lostinelt

 Sadly I couldn't join this week's session because of health conditions. But my dear teacher uploaded the recordings of the session on Dropbox so I was able to follow what happened during the lesson. We were assigned with the article "Teaching Materials" by Matsuda (2012) before the sessions. Article basically focused on criteria for choosing materials, ELT coursebooks, selecting and creating supplemental materials. So we had knowledge about the topic beforehand like the other weeks. We were also asked to bring an ELT coursebook that we had used in our middle or high schools to make some evaluations. (I will talk about it later on.)  Firstly, in the session they were seperated into groups to discuss pre and post reading questions related to the article from assignment. I had a chance to watch all groups for few minutes thanks to the recording. Most of them, like me, believed that materials played the role of the input source. They wanted ELT materials to have more glo...

 This week's topic was about digital tools. So, in the first session and the beginning of the second session we learnt about new tools to use in teaching thanks to our teacher. Tiki toki, thinglink, animoto, renderforest, edpuzzle and weebly were introduced. I had had knowledge about Thinglink before the introduction as it was included on my previous year's course. It has been one of my favourite tools since it highlights visual learning. I have always had fun while usiing Thinglink and this  is another reason for me to like it. The other tools apart from Edpuzzle  were unfamiliar to me. However, I only used Edpuzzle as a stundet and never created my own activities. So learning about it was really helpful. Tiki Toki is a timeline creating website which we thought would  be useful with teaching tenses and asking student tocreate their biographies. Learning about Weeblywas actuallyreally important for me. I, unfortunately, did not know about the process of creating a w...

  The sessions were about the impact of technology on teachers and classroom environments this week. We were separated into groups of 3-4 and asked to discuss the reflection questions that we had already answered as an assignment. During the discussion we had similar answers. However, some different ideas were shared as well. For example, I hadn't thought about negative impact of technology on kids until one of our friends mentioned. Getting new ideas and seeing things from different perspectives are the reasons that I like group works. It really helps with the way that I think. For the first time in 4 weeks, we had some time left after discussion. Our discussion was quick yet eye opening for me. Also, with the left time we kind of got to know each other better. After the group discussion, we shared our ideas as groups to the whole class. One thing I realized was that every one of us were concerned about the students' access to technological tools and connectivity. Everyone inc...

  This week we discussed about  "digital citizenship, digital literacy, information literacy, copyright and licensing" topics. The session started with a match up game which included main terms of the chapters we were assigned. 9 terms were asked to match up with their definitions and I got 7 out of 9. I confused ICT with social media literacy if I'm not wrong. Then we continued our session with discussions made in groups. In our group we mainly had the same ideas about digital literacy, digital information, the skills of information literacy, the need for digital literacy and so on. However, when it comes to deciding the reliability of a source, one of our friends said something I would have never thought in my whole life, which was "checking if  the source has gsm number or not." She explained that in medical researches if there is a number we can contact and get more information from a professional which meant they were a credible source. This is a tactic  I ...

  This week we had two main topics; collobration skills and global englishes. In t he first sessions we started with an activity. Our teacher showed us a picture and asked us to create a story with words used in the picture as a group. After discussing our stories, we were asked to create a storyline for the song we listened. I had a great time doing these tasks. Working as a group really helps me understand others and realize my own strengths in different roles . For example, I can see if I'm better at initiating the idea or creating ideas to back up the story while working collaboratively. Also noticing if I'm better at keeping notes and summarizing or keeping the track of time is possible in group work. So, doing these two activities not only made me have fun but also realize new sides of me. Last task on collaborative work was about finding the murderer. It was a fun game but I believe such games would be a lot easier in face to face education. We had few difficulties but i...

   1st Week of 21st Century Skills Training    On 6th of November, we had our first online course of 21st Century Skills Training. In the first session we discussed "Critical Thinking". Before the session, we were asked to read a text about critical thinking and consider the given 4 or 5 questions. So, in the session i, like all my friends in the project, already had an idea about critical thinking which made the tasks easier to do. At first, we were not given an explanation or definition. We played a little game where everyone gave an answer to given questions about 21st skills through our phones and we were able to see the word cloud, which also made it clear that our ideas  on 21st century skills as participants were similar. Then, we were separated into groups of 4 with different roles and asked to answer questions about critical thinkers. I think this was helpful because i could see the different perspectives in the group while explaining strong and weak cr...

Hello everyone, I will tell you about another amazing educational app. It's called Gistory. Well, the first time I tried using Gistory back in March i had really time understanding the concept but now spending more time on it I figured it out easily -or maybe not easily hehe- and I want you to take a look. So the app allows you to create interactive stories which is really useful for foreign language teaching. As you can see from the pictures below, while learning about present continues tense pictures, videos, fill in the blanks activities are given to test your knowledge. So it's really helpful for your students to test their level on the subject. It's not only the stories given by the app but you can also create your own. All you have to do is select "add a gistory" option. Then you should put a cover and choose a title. After that process, you can add chunks. For each one you can add explanations or questions with photos, videos and audio. I kinda ...