Today I would like to share a link with you which will direct you to my other web page. There, you will be able to find detailed information about Socrative - a very useful and free web application to engage and assess the students. Here you have the link: Ahu's ELT World - Learning English with Technology.
Please let me know if you find the web site useful. Any comments on how to use Socrative in English classrooms are more than welcome!
It’s been
quite a while since my last blog entry. It was a good but fairly short summer
for me. Being my favorite season, summers are always short and I can’t stock
enough sunshine to keep me warm during winter.
I have
started blogging as a part of my classwork but this year I am planning to write
just for the sake of writing and sharing different and new ideas in the field
of ELT.
During the 2015-2016
Fall semester I will be an Erasmus student in Krakow, Poland. I will continue studying English Language in Tischner European University. Therefore, I am considering
to share new ways of approaching to students and English language in my blog.
In this digital storytelling project, I decided to introduce my best friend Zeynep. To be there in good times and to turn bad times into cheerful memories, Zeynep is an expert!As an emotional human being, I went through series of emotions while I am telling our story. You probably will be able to feel them. It is not possible to share the events of 21 years of friendship under two minutes, yet I tried my best. I enjoyed doing this video, I hope you will enjoy watching it, as well! Once again, I want to thank Zeynep for being such an amazing friend. Words fall short!
This
week I am going to introduce a digital story telling tool for iPad users which
I enjoy using: Toontastic. You can create your cartoon story and share it with family
and loved ones by simply using Toontastic. Not to worry if you do not have
an iPad but an iPhone. You can check Toontastic
Jr. Pirates out by clicking the image! That is a lot of fun, too!
At
the beginning, you see the Story Arc screen where you decide how you will
structure your story, originally divided into five scenes: Setup, Conflict,
Challenge, Climax and Resolution. You can re-order the scenes or add more if
you wish.
For
each of the sections, you choose a setting first by either selecting from the
pre-designed settings or creating (drawing, taking/using a photo) your own as
you would like.
The next step is choosing your
characters and props. You can choose from templates, draw your ProtoToy or use
your own photo. Yes, you can be the hero/ine of this story as well!
1-2-3
Action! After deciding on the setting and characters, now it is time to animate
your characters and vocalize them. Place, scale and rotate your characters as
you wish and then click “Start Animation”. Move, animate and vocalize your characters,
and when you are done, press “Stop Animation”.
Music
is very important for realizing the emotion; therefore, you may want to choose
a piece of music for your scene. Decide on the mood of the scene and level of the mood. Happy or ecstatic? Surprised or shocked? You can
pick the most suitable one!
When all your scenes are finished, you give a it a title as well as adding your name. Now it is time to enjoy your story that you directed!
Toontastic
promotes imagination and it can especially be used with young learners efficiently. For example, the students' task is to change the ending of a well-known story or add to it, in groups of 3 or 4. They pick their favorite story and continue the story after the “they lived
happily ever after” part. First, they write their stories and to make things more cheerful they can use Toontastic! They will be using their creativity and working on their pronunciation, in addition to producing written texts. New settings can be created as the characters move in/out
and travel around. They can introduce new characters; characters may get old or
fat… It all depends on the creativity of the students.
Below you can watch my sample
cartoon. In order to show as much settings and characters as possible, I used irrelevant
settings (I even drew one of the settings!) and characters and there is no
story in general. I hope you will enjoy it!
Please let me know if
you use this app in a different way, because I really like it and I want to use
it productively in classrooms.
You can also watch the trailers of Toontastic and Toontastic Jr. Pirates:
To find out more about Toontastic and actually download it with iTunes, please click on the icon below!
This week I want to introduce you a
very useful website for learning and practicing English: Duolingo – a free
science-based language learning platform. The teaching method heavily depends
on translation. While translating from and to your native language, you learn
and practice how to pronounce and spell the words and to form sentences.
Taking your native language –or
another language you are competent- as basis, Duolingo gives you the option of
learning various languages, besides English. For Turkish speakers, it only
offers English courses, but German will be added soon. For English speakers,
Duolingo has more languages to offer. For example, I use this site to learn Spanish
and refresh my Italian. Interestingly, in the near future it will even be
offering fictional languages like Dothraki and Klington.
Duolingo was created by crowdsourcing
pioneer Luis von Ahn, PhD and Severin Hacker, PhD and was launched in January
2013. Today, it has a community of 20 million users. More than 20,000 of these
users applied to be volunteers for contributing the process of creating
language courses. Due to its strict selection process only 3 to 5 bilingual
contributors can work in the creation process.
After you choose the language you
would like to study, Duolingo gives you the opportunity to start from the
beginning, or to take a test to determine your proficiency level; you continue
accordingly. You set yourself a goal to reach each day and your coach reminds
you to come back if you do not show up for a few days. It keeps track of your
progress, as well as motivating you to reach your goal.
For demonstration purposes I chose to
learn English as a Turkish speaker and I began with Basics 1 as you can see in
the screenshot below. In addition to providing hints and notes to help you
understand the topic, Duolingo offers test where you translate words or
sentences from Turkish to English and vice versa, listen the phrases and write
them down, fill in the blanks and pronounce the words. It may seem like a piece
of cake at the beginning, but trust me; it gets quite tough as you progress.
I really like using Duolingo and find it very
useful for learning a language. There are a couple of reasons why I chose
Duolingo, among the other language teaching sites. First of all, I can use it
on my smart phone when I am stuck in traffic on a bus or on my computer. I set
daily goals and I try to keep up with them, or get an e-mail from Duo, reminding
me to study. Both the application and the website are user friendly. What I
really appreciate is that, there are no hidden fees, Duolingo is totally free. Frankly speaking, I did not have any problems
using the website therefore I do not have any weaknesses in mind to declare. I
would definitely suggest teachers to recommend this website to their students
to practice their English because of the above mentioned reasons. Teachers may
turn the usage of this site into a challenging competition and the students may
try harder to make a decent progress.
If you wish to learn more about Duolingo, you can watch the video below.
After
the podcast project, this week we have been introduced to the Wiki projects. As a
class we have a Wiki page called “My Favorite Book”. We, as students, each have
our own page with the name of our favorite books. This is the first time I have created a Wiki page. I guess it will not be the last one, since
I enjoyed writing my Wiki page very much.
Creating
a Wiki page is fairly easy, it takes just a few minutes to create it, as the name wiki-wiki suggests, meaning quick in Hawaiian. The only thing one needs is to sign up for free with a user
name and password. Then, s/he will have the authority to create, edit or even delete an entry on Wiki pages. Since thousands of people contribute to the Wiki pages, it
is possible to find answers for almost anything. Yet, because of the exact same
reason the reliability of the answers should be questioned and crosschecked to get the maximum benefit.
I really have hard time when I am asked two things:
My favorite book and my favorite cartoon character. Being a bookworm, it is
really hard for me to choose a single one from all of the great books I have
read so far. My all time favorite is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald
Dahl. Yet, for this project I decided to describe another book.
Here
is my Wiki page with one of my favorite books. Enjoy!
This week we, my partner
Buse and I, prepared a podcast using Vocaroo – Online voice recorder. First, we chose
our characters: Cinderella and Lady Tremaine, also known as the Wicked
Stepmother. Then, we wrote the chant –which you can find below- and finally
sang and recorded it. Our main purpose in doing so was to create an example for
our students who will also experience writing and singing chants.
Before we explain the task, we will
introduce the class chants along with other types of poems. In the task we
created, we want the students to express their own ideas, feelings and opinions
using new vocabulary. We chose chants instead of a paragraph since they will be
required to write paragraphs in many occasions for the rest of their lives! In
addition, they will need to find words which rhyme and use at least three
antonym pairs, as we did in the example (question-answer, always-never, and
black and white), while writing their chants.
In the task we prepared, we ask the
students to decide on their favorite cartoon character, take a photo with
her/him if possible (if not, a photo with the toy of the character is also fine
or acceptable), imagine the character’s past and write a chant with 5-6 lines about
a specific instance of that past. Afterwards, each student will sing it, record
it and send the photo and the chant to us via e-mail. We are thinking about bringing
all of them together and creating a totally different story, so they will be
able to listen to each other’ stories as well. Our students do not know this
little surprise we are planning yet. For now, we are looking forward to listening
to their podcasts!
While preparing this task, we kept
in mind the difficulties of creating a podcast. Although we did not face any,
the students may have some technical problems such as connection, microphone,
or recording problems. Fortunately, we have a computer lab at school so if the
students cannot succeed at home, they can always try at school or ask for help.
On the other hand, creating a podcast, they will listen to themselves, check
out the pronunciation of the new vocabulary, pay attention to the word choice,
and become confident about the way they sound after listening our example!
We hope our students will enjoy
doing this task as much as we did and create lovely podcasts!
