finally learned the necessary part we used).

I think the digital story is not bad; however, I will not ever never give my students such a task as homework or out-class task. It is another type of must-be-done-in-classroom task. Because of the hardness (I mean only those who took courses on how to create such things can easily do these tasks without facing any obstacle.) In my opinion, giving such a task to my students might make them take a dislike.

Nevertheless, seeing the final product made both me and my friend happy and relaxed. Completing such a task may lead me to greater success. Yes, it was hard and took so much afford but in the end, everybody (including the fish) was happy.

Welcome To My Blog

 

WELCOME ALL!

Here you are... Welcome to my blog. It is very nice to see you here. In this blog, I aim to show you new technologies for education and some methods for teaching and learning. I also would like to share my personal work about everything I find useful for students or another teacher.

As a future teacher candidate, I would like to share mostly language learning techniques, tips for skills, and maybe grammar knowledge. I also will share the works I will be given and maybe other works like not about English language learning but cultural, interesting, or humorous things I think I should share and can be kept for later use.

I created a blog because I think blogs are easy to use, rearrange and examine. My blog will be easy to reach and read, and I will be always looking for new things I learned to share and write over.

Finally, this blog will be English and mostly about English Language Teaching. As I am going to be an English teacher, I believe that English is one of the most important languages one should know. I think this blog will be helpful both for me and for my readers.