elifs-realm-of-languages

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

Farewell People

VALLAHA BUNU DA YAZCAM SOZ

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

AI in ELT

VALLA BITTI POSTU SABAH YAZCAM UHU

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

AR Integrated Teaching Materials

Hello everyone!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/180aL-08uOLMz9VFaqX0EQsEFMNezDj8kMxHH21-3iSY/edit?tab=t.0

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

Flipped Language Classroom

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

Corpus-based Teaching Material

Hello wayward person who is reading my post. Today I will be talking about corpus based teaching materails and lesson plans. I will also share teaching materials and an example lesson plan I've done with my friends Badia Berrag and Bade Çamkır.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

A New Year

Hello wayward person who've stumbled onto my blog somehow.

It is Elif Duru again, back as a 3nd year ELT student. If you'd like to learn more about me, I have an 'About Me' page in my profile.

So, are you planning on staying? Are you just passing through? Will you stop here again? Where were you going before you stepped in to my realm? Can I convince you to stay? If I can't, well, I hope you stray a little from your destination once more so I may have another.

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I hope I see your name around here again.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

End of the Term

Hello wayward person who is reading my post. Today is the unfortunate day we are parting ways. Whether you were with me from the start or you found my blog after it was done, thank you for sparing your time to read my posts.

Before taking this course, of course I knew that technology was used in language teachning but I never thought how intregrated and thought out it really was. Every choice the teacher makes have an impact they have to consider from multiple perspectives.

Through this semester, my understanding of technology integration in a pedagogic purpose greatly increased. While going through the assignments myself, it was important for me to consider how a student would feel while doing the same assignment and take notes for myself.

Personally, between all the tasks we did this school semester, I liked making a podcast the most. Because I think making infographics is surely a useful way for the students to retain important information about subjects but it is not something students will enjoy while doing. And while AI is a highly precious tool that is heavily helpful it is something that is very easy to for unsavory purposes. Podcasting though is a process that wholly integrates the student from recording their own voices to editing the sound changes and effects.

I think it was a very informing course and was very engaging with the students. Both theoretical and practical knowledge were interesting to listen and learn about and I am happy to have taken this course.

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I wish you a fun and relaxing summer vacation and I hope I see your name around here again. But for now I wish you all farewell my friends.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

Artificial Intelligence

Hello wayward person who is reading my post. Today I will be talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and share with and AI assignment I've done with my friend Badia Berrag.

Artificial Intelligence is made out of huge systems trained on immense amounts of information and learn to identify the patterns in it, so they can carry out tasks such as having human-like conversation.

For our AI assignment, we were instructed to use a site called MagicSchool AI which is made for both students and educators. It has many tools that can provide feedback, summarize videos, plan lessons, write stories etc.

Our assignment was giving the Character Chatbot (a chatbot that allows you to talk with many historical figures or fictional characters) a character prompt, conversing with whoever we chose and write a report on it. My friend and I chose the fictional character 'Truman Burbank' from 'The Truman Show' movie because (if you are following my blog you already know) our last assignment's topic was the same movie.

The Chatbot was surprisingly in character and was very fluent in his language. Even when we asked questions about things that happened after the movie the bot was realistically in character. However, it gave answers in paragraphs over paragraphs so it took a long time to summarize our report.

After we summarized the Chatbot's answers and copied them down to our report, we proceeded to the next step which was giving our first draft report to the Writing Feedback Tool and revised the report according to it.

According to the feedback we got in some sections, the language could be tightened and made more concise to improve clarity and impact and we should consider varying our sentence structures to add more rhythm and variety to the writing. We also had some minor grammar and punctuation mistakes, too.

To revise our report we fixed the punctuation errors, paraphrased some of the paragraphs and rephrased some completely. At the end of the both I will link both the first draft and the revised version of the report for you to go over.

Personally I do not like AI, and I would do my best to not use it in my lessons. If I had to teach my students how to use it, I would do my best to make use it responsibly. AI can be such a helpful tool to teachers but it should not take the place of the teacher and teachers should use it responsibly too.

How about you wayward person who's reading this post? Have you ever used AI for a school project or something personal? What do you think about it giving students feedback instead of a teacher? Do you think it is a useful tool in language teaching?

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I hope I see your name around here again.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

Online Collaborative Writing

Hello wayward person who is reading my post. Today I will be talking about collaborative writing and share with you a writing assignment I have done with my friends Bade Çamkır and Badia Berrag.

Collaborative writing is, as it's name, multiple people working on a text together. Our task was watching a movie, writing a review paper on it with a group and lastly doing a mutual feedback session with another group.

We decided to watch 'The Truman Show' for our assignment. It's an old and popular movie. Even though it was a movie I heard about a lot but I still haven't watched it. I was so clueless about it, I was shocked to learn what the plot was about.

We used Google Documents to write our task because it's something we are already familiar with as university students and it's easy to use. We decided to split each subject of the paper between us and at the end wrote each of our own reactions about the movie. I wrote the aspects that I most liked in the movie.

Our feedback group was our friends Alper, Emircan and Abdelhamed. They decided to write their paper about the movie 'Fight Club'. I highly recommend going to their blogs and reading their reviews and posts too, they have done really well in this task.

I think digital collaborative writing is very helpful in decreasing the workload of students and encouraging teamwork. It helps to acquire coordination skills, creativity and planning.

I personally though, don't like collaborative writing because everyone has a unique style of writing and different styles disrupts the fluidity of the text. In some cases, it is very easy to distinguish which sentences were written by different people.

How about you wayward person who's reading this post? Have you ever written something with your friends? How did it go? Do you think it is a useful task in language teaching?

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I hope I see your name around here again.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

Digital Storytelling

Hello wayward person who've stumbled unto my post. Today I will be talking about digital storytelling and share with you an assignment I've done with my friends Bade Çamkır and Badia Berrag.

Digital storytelling is the art of digitalizing storytelling with mixtures of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video and/or music to communicate information.

Our goal with this assignment was to create a digital storytelling video. We had to choose between doing a Public Service Announcement (PSA) video, a step by step "how-to" video and an original fiction story. We chose to write our own story to narrate as a group.

First, we wrote the script of our story using Google Documents so everyone could write together and help when each others were stuck. We had a time limit of 2 minutes however, so we had to condense our story a lot from the first script we wrote.

After we were satisfied with our script we searched for a website to help us create characters and animate them. We chose the website Pixton which our teacher suggested to us. Me and my friends were very surprised when we used it because it had a lot of options for character creation, actions and backgrounds.

For how much helpful it was for us, we did encounter a slight problem with Pixton though. Pixton did not let users download their finished comics in its free version which what were we using. So we had to screenshot the scenes and had Badia piece them together in a video editing program.

Lastly, we recorded our voices and I edited in some sound effects and background music to give the story depth.

In the end, I think the video turned out somewhat good. The hardest part for me, was having to shorten the script over and over to make it fit within the time limit. Because every time we had to shorten some character's speech or delete voice-over narration the story lost some of it's fluidity. We tried very hard to keep a balance but still ended up 1 minute over the time limit.

As for the educational purposes this assignment have I think it would be a very didactic activity to give to students who have the capacity of being able to navigate recording/editing programs and have them engage in the higher-order thinking skills.

If you are curious and would like to watch it, I am linking our story down below.

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I hope I see your name around here again.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

PODCASTING AND AUDIO EDITING

Hello wayward person who've came across my blog. Today I will be talking about podcasts and share with you a podcast assignment I've done with my friend.

Podcasts are digital, audio files that you can stream and/or download online. They are usually made in series of episodes, but they can be just one episode too.

You can categorize podcasts by their definition, source, audience, and purpose.

For our assignment me and my friend Bade Çamkır decided to do a fictional podcast.

Our assignment was to write and record a story including the key words our teacher gave us and then add different sound effects to make it more realistic. With the words given us, we decided to make our story about a kid encountering a clown.

It was a nice project to work on. Me and my friend had fun and had no problem in recording our voices. The hardest part for us was shortening the story to the limit our teacher required from us. Both me and Bade are experienced in writing long stories and that made it difficult for us to shorten the story while keeping the flow we wanted.

I have recorded, edited and uploaded audio-books to the internet before, so it was me who found free and open to public use and edited them over our recording. Editing the audio is actually not that different from video editing, according to what my friends told me. Which is weird because while I'm a wizard in sound editing, I'm hopeless in editing videos.

I think this is a fun and informative task that should be given to students who are able to use electronics effectively. Language-wise, it would be a big help to improve the students' pronouncation and teach them how to pace themselves while talking. Technology-wise, I think it's important to teach students how to edit audio recordings and upload them to internet. Editing skills and knowing how to upload and embed files to internet are important abilities in our decade.

What do you think wayward person? Would you like recording a podcast and sharing it online? Do you know how to edit audios? Would you like to learn? Do you listen to podcast yourself? Do you get curious about how they are made?

If you'd like to share your answers or want to get more details about podcasting or audio editing my realm will always be open to you.

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I hope I see your name around here again.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

INFOGRAPHICS

Hello wayward person who is reading my post. Today I will be talking about infographics and share with you an infographic assignment I've done myself.

Infographics are are eye-catching graphics that utilize statistics, symbols, pictures and text. They are designed to present information quickly and clearly.

My assignment was to create an infographic about any ethical and/or legal technology issue we want. I chose to do mt infographic about plagiarism because it's one of the biggest worries we students have.

I used Canva to create my infographic because it's easy to use and has free designs I can edit. It was an easy assignment to do and information was easy to find. However, the topic I chose didn't have any statistics I could use and that worried me because my infographic consisted of only text.

In the end this is what it looked like.

I think we should teach students to how to do infographics Infographics are suited to many learning styles and are quick to give information so students would not get bored easily. It would also teach the students to summarize the knowledge they have and pick out the most important parts of it.

What do you think wayward person? Do you like reading infographics? Would you like to an infographic? Which topic would you do? Do you think it's really beneficial for students?

If you'd like to share your answers or get more information my realm is always open to your words.

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I hope I see your name around here again.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

21st century learning

Hello wayward person who've stumbled unto my post. Today I will be talking a little about 21st century learning and how it affects us language teachers and what should we do about it

Learning and education in 21st century convenes around 4 important C’s.

Critical thinking

Communication

Collaboration

Creativity

I will not waste your time by giving dictionary explanations for each them, if we are here then we should be able to interpret what they tell us by ourselves.

These 4C’s corresponds with the technology’s step into education field.

Technology has, just like in every area it could reach, developed new educational materials and supplies. And these materials and their technologies are not stagnant, no, they are in constant development, always getting better.

And then there's us teachers, who are trying to compete with these machines.

For our students, technology is a vital part of their lifes. There is little to no area that they do not use technology in. And naturally when you take it away from them, then the students lose their interest and motivation.

Especially for us language teachers though, things get even harder. Language learning is a time consuming task and it is only natural for it to get facilitated by technology. I am certainly not against helping people communicate with each other and understand the world easier. But I will not deny it makes our jobs harder either.

In order to teach our students to our full potential instead of competing with the fast-developing technology we must learn to work alongside it. We must learn to see it as a part of our generic teaching materials. We should use the technology as a facilitator both for the students and for us teachers.

What do you think wayward person who's traipsing through my realm? Do you think language teachers can work with technology as an aid? What do you feel about students depending so much on technology that teachers have to integrate it to their lessons?

Have my questions pulled you deeper into my realm, mesmerized by the thoughts I've heaped on you? If you'd like to share your answers my realm will always be open to your words.

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I hope I see your name around here again.

[elifs-realm-of-languages]

Hello wayward person who've stumbled onto my blog somehow.

I'm Elif Duru Azaklı, a 2nd year ELT student and this blog is a project for my Instructional Technologies lesson. In this blog, I will usually talk about what I studied in the lesson and my thoughts about them.

If you'd like to learn more about me, I have an 'About Me' page in my profile.

So, are you planning on staying? Are you just passing through? Will you stop here again? Where were you going before you stepped in to my realm? Can I convince you to stay? If I can't, well, I hope you stray a little from your destination once more so I may have another.

It was good to see you wayward person, may your journey from here be lucky and joyful. I hope I see your name around here again.