elifkaragoz

[elifkaragoz]

Hello Everyone, it’s me again!!!🥰

Today i want to talk about AR (augmented reality) and a task me and my friend, Derya Geçirgen, just had finished . Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that blends the real world with virtual elements like sounds and digital images, allowing interaction between the two.

Now, let’s move on to our task . Basically,we created an augmented teaching material about Berlin. We included two landmarks, a museum, and another famous feature of the city. We used a QR code to share a 3D model of the Brandenburg Gate and added questions to the worksheet. For the Natural History Museum, we also provided a 3D model for students to explore and answer questions. Since we couldn’t find a 3D model of the Berlin Cathedral, we used a YouTube video instead.

Berlin is well-known for its street foods; therefore, we included a QR code on the worksheet which contains a video of two tourists trying different street foods. Students were asked to watch the video and answer related questions. Finally, we had them write a letter to a close friend about these places, incorporating what they learned from the activities.

Since our students are in a high school preparatory class and their level is A2, we chose videos and questions that are suitable for their level. The most challenging part of the task was finding 3D images of landmarks and a museum for any city. As a result, we kept changing cities and searching for videos and 3D images of landmarks and museums. Once we found our city and the landmarks , the assignment started to seem like very fun. My group partner and I worked together to prepare the worksheet using Canva. Finally, we created an ASSURE lesson plan for our material.

We used the food-related video on YouTube, the 3D museum image on Google Arts and Culture, and the 3D image of the Brandenburg Gate on the CyArk website. I think integrating augmented reality materials into English lessons, makes the topics more interesting for students. I also believe that experiencing a different kind of reality will strengthen the knowledge. So, as a future English teacher, I will definitely integrate AR based materials into my lessons .

Here you can see our material

Here you can see our lesson plan

Take care💕💕💕

[elifkaragoz]

Hello everyone!

Recently i’ve learned a new classroom approach called “ flipped classroom approach” . I would define this approach simply as “reverse classroom”. In this approach teachers prepare and provide educational materials like videos, instead of giving lectures during class time. Students watch and study these videos at home and they do activities, discussions and group work during the class time. I think this approach promotes self-study and independent learning skills. Moreover, it creates a time for deeper analysis of topics in the classroom. Since in the class time students produce the information instead of consuming it, it enhances their critical thinking skills and creativity. However, i think there are some disadvantages of this approach. For example limited or no access to technology is a serious problem when it comes to this approach. It also requires teachers to spend a good amount of time to prepare materials that are suitable for their students. It may interfere with their personal lives. Likewise, students need to spend a good amount time on this pre-class materials, which can be tiring for them.

To understand this approach better, our teacher gave us a task. Basically our teacher asked us to choose a grammar topic from the PROGRESS Preparatory Class Student's Book by MEB. This task required us to plan how to teach it by explaining the rules (form) and why/when it is used (function). We needed to work with our partners and narrate a 5- minute video in English. Our teacher asked us to use visuals, texts to make the videos more appealing. For creating the video, our teacher made some tool recommendations and we chose the tool called “Animaker”. Animaker is a tool for creating animated videos with characters, text, and backgrounds using simple drag-and-drop features. Finally we are asked to prepare a quiz so students can practice the topic. Our teacher also made some tool recommendations regarding the quizzes and we chose “Wordwall” . Wordwall is a fun tool for creating interactive quizzes and games like matching or multiple-choice for fun learning activities.

For this task, i work with my beloved friends Ata Çakmakçı and Derya Geçirgen. We chose the “Object Pronouns” topic. I can say that narrating the video was mostly fun however, sometimes i didn’t like the tone of my voice and had to re-record. I must admit that this part was kinda tiring. I’ve took the “exercise” part of the video and preparing the exercises was quite fun. However, the tool we used was kinda slow so i had some challenges regarding the time. For the quiz part, each of us prepared questions that are suitable for our target audience (A1-A2). We didn’t have a hard time preparing the questions since we know the topic well.

Overall, i really enjoyed this task and i might use this approach in my future teaching. I believe it has more advantages than disadvantages.

Take care everyone, have nice day🥰

Here you can watch our flipped classroom video

Here you can check the quiz we prepared

[elifkaragoz]

Hii Everyone! Did you miss me? Because i certainly did🥰

I want to share my experience on a assignment that i’ve just finished.

In the Current Issues course, our teacher gave us a group assignment. In short, the task was to create a teaching material using a corpus. After creating the material, we were asked to prepare a lesson plan based on the ASSURE model and write a blog post about it.

Firstly, Derya geçirgen, Ata Çakmakçı and i had to choose a topic in a coursebook that our teacher provided for us. This part seemed easy; however, we had to analyze the coursebook in detail and it took some time. We all decided on the “Time Prepositions” and then, we tried to find the best corpus website for our topic. I can say that it was challenging since the websites seemed complicated to us at first glance. Initially we chose the website “CorpusMate”; however, after our teacher’s feedback we decided to use “LexTutor”. After deciding on the website, my friends and I discussed what to do with the activities. We analyzed the activity samples that our teacher provided for us. Using both a corpus and our creativity, we prepared fun and educational activities to enhance students' linguistic and research skills. Finally, we created a lesson plan based on the ASSURE model , with the help of an example that our teacher provided for us. The activities we created are based on student’s use of corpus and their research skills. Therefore, lack of internet, devices and insufficient instruction on how to use a corpus might create some problems in a real classroom setting.

Overall, i can say that this process was challenging but i am glad that i prepared such material. I firmly believe that it will help me a lot in my future teaching.

Here is the link for our teaching material

Here is the link for the lesson plan

İf you want to check my friends posts on this task, here is Derya’s blog link and Here is Ata’s blog link.

Take care everyone!🥹💕

[elifkaragoz]

Hii!!

Today, i want to share my experience in one of my uni classes, which is called “Instructional Technologies and Material Design in English Language” . I must admit that when I first saw the name of this course while i was selecting classes for this term, I was a bit surprised. I used to think that my field of study (English language teaching) didn't have much to do with technology. I know there are not many areas that aren’t integrated with technology nowadays; however, my field of study and technology seemed like two unrelated areas to me. Before attending this course, i asked myself: How we could integrate technology into language teaching? Then I remembered our English teacher creating online games related to relevant grammar topics for us, and I thought, yes, we can really integrate technology into language teaching. However, my thoughts on “ integration of technology in ELT” were very limited, i couldn’t think of many different tasks or activities.

This situation now changed since i completed the course. My initial thoughts about irrelevance of technology to elt has completely changed. Turns out, technology and elt are very relevant and integration of technology into elt is very beneficial and crucial at the same time. This course has taught me that we must keep up with the changing world and developing technologies. It made me realize that technology can very very useful when it comes to language teaching and we must use it in the most efficient way possible. I really liked all the tasks our teacher gave to us, this tasks not only improved my english skills, but also made me learn a lot about new technologies. As a teacher candidate, i am sure that i will give tasks like this in my teaching.

I also loved that we had written reflections about the process of every assignment we completed. Creating a blog for this course was really fun too, i hope i can continue to share interesting posts on this blog because i kinda got used to it and i would love to continue🥹. My favorite task is “digital storytelling” because i was familiar with editing videos which made the task really easy for me. Additionally, creating the story and narrating it with my friend was beyond fun! My least favorite task is “infographics”, i really do not know why, but i just did not like this task like the others. It is probably because i do not really enjoy creating “ visual, informative charts”. However, i still think it was beneficial, i just did not like it as much as the others. I only have 1 suggestion for this course and it is: increase in practical activities in the classroom.

Take care everyone! Enjoy you day🫶🏻

[elifkaragoz]

Hii!

Today, I want to talk about the latest assignment our teacher gave us. Basically, we are supposed to have a conversation with a recognizable person or a historical figure, summarize the discussion, and then write a report about it. I chose Jim Morrison since he is a rock legend and a very important historical figure when it comes to rock history. Also, i am a big fan of his songs🥹🖤. I asked him about his childhood, love life, professional life, musical influences, his favorite poets and poetry… I’ve enjoyed this interview even though i know that it is just ai pretending to be Jim Morrison

Our teacher wanted us to use Magic School's Character Chatbot to have a conversation with whoever we chose. I had never used this artificial intelligence website before, but I found it surprisingly easy to use, and I really liked its user-friendly interface. I also liked the colors in this website, they were vibrant and made me think of summer unlike other boring-looking ai websites. I can say that this ai website mostly helped me; however, despite specifying 'briefly explain' for some questions, it provided very long answers, which made it difficult for me to summarize. Also, it didn’t give explicit answers to some questions. Even though i stated that the answers should be explicit. However, i must admit that the Magic School’s writing feedback was really helpful; it found many minor errors that I was unaware of and made my writing almost perfect!

I would definitely give a task like this one when i become a teacher. I believe that integrating such technology , especially ai, related tasks into the lessons can be really effective. I would probably make my students use ai not just for a writing task but for a task where they have to use all of the 4 skills. Language learning is very time-consuming and ai is very fast; therefore, it totally makes sense if we use it for language learning. Also, it is cheap and you can find many free versions to learn a language. However, ai is still very new and it means that it is still developing and it makes mistakes, especially when it comes to languages. Therefore; depending only on ai can be very misleading, it is always better to double-check the info👍

Take care everyone, i wish you all an amazing day🫶🏻

Click here to see the Transcript of the Interview

Click here to see the Report before the ai feedback

Click here to see the Revised Report

[elifkaragoz]

Hi!!

Recently, Our teacher gave us a “film review” task. Basically, it is a collaborative writing task and we have to write a film review based on the instructions that our teacher provided for us. After completing the film review, we had to find another group to give each other feedback.

Me and my friend @deryagecirgen wrote a film review. It was a film review for the movie called “Thelma the Unicorn”. I’ve always loved cinema; therefore, writing a film review was so much fun for me. I’ve actually written film reviews before; however, that film reviews were not detailed or professional.

Neither i nor my friend did a “collaborative writing task” before. Therefore, we were kind of worried about how we will complete the task. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as complicated as we thought it would be. It was actually practical and we handled it very well. I have to admit that trying to minimize our differences in writing were hard. However, i had a compatible writing partner and our writing styles were not that different so, it was a nice experience. We used “Google Docs” for collaborative writing, it seemed like the easiest one to use for this task. We did not have any problem while using this application; however, managing access on this app confused me at first. Thanks to the help of my friend, i figured it out real quick. I would recommend this app to everyone who is trying to do a “collaborative writing task”, it is really easy to use. After completing the task, we found a group to give us feedback. We give them feedback as well. Giving another group feedback was actually helpful, we compared our review to theirs and see the parts that we can improve. Overall, it was a fun task and i enjoyed it.

Here are the screenshots of the film review we wrote and the feedback that other group provided for us:

Here you can read our film review

Click here to see the picture 1

Click here to see the picture 2

[elifkaragoz]

Hi!!

Today, i want to tell you about my digital story creation process. Me and my friend @deryagecirgen created a digital story video for the first time.

The first thing we did was determine the topic; however, it was not easy because we had different ideas. This digital story had to be creative and interesting so, we had to avoid cliches. After a brainstorming session, we decided to tell the story of a girl’s adventures with her cat. It sounds like an ordinary story, but it definitely is not! Our story includes many supernatural elements like fairies and talking animals. We tried to avoid cliches and focused on creating something unique. "After planning the story in detail, it was time to create the visuals. We had to find a website to create our visuals for the story. Since we never did it before, we decided to use websites that our teacher recommend to us. At first, we find a website and it was free! This made us really happy but this happiness didn’t last much longer. The website lacked face expressions which was very important for our task. We searched for another website and we decided to use PIXTON , this website was amazing and it had everything we need. We started creating the visuals for the story without wasting any time. This part was so much fun because we were in control and we created everything based on our taste. When we finished creating the visuals, we realized that we couldn't save what we had created because the site was not free. At that moment we felt like we spend our time for something that we couldn’t even save to our computer. Both of us were nervous and discussed what to do. Finally, we did the most logical thing, which was to take screenshots of what we had created. We recorded the narration by taking audio recordings on my phone. We used the INSHOT to make video out of the comics and narration. This part was easy because i have edited many videos with this app. I can say that editing the video, including adding voice and visual effects, was so much fun for me. This app had everything we needed. Overall, i find this process challenging and fun at the same time. Me and my friend really enjoyed the process, especially when we recorded our voices. I would love to do a task like this again.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog post, have nice day🫶🏻💖

Here you can watch my video

[elifkaragoz]

I've always wanted to make a podcast; it was one of my dreams. Today, I made this dream happen and prepared a podcast for one of my classes at the university. My podcast is inspired by "60 Second Idea to Improve the World," a podcast series on BBC. My idea to improve the world is “traveling more and going on vacation at least twice a year.” This may sound like not the greatest idea to improve the world, but trust me, it is. Traveling and going on vacation make people happy and relaxed. Happy people create happy societies, and happy societies create a happier and better world. For example, Finnish people are the most traveled people, and they are also the happiest people in the world. I think improving the world first starts with improving the people since people are part of it. I think happiness is one of the most vital things for a functioning, successful, and peaceful society. I explained this idea in my 60-second podcast.

I actually struggled to find an idea at first because our teacher said no to “clichés,” and clichés were the only things that I could think of at that time. Then, I met with one of my friends, and we talked about our dream holiday and which places we want to travel to. I immediately thought that our lives would be so much better if we could travel more and go on vacations, and not just us, but everyone would be much happier; the world would be a better place. So, that’s how I came up with the idea.

Making the podcast part was actually not that difficult. I used a website that my teacher recommended to us. The website was really easy to use, so I did not have any problems with that. However, I have to admit that making the podcast strictly “60-second” was a little bit hard, although I managed to make a “60-second” podcast after a few tries.

Overall, making the podcast was fun, and I enjoyed it, so I can give my students a podcast assignment. I think speaking and making a podcast in English would be very beneficial for their language development, and it is also really fun.

Here is the link of my podcast: https://voca.ro/1jmWTivVrhyQ

[elifkaragoz]

INFOGRAPHİC

Today, I tried something new and prepared an infographic. I'd like to share this process with you all. Firstly, I prepared this infographic for one of my university courses. Our teacher gave us various topics to choose from and asked us to make an infographic based on one of them. I chose to create an infographic about cyberbullying.

At first, I had no idea what to do. Then, I read the document our teacher sent us and watched a video about how to make an infographic , which helped me understand what I needed to do to at least a little bit. Then, I searched for a website to make the infographic, but I had to eliminate the paid ones. I finally decided to make the infographic using the 'Canva' website. Using the 'Canva' website was surprisingly easy, and there were so many template options. I liked the variety of templates because I found something that was just for me. Since the topic I chose is a serious one, I wanted my infographic to reflect that seriousness. Additionally, it's a topic that needs to grab much more attention , so I wanted the title to be attention-grabbing. I avoided using complex shapes and flashy colors because, like I said, I wanted the infographic to reflect that seriousness. However, I also didn't want it to be boring, so I didn't overload it with too much information and i used different fonts in the text. Even though it initially confused me, I enjoyed preparing an infographic. and I also believe that being able to make infographics will be useful in my teaching career. I think I did a good job, and I hope you think so too.🫶🏻

[elifkaragoz]

In the 21st century, everything has changed, even learning!!!

The great Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, 'the only constant in life is change,' and I certainly agree with this statement .Everything changes so rapidly nowadays, mainly due to technological advancements. This acceleration in technology is both incredible and unstoppable at the same time . In the past, whether it was hardware or software, new technological developments would take years to emerge. However, today we witness to new technological advancements almost every day . These technological developments impact and reshape every aspect of life, including learning.

Learning styles have changed a lot due to technology . Now we have what is called “ 21st century learning”. This learning style is much more personalized than others. By that, I mean that it meets individual students' needs and interests. It is learner-centered and diverse, both in terms of subjects and sources. In my opinion, this is very helpful for students to broaden their perspectives. 21st century learning utilizes media a lot. I think media usage enhances learning; since both written, oral and visual media are all accessible.

Thanks to technology, in this learning style, students are not only consumers but also the producers. I think this is the most important feature that sets 21st century learning apart from the others. We need to produce, especially in a society where every individual is dependent on consumption. 21st century learning highlights critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, which are referred to as the “four C’s”.

These four skills are crucial for students to succeed both academically and professionally. Another feature of the 21st century learning is “digital literacy”. I think this feature is the most vital one. In order to make the most of technology, we first need to understand and be able to use it. The more effectively we use technology, the more efficient our learning becomes. If we don't know how to use technology, technological advancements lose all their meaning for us. That’s why i think this the most vital feature of the 21st century learning.

I think technology will help us become a much more advanced civilization, and I believe in this with all my heart.🫶🏻

[elifkaragoz]

WELCOME 🫶🏻

I want to show a photo of me at first:

I am an ELT student and this is my blog for one of my class. I briefly introduced myself in the “ about me” section, if you would like to know something about me you can check there. In this blog, i will mainly post my thoughts about ELT and technological advancements in this field.