Elif's Blog

       Hello!! It has been a long time since my last post. Now I am a 3 grade student in ELT. I passed my Educational Technologies course and now I am going to use my blog for my new course; "Current Issues in ELT." For this week's assignment, my friend Büşra Hazal and I prepared a corpus-based worksheet. Our worksheet included steps and activities that encouraged student and teacher corpus use. Our grammar focus on the worksheet was frequency adverbs based on unit 4 from MEB's prep class book. Our vocabulary focus was comparing always and never and their uses. Our main objective was to prepare a worksheet for students to practice adverbs of frequencies and integrate corpus work into their learning process. After completing this worksheet our students will be more acquainted with corpus and how it can be used. They will also be able to start using frequency adverbs in sentence frames. However, there are also some difficulties and problems students might face while ...

  Hello! Our term is ending and my journey in my Educational Technologies class is coming to an end. Before this class, I did not know that technology can actually be very integrated with ELT. With this class, I learned that there are actually many tools that can be used by teachers to improve their students' learning process. I also learned that time is changing and each day technology is becoming a very important part of our education system. My English teachers in the past were only using limited tools and some of them were not using any. With this course, I learned some different and entertaining tools that I can use with my future students. This course also improved my technological and collaborative skills. Learning how to use a different tool every week and usually working with a peer or peers on an assignment taught me a lot. Our first assignment was to create a blog page that belongs to us. This was something that I have never done before. That is why it was very excitin...

      Hi! This week in my Educational Technologies we were assigned to create a digital poster. We had two options. I chose to create a movie poster. Our duty was to create a movie poster about a book that we have read. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is one of my favorite books. That is why I decided to create a movie poster about it. The book is about Arthur Dent's escape from Earth by hitchhiking with an alien named Ford Prefect just before the end of the world. I used Canva to create my movie poster. Because I have used Canva before with my friend Büşra Hazal for our digital story assignment and I am more familiar with it. Creating things with Canva and using Canva is very easy and entertaining. Canva's templates helped me a lot while creating my poster. After following the instructions of my assignment my poster was ready. I would definitely give a task like this to my future students. Because creating a movie poster based on a book can make them enjoy book...

Hello!! This week in my Educational Technologies class we learned the rules of digital storytelling, its use in English language teaching, and how to create one. We had three options for our assignment. My friend Büşra Hazal and I chose to create a fictional story. We used Canva while creating our digital story. It was very easy to open a profile and use Canva. Also, I believe the best thing about using Canva was being able to work on the same thing from different computers at the same time with my friend Hazal. However, it was a little bit hard to add a soundtrack to our story and we had a hard time figuring out how to adjust the volume of the soundtrack. Using digital storytelling in English language teaching classes has many benefits for students because it appeals to both visual and audio learners and can help learners to focus on the lesson and the subject better. But creating an authentic and beneficial digital story might be difficult for some teachers and students who were as...

Hello everyone today I am going to talk about our last assignment. We were assigned to create a podcast for our Educational Technologies class. We had four options for the content of our podcasts. My friend Hazal and I decided to create a sound-rich story. Our podcast was about a girl who was innocently playing in a playground before hearing an evil clown's laughter from the forest and the events that happens after that. My friend Hazal and I started our homework by creating our story then we recorded our voices. Finally, we added sound effects to our story and completed our assignment. Creating the story and using our imaginations was so much fun. However, it was a little bit hard to add sound effects and record our voices. I would definitely give this assignment to my future students. Because I think creating a podcast, working in pairs, and recording their voices are some benefits that encourage and improve students English knowledge and language skills. Also hearing their voi...

      Hello Everyone!!! This week my friends Salih, Büşra Hazal, and I were assigned to do collaborative work on Padlet. First, we created a wall on Padlet, then we chose a problem from the list that was given to us. We chose unemployment. After that, we started creating a KWL chart on Padlet. KWL chart is a chart that consists of three parts. The first part is the part where you write what you already know about the topic. The second part is what you want to know and the third part includes what you learned. We filled each part about the unemployment issue in Turkey. In what we learned part we found answers to our questions from what we want to know part. This way we became more knowledgeable about the unemployment issue and how it is handled by the government.      During our project; Padlet helped us to create a chart collaboratively. Me and my friends loved working and spending time together. It is very easy to create a Padlet account and start usi...

 Hello Everyone!! This week for my Educational Technologies class we were assigned to watch a movie and write a review about it. My friend Büşra Hazal Sert and I watched Lucy and we wrote a movie review about it on our class wiki page. Lucy is a science fiction and action movie aired in 2014 and it is about a woman (Scarlett Johansson) who achieved to use 100% of her brain capacity which made her solve the mysteries of the universe and humankind. Büşra Hazal and I could not stop laughing in some scenes because they were looking very unreal. However it was a great and interesting movie with awards and nominations that everyone should watch. Especially the visual effects were really good for a movie from 2014. I had great time using our class wiki page and working with Hazal. Wiki page was easy to use and being able to edit and write our comments about a movie we watched or we want to watch in the future was very entertaining. Using wikis as collaborative writing tools is a really ...