THINK A TOOL , WHICH IS REALLY JOYFUL AND ECUCATIONAL ! 

DON'T WORRY!!  I FOUND FOR YOU : '' PIXTON ''

   After a long time, Hello everybody !! Today ,  we will learn an excellent website with together. The day by day , we want to improve ourselves about English language teaching . Lastly, me and  my fellow worker  Özge Sağaltıcı  have studied on a website , which is called  Pixton  , which was assigned to us by our Material  Designing Teacher, Gökçe Kurt. Therefore, this article will be about our   study on this amazing website. First of all, I can say that , it is   totally a technological wonder! When using it, I really enjoyed and, I am sure that you will , too. It is really  easy to use . Just you need   that click and drag ! So now, if you want to create lots of joyful comics and cartoons , just  look into my article and learn lots of things about   Pixton ! I am sure that after looking into the article, you want to create lots of comics  .                                                     

• Pixton is a technology that gives anyone  the power to create amazing cartoons and comic strips  on the web .                                                                                                                   
• It is also a kind of a social networking site where you can read anyone's comics and you can share yours too , but  even if you don't want to create a comic , you can read anyone's comics.                                                                                                                                         

• It is such an extremely easy-used website that all you need is click and drag motions.     
• When you log in the website ,you can also  see  some comics strips by published by other  people using this website.                                                                                                      
• Pixton is actually made of series of pannels and each of pannels has its own setting buttons around. Pixton enables you to choose characters and properties among many and many options , give them any positions and facial expressions on the each of pannels.                                                                                                                                                          
• It has great many  options to add any backgrounds and many options again to make some editions , on the colour , looks proportions of the properties and the characters.
• It  is such a well designed and easy -used that all you need will be click and drag motions while creating your comics.
• It has some tutorial videos for all the settings one by one . So that will help you when you need.
• Moreover, you can download , print , share and save your comic to continue later .

      Is it really amazing ?  You want to see?? You can click here if you want to visit.

   Actually, Pixton has some different usage options for fun, for school and business as you see on the picture above. It can be a good option '' Pixton for schools '' to use in the classroom. It is for teacher and students use in the classrooms. It provides grading and assessment tools and also voice recording settings for the characters to enhance learning.

  To come to its educational benefits we can surely say that it is very and very advantageous. One of the facts for that is that , it is really easy to use and really cheap. This ease of use will surely give your students a big fun and maybe, that will save them from the boring English learning styles. Furthermore, by the help of thid kind of website you can success on making your students more engaged. I am prompt their engagement by grouping the students and so , providing them an interactional learning.

  It is also a good tool for personal learning actually. Students can create and read English comic strips on this website so that they can improve their creativity, too. And finally, you can make them proud ! Enabling your students to make these king of activities will encourage them.


  Finally, you must certainly use it and create your own comics !!!

  And also you can see our examples below :

If you want to watch , you can also find tutorial video :

      LET'S LEARN WITH BUSUU !

Today, we will begin a journey that today's learners will enjoy it so much :) I will introduce a language app to you that you can install or you can use it your mobile devices. Thanks to the today's technology , we can use a lot of educational and useful apps. One of them is Busuu! With this educational app, you can learn kinds of languages such as English, Spanish, French, German etc. easily. That useful app provides grammar learning with a easy and enjoyful way. 

  LET'S LEARN, WHAT IS BUSUU ? 

Busuu is the world's largest social network for language learning. Through online and apps, it provides for language learners grammar courses. Busuu courses base on levels, A1, A2, B1, B2 . The users enroll to study one or more languages.

With Busuu, you can learn grammar , vocabulary easily and  you can improve your listening skills , reading skills and also writing skills. You can learn vocabularies with images easily and entertaining.

            When you look that image , you can learn something easily and , thanks to this app you can learn something visually. It means that possibility of forgetting something decreases. 

When you look at the image, you will see the course and branch of course . For example, in A1  we can learn numbers, animals, colours, our family, have/has got to and the other things.

When we select our course, we will begin to learn immediately! 

There are different categories in every lesson. Every lesson provides us a lot of vocabularies and grammar lessons.

• Do you know that busuu are used by thousand of people? That app is really easy to learn and useful and also educational .Therefore , a lot of people prefer to use this app. 

     

Personally, I prefer to use Busuu App. Because , it provides also practise with native speakers. I strongly recommend you to download the app, Therefore , you can learn a foreign language with ease and amusing. The opportunity of practising with native speakers is the best thing for the app. 

Don't lose time! Download the app and spend an educational time!

You can also find the review of busuu below ;

HEY GUYS! DO YOU WANT TO CREATE YOUR OWN DIGITAL STORY? IF YOU SAY YES , LOOK INTO HERE :)

Hello everybody! Until now, I guess that you may not hear what the digital storytelling. Don't worry! From now on, you can create your story. Me and my fellow worker Ertuğrul  are responsible for Digital Storytelling task this week and I want to share the process of our project in detail , thereby you can benefit from this example. I am sure that you will do . better after witnessing our experience.

• What is'' Digital Storytelling''?

Digital Storytelling is relatively new term which refers the new practice of ordinary people who use digital tools to tell their story. Simply, we can say that digital stories are multimedia movies that combine photographs, video, animation, music, sound, text and also narrative voice.

• How did we create our digital story and cap off it? 

• And,was it a difficult process?

After given the task, me and my fellow, Ertuğrul, decided to create a fictional story. For this duty , first thing to do was creating at least two  characters and create setting, atmosphere , the sequence of events, weather and the other things. We wanted a digital story, which is both entertaining and also it must be educational.For this reason, we had to choose a topic , which could  be taught the child easily. We decided to teach ''comparatives''. For our project, we benefit from'' Go Animate'', which is an online animation maker program. 

Absolutely, it was a difficuly process for us. We had to collaborate for this tusk . Firstly, we created our atmosphere and then we selected our characters.There were some significant points that we had to watch out for , the other ones improved immediately. The recording part is the most difficult one in my opinion. We wanted to create a real atmosphere, therefore we worked so much while we were recording our voices.

In our day , all people with a computer can create a digital story and teachers can integrate this advantage for their lessons and let their students to create their own stories and share them for everbody. Thus , the students can gain a better understanding of more abstract consepts. And also , the experience of creating their own story will stimulate the student's higher level  thinking. Thanks to this project, they will learn collaboration and they will gain self confidence and they will express their ideas easily. And also, this tusk will encourage them to communicate with each other. It is a really entertaining experience, so , if the students create their own stories, they will think that learning English is really enjoyable and amusing. In this way, they will want to learn more and more, they will want to discover more and more educational thing. 

Don't forget! We are the teacher of the future.We have to be equipped with technological tools and gadgets. We have to benefit from the power of technology . Therefore , we always aware of developments in the field of technology and we must practice this when we teach somethings

.

• You can watch our digital story below. 

Website: BBC Learning English

Hello everybody!

Day by day, I have a really beneficial , educational and  precious  ideas about English Language Teaching. I know that you are really curious about my next educational post! Today, I will mention about an ELT website, which  is specifically  designed  for language learners. Our significant mission is  that searching  and evaluating  beneficial and educational things for learners as a teacher of the future. For encouraging and enabling  to  learners, I want to introduce to you with my useful website: BBCLearning English.

The BBC Learning English is a department of the BBC World Service devoted to English Learning Teaching. The service provides free resources and activities for teachers and learners. It has been teaching English to  global learners  and teachers since 1943, enabling  lots of educational videos, free audios, text materials to learners all around the world.

When you look at the website at first , you will introduce with the team producers, writers and ELT specialists, and also you can have extensive knowledge about their qualifications and credentials in the section of ‘’Meet The Team‘’and you can see their profiles and meet the team. When you look at the website, you can see that there are three courses you can get easelly on the homepage. These include : Intermadiate, Upper- Intermadiate and Lower Intermadiate. 

The website include a lot of lessons, activities, and my favourite is 6 Minutes English. It is a listening activity which contains some basic questions about the passage or short story. These are maybe available for your students in the future or anyone else who learn English. And also, activities and some lessons are dowloaded to printing. Some examples from them; 

I recommend you it! If you want to learn English or improve your English levels, you can do this with the help of the website. Today's world technology is an undeniable advantage for us. We should use it well. Because in the future our students already know the websites, blogging etc. We help them not to get lost in the internet. We recommend some websites, blogs or some different tools to our students.

If I were a teacher, I would recommend this website for them! 

See you in my next posts!

What is RSS?

Hello everybody! This week, we are talking about RSS .  I know that all of you want to learn what RSS is. RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish often ubdated content such as blog entries , news  headlines or podcasts. An RSS document , which is called  a ''feed '', '' web feed'', or '' channel'', contains either a summary of  content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it  possible for people to keep up with their favourite  web sites in an automated manner that is easier than checking them manually.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Now , I am going to talk about my fovourite blog. To be an efficient teacher and to improve myself in the area of ELT , I follow a lot of blogs. Among these blogs, one of them is my favourite . I highly recommend to all ESL/EFL teachers to check Özge Karaoğlu. She is an English teacher and educational consultant in  teaching with web based and teacher trainer. It is one of the most useful blogs for educational technologies.It encourages educators and students to use web tools and technology in language learning classrooms and raise their awareness about educational resources. When we look at Özge Karaoğlu' s blog, we can see that useful videos,vocabulary activities,games and lesson plans etc. In the future, ıf you want to be a good teacher, you can visit her blog and in my opinion you mus follow her blog!

A FILM REVIEW: THE GREAT GATSBY

Hello everyone! 

  The task that we are supposed to the for this week is '' Wiki Project.'' For this project , me and my partner, Sena Keçeci , made a film review : The Great Gatsby. You can reach our  wiki project from here . 

  Wikiing is a helpful project; wikispace is useful for displaying students' work and it is an educating site for both teachers and students; however, unfortunately I haven't had any information about the existence of this kind of site by this time. I am happy for learning about it now. I had no difficulty at all during the process of task completion. 

  Wikis have lots of advantages for EFL learners. Firstly, they improve their reading and writing skills; wikis are sites that provide reaching lots of ideas without any effort. And they give an opportunity for the EFL learners to look at their friends' work and give feedback on it. Thus, they provide developing self expression and creating cooperative learning. Wikis also enhance collaboration. 

  I want to use "Wiki Project" for my students in the future. Because it shows that for providing continuous interaction English is like a living being; so it makes the process of English learning meaningful and motivating. I really like it! 

A Sunny Day - PodCast

I worked with İpek Kesici for this assignment.

I have to say that we couldn't decide which choice would be more suitable for us. But then we chose the second one: creating a rich sound story. First of all, we knew that it would be difficult, on second thoughts, it was. I would be lying if I said I wasn't stressed. Podcasting is a very arduous process. We created an interesting story with the transcript, and recorded our voice. Everything was good up to that time. But then, we didn't know how to embed or share an mp3 file in our blogs. While we were looking for the solution, we found one. The process of research was really waste of time. But we found what we wanted without asking anyone. 

Podcasting has some advantages for EFL learners. It provides them an opportunity for development of their listening skills and pronunciation. They may also enjoy listening it. That is, podcasting can encourage EFL learners in the process of learning second language.

I want to use podcasting with my students in the future. Recording songs and stories might encourage them to study and wish of learning. They can also be happy for listening their teacher from the podcast: it is a familiar voice, they will be interested in listening it.

I hope I can use podcasting effectively in the future.  

Here's our podcasting assignment;

Record and upload voice >>