Application for education...

Hi, everyone ! In today's world, we can't live without technology because it's everywhere. We can see this from the fact that even very young children have their own lastest technology mobile phones let alone adults. Actually, it is a good thing if we can turn this condition into benefit. For example, applications for English learning that can be downloaded to mobile phones. And today I will introduce one of them which is called Learn English Grammar to you.

This application developed by British Council is for English learners. It has two parts: Practice and Test. 

And in both part, you select one of the levels based on your English proficiency. 

 






For example, when you choose "Practice" and the elementary level, you will see the topics.

And let's assume that you choose the Simple Past, you will have multiple choices or different kind of questions which  will give you a chance to practice the rules of the past tenses.

And when we look at the "Tests" part, we see " arranging the words" questions as we can see from the left picture or questions requiring listening skills as in the right one 

                                     
                                                                               

                                          "fill in the blanks questions" as in below:

or the " finding the correct sentence" as in the left example and grouping the verbs according to whether its being regular or irregular form as in the right side.

As a result, I really recommend it to both English teachers and learners because I find this application very useful and enjoyable and I think your students won't be bored and will enjoy it,too. Actually, you can give some tasks from the app  for example you can ask them to complete some parts of it according to the topic you covered and the language level of your students. See you !

You can download the app from here:

Picture References:

https://www.scholarshipgrab.com
https://upload.wikimedia.org
http://call-of-mini-infinity.wikia.com/

Digital Storytelling

Hello, everybody! Today, I'm here again with a new task, actually one of the technological tools: Digital Storytelling! It was the first time my partner Mehmet Yakala  and I created this kind of task. Because of this, we were really anxious and also excited. Firstly we wrote the story and after that focusing on the characteristic features of the characters, we search on the net to find drawings of some cartoon characters and backgrounds that were sutiable for our story. After we found them, we used a copy paper, drew them on papers and it was time to colour them. Actually the most enjoyable part of the task was to colour; we felt like children. After finishing  this part, we narrated and recorded it with our cellphone's voice recorder but the process was a little bit hard; we record it at least 5 times because we were very excited and made some mistakes. And the last part of it was to take video of the story. We made the pictures play with our hands in accordance with the narration and we join the video and the track by using Movie Maker. 

Actually I was glad to do such kind of task because it requires collaborative working. Without my partner. Mehmet I wasn't be able to do it easily; we had some difficulties but we supported each other and cope with all of them. When I look from the view of teachers as a pre-service teacher, we should assign this kind of task requiring collaboration to our students so that they can learn from each other and can share their own ideas and also think creatively. I hope you will use this useful tool for your students. Here is ours named Lilly and Swan. Have fun; see you later!

Picture Source:

https://www.flickr.com

A website has an educational side.

Hi everyone! Today I will share a website named "easy world of English" which I find beneficial for learners of English. You can access it by clicking here. This website was created by a group of young experienced teachers who aims, by creating this, to provide students with flexible English program that facilitates the learning process of students.


The website includes multi-level reading, writing, listening, speaking exercises. It is suitable for all students of English actually. And the point that caught my attention is that each exercise has a "how to work with" and a welcoming part; for example, the exercise about pronunciation has a "how to work with pronunciation" part :

                                                                           
And in reading section for example, the text named Major languages in the world, there is vocabulary and expression part which makes the words that the students may not know more understandable and besides, you can listen the text if you wish.

As a result, I really liked this website and I recommend it to teachers. they can use it as a source for their students to improve language skills or they can simply suggest this to students who want to enchance their language skills after lessons. See you next time !

RSS is RRS ( Really Really Simple) !

Hi, dear all ! Today I’m going to talk about RSS (Really Simple Syndication).  RSS is a technology that we, (I mean, web users) use to access the update posts of our favourite websites or blogs we follow. With the help of this, you don’t have to check websites everytime to see whether there is any update post or not. It’s just doing it for you. And by using RSS, you can get and read other relevant information, too. If we talk about how to use it, I should say, it’s quite simple actually. Firstly, you just download any RSS reader or you can just use an online one. After, you just add links of the websites or blogs to your RSS reader and you are ready to keep the track of new posts, which I actually use an online one. You can take the advantage of it, if you use blogs. It really saves time !

Here are blogs that I follow as you can see:

This blog is created by Burcu Akyol who is teaching for 14 years and sharing her ideas about teaching and education. Actually when I saw her last post, I was really impressed because the post contains some suggesstion not only for educators but also for parents. And she also recommends a relevant video to support her ideas in the post. When I look at the general of the blog page, I see that she address followers really well. And her posts are really beneficial for educators who want to be one of the "good teachers". I strongly recommend this blog page to you. 

Picture Source:

http://www.solostream.com/

A Film Review - Sweeney Todd,The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Hello, everyone ! This week, we created a wikipage with my dear friend Mehmet Yakala. In our wikipage, we reviewed a film which we both watched and liked. Actually, as anyone may have some difficulties in starting a new task, we did so, especially deciding on which points we will focuse on, as you know when you start talking about  the thing you have already known every piece of it, you will be very indecisive and confused Our wikipage also includes the plot of the movie, and whether we recommend or if we do, why?. If we have to talk about wikipage, we must say that they are very useful because you can share your thoughts about anything and you can also have some ideas about the things which other people wrote. Creating the wikipage and reviewing the film we have chosen was very enjoyable although it was a little bit difficult to make due to our inexperiences in this kind of task. While reviewing the movie, we worked very collaboratively actually, we supported each other and evaluated our task in every step of it and decide what was to be the next one. Actually this kind of thing makes us collaborate with each other and gives a chance to know your collaborator and his ideas more closely and better. To sum up, using this and this kind of technological tools will be for the benefit of students and broaden their viewpoint and make them think in a way that actually they can't on theirselves. We really recommend wikis to be used in the classrooms. We hope you find this one that we did useful for yourself and enjoy it!

Here is our film review of the Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. You can simply read by clicking here.




Picture Source:
http://www.windsorpubliclibrary.com/

Colourful Balloons

Hi everyone! Today I made a podcast for the first time and I hope you enjoy and find it useful. I created this podcast for intermediate learners. I worked with my dear friend Mehmet Yakala in this making process. Actually, I had some difficulties in finding a suitable place for the recording and adding sound effects to it simultaneously and besides these, I was really excited because it was my first experience in this area. So, I strongly recommend this kind of activity to all teachers who want to teach English in an entertaining way.

Hope you like it!


Audio recording and upload >>

Picture Source:
http://www.dreamstime.com/

Welcoming Post

    Subscribing to a blog and reading them generally make people feel bored because they prefer photos or videos rather than long posts. In my blog which contains many videos and photos beside posts, I hope you will find different kind of information that is useful for second language learners.As you keep reading my posts, your ideas about teaching and learning a foreign language will change positively.

                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                               
 To be continued...

Picture source:

http://www.gotmesh.org/
https://media.giphy.com