teachermelly

[teachermelly]

Technology and Materials Design - A Last Glance

This term, we enjoyed the lesson “Technology and Materials Design” with our dear teacher Dr. Gokce Kurt. As a whole, it was a great experience and offered lots of benefits, future suggestions and brainstorming. But we should go on a little deeper to talk about the class. 

What we lack in our teaching, especially in our country is the usage of different strategies and usage of technology. Teachers still do not bother to discover another visions, tools, materials and even though they do not get out of their comfort zone a bit, they see their teaching modern. YET, teachers of 21st century need to understand the benefit of technology and attempt to use it in their class, try to create chances to use different materials and strategies to enhance English language learning to a further extent. As a teacher of future, this is the main message I’ve got from this class. Get out of your comfort zone, take actions to make your teaching easier, more effective, more beneficial. Because once the one tries to discover this whole big world of technology use, to teach eventually becomes easier and easier.  Personally I enjoyed the diversity of the topics of this class, the tasks were very educative and I had a great time participating to the class.  One point that I would like to change about this lesson would be the pair works we did. Even though I enjoy pair works from time to time, this class required a lot of them. This is my personal idea, though, as I prefer individual work a lot better. 

Apart from this, I loved every bit of the class and I am glad to be sure that each and every new generation of ELT Marmara will enjoy it with Dr. Kurt... :) 

[teachermelly]

Padlet - A Tool to Be Inspired

 Hello everyone! This week, me and my partner Melisa are working on a tool presentation, and our tool is called Padlet. We wish to introduce Padlet and how it can be used in English Language Teaching while we, teachers want to enhance the topic “travelling.” 

Padlet is a virtual wall that allows people to express their ideas on a common topic. It works as an online sheet of paper where people can put any content (images, videos, documents, texts, etc.) anywhere on the page, together with anyone, from any device.  You can type, record your voice, add a web link and simply create an online platform shared with your whole class.  How can teachers use Padlet in class?  Padlet offers a social environment, thus, most teachers use the tool to form an online classroom. They write a task on the top of the page and the students attach their work to the wall. The teacher or the students themselves can write feedbacks to any post they like. It can be used as a blog, as students can form their own walls, use Padlet as their blogs and teachers can follow their tasks on these blogs.  OR, there could be different classes of Padlet for one lecture. For instance, there could be one to do tasks, or one to write about their performance, or about their evaluations of the lesson. You can also include parents to share the outcomes of the class to inform them about their children.  If you focus on teaching the enormous world of travelling, you can also use Padlet in several ways. One option is to give a task on writing an essay, a poem or a story about one country they would like to see. Or, to be more specific, you may give them a continent that you choose for the week, ask them to find 5 features that is interesting about the continent and write a short paragraph about one country in the continent they would like to see. Along with writing, students can also tape a voice-message, take a video or draw a picture and attach it.  We can always broaden the strategies to use Padlet as it is a very useful tool to be used in a 21st century classroom!  See the tool that we created for teaching travelling: https://marmarauniversity.padlet.org/meliskarabulut97/82ievs3een7j

Thank you for reading and hope to enhance ELT more next week! 

[teachermelly]

Mobile Apps - The Essentials of Everyday Life and Now Learning Hello everyone! In this post, I will be examining a mobile phone app called Rosetta Stone, which is highly recommended by language teachers and used by many students all around the world. As approximately every person has a smart phone and uses the apps in them in a very advanced way, language learning has started to use this opportunity to initiate learning through one-hand activities. Now, people learning various languages prefer and love to use mobile apps because they can practice anytime in an effective and easy way. Today, I will introduce you the app Rosetta Stone which offers American and British English,  Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Dari, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Pashto, Persian (Farsi), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Latin America and European), Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog (Filipino), Turkish, Urdu, and Vietnamese. It is a unique app different than Duolingo or any other kinds of language promoting apps. For instance, the app uses actual contexts that try to give you the level of English you need. By answering the questions given in the context, (like a person in a restaurant or in the airport, you solve an issue that the person faces, like he&she loses a stuff and tries to find or manages to do a task) the learner actually acquires some contextual knowledge and also is rewarded after he&she accomplishes in the context. Also, the app has now a new feature that allows you to talk to a native tutor who helps with pronunciation, word choices and context at most. The speech sessions are done after each lesson and it supports the learner in a very professional way. The base of the app has a well-designed speech-recognition technology and in this way, it can help the learner as if in a real circumstance. The topics of the language is seperated according to the contexs and the beginners start with greetings, shopping, class talkings and it moves along to the hardest grammar and complex situations. They are excellent in leveling and, of course, with their contextual grammar. The users around the world are very content with the skills that Rosetta Stone teaches. The comments say that if you study this app for 3-4 months, you will definitely learn to write, speak, read and listen to the language in an efficient way. As it is a full-package app that involves all the skills of the language and also an e-tutoring, it costs pretty much and this is the only con of the app.  You can buy Rosetta Stone Language Learning as an online subscription, as a digital download, or on CD-ROM but for learners from all economies, it is hard to implement. Along with this, also the app has one more little con yet it is seen as a good thing: the word drills. The learner faces the same word over and over again as a better practice, but they seem to like this part. Not seeing the price and drills, this is a masterpiece with lots of grammar games, visuals, tutors and every aspect of it. The best usage of Rosetta Stone would be in a class that focuses on fluency in the language as it offers all the necessary aspects of language. A teacher is welcome to make students use the app with the games and contexts after a class that is connected to the topic. Or, along with having the topic in the class, the students can connect to their own tutors and speak about the topic. In many and many ways, Rosetta Stone offers a very high quality language learning, yet, taking lots of dollars from your pocket. If you are okay with doing some sacrifices for your language learning and want the best result, then Rosetta Stone is the right one for you. For those wishing to have further information, here some links about the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHIlVdlJkMQ http://www.rosettastone.eu/mobile-apps Thank you for reading. See you later on!

[teachermelly]

Digital StoryTelling with Teacher Melly

Hello everyone! This week, I and my partner have been working on a story-telling project. Let me tell you in detail: The story-telling aims to teach words, expressions and basically English in a simple way, through music and short stories and in an active way. In our story, Doctor Froggy, me and Melisa tried to tell the story with visions, music, background voices and narration to initiate learning through various styles.  The pair work made this story-telling a lot easier, stronger and funnier in the progress. This is why, we found collaborative work very helpful and enjoyable as well.  We used moviemaker and video tape for the production of this project. Also, we used Youtube and some other sound systems to promote.  To summarize, we believe that story-telling can help students to acquire words and grammar structures without openly knowing and being aware of the acquirement process. Also, the students can be involved in the learning process with a joyful activity and love English in this way.  This is all from us this week. Enjoy the video and see you in the next post! :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImApJlKZclk 

[teachermelly]

WEBSITE EVALUATION! - GRAMMARLY!  Hello everyone! This week I will be evaluating a website that teachers from all around the world can use for enhancing their students’ writing skills, Grammarly!  Grammarly is created by Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn, written by Brad Hoover in 2009 improve the writing skills of English learners. Its content and working style is supported by linguists and website programmers, But there is not quite solid information about the credentials of the website. 

Grammarly in general is a website for correcting the mistakes of written forms of English; such as essays, stories, homeworks, etc. It detects and corrects even the smallest mistakes or suggests better usages instead of an irrelevant word or form. The website contains lots of services and parts: the grammar checker tool, plagiarism checker tool, a handbook that you can find detailed explanations of grammar rules, Grammarly@EDU in which the learner can get writing assistance software for academia and so on. The focal audience begins from highschool students to master-degree students -or even old adults having trouble with their grammar-.  The main purpose of the website is to enhance the writing skills of the learner, to show some tricks and better forms of writing in essays and homeworks, to inform about their most common mistakes, etc. Because the website offers some other facilities such as extended grammar explanations and plagiarism warner, we see that it focuses on the literary purpose of the language. Also, along with helping to formal purposed-texts, if you download the extension to your internet browser, it also scans your Facebook posts or Tweets and corrects the broken forms.  The visual support of Grammar is very high, it attracts the audience and the website is a five-star quality one according to user votes. It is plain, professional-looking, and does not strain the eyes with unnecessary visuals. Along with that, the audience is quite content with the whole of it. It corrects more than 250 types of spelling, punctuation, vocabulary and grammatical errors and available as a web app, desktop software as a Microsoft Office Add-in. Therefore, it appeals to the target audience.  For English teaching, it can be used for writing tasks and literary purposes. For instance, if you give an assignment to the students on essay-writing or research, you may ask the students to use Ggrammarly to make them realize their own mistakes rather than lowering their grades because of mistakes or word choices. Thus, you – the teacher- can focus on the main part of the assignment: the fluency of the thoughts of the learner. With Ggrammarly, the students also can improve their essay styles and lexicons. Another application scenario of Grammarly to the EFL class would be using the handbook of the website which offers more explanations of grammar rules. You may use the handbook in class or recommend your students to use this. So I recommend teachers to use Grammarly actively!  See you next week, wait for new posts! :) 

#grammarly #english #language #teaching #study #elt

[teachermelly]

WİKİ ACTIVITY

This week, me and my partner work on a Wiki Activity in which we discuss about an Academy-Awarded film, Midnight in Paris. 

This collaborative activity has opened some new ways of thought in our minds as we went back in time that we watched this excellent movie and remembered the small details that make the movie. We both have different perspectives and ideas about the movie and we collaborated our visions into a new vision about it.  

We also learned to use an another educational tool that we can use in our further teaching life, Wiki. It is an easy but functional website that we can create tools to use. To learn to use the website was just a little bit challenging but we had fun while we were making mistakes. 

This activity is not only educative, but also culturally informative to us. 

This is all from me this week, hope you like my entry of Wiki!! 

See you! 

[teachermelly]

!PODCASTING! - LISTENING IS CARING This week’s task is to create a podcasting audio that include a message to world! Our topic is the importance of listening. To my (and to my partner’s) idea, listening is a big issue and also a starting point of many problems. Starting from bilateral relationships between people, the problems that arise from listening can effect education, politics, media and many other areas in life even though we may not actually be aware of this fact. But also, a healthy way of listening can change the world, our vision, our morals, moods, whole life! For instance, as a teacher-of-future, I can honestly say that with my student (I only have 1 at the moment) we have a very sincere relationship thanks to our good listening and caring skills. She feels more confident, willing to talk and listen once her thoughts, dreams and even grammar errors are cared! I feel the power to influence her life this way, because teachers have much more chance to change people’s visions and behaviours. By being modest, caring and just simply being a student to what a speaker tells you, you can learn many things in life, actually more than you can imagine!  In this podcasting activity, I and my partner Melisa taped our voices telling our message to the world. This was a very simple but brainstorming activitiy as we spent some time to impress the world from a different aspect. Our cooperation gave strength to the activity, along with working together, we also had fun!  Follow for more materials I will share in the following weeks! And LISTEN carefully!

#podcast #english #languge #teacher

[teachermelly]

21st Century Learning,  is basically student oriented and solution focused!  What I mean is that in our century, teachers have become more aware of their power and effects on students, this is why they care a lot more about students’ feelings, motivation, performance and their simple needs.  Learning skills are more developed, technology is better used for teaching and learning, collaboration is best supported. 

Still, we still have a long way to go in terms of innovating our era’s education! 

[teachermelly]

Hello everyone! In this blog, I will be sharing contemporary English Language Teaching Methods, developments and studies in the field, some materials to use in the class for my colleagues and students. Hope you follow and like my blog!