Create Your Own Comic with Pixton!

   Hello again. Like in my previous post, I will introduce a website but this time it will be a website that my friends Seçil and Yağmur presented in our class. It is called Pixton. It enables you to create comics online. The website offers you three options to work with, these are: Pixton for fun, for school and for business. After you choose one of the options, you need to sign up or log in with either your Google or Facebook account.
When you log in the site then it's time to start creating your own comic and characters. You need to click "my comics" button and then you can start either by creating characters or comics. After that, you can select a layout among many options. When you decide on the layout, then you must add characters to your comic. Again you have options. you can create your own character, choose from community that includes characters other people created and you can add new ones but you must make payment for them. Creating your own characters is amazing, if I were you I would use my own unique character. When you make your choice about characters, you can select a suitable background image or you can upload your own photos. And you can add speech bubbles to your comic. By the way, you can see some buttons at the left side of the page, these are Move mode, Green mode for expressions and poses, Orange mode for appearance, Pink mode for proportions and finally the color wheel mode to change the color of a selected item.You can make changes with these buttons. And if you want, you can add panels also. 

When you completed your comic you can share it or you can  send it by email but if you want to print or download your work, payment is required.

And it's time to talk about it's effective use in language classroom.
This is a useful tool for teachers to use in classroom activities but I should remind that this tool is not suitable for young learners because of wide range of options tool has. Instead of this you can choose more simple tool like Storyjumber that I wrote about in my previous post, because it has more limited options. 
Teachers can ask students to create a comic about their most unforgettable memory or their one common day.By this way, they learn to think creatively and improve their some basic skills like writing, vocabulary etc. And also it is very entertaining.

Picture references: http://wixton.wikia.com/wiki/

                               https://wiki.itap.purdue.edu/display/INSITE/Pixton

A Great Tool for Creating Your Own Story: StorJumper

  
   Hi everyone! It has been long time since I wrote my last post. Now I am here to introduce an amazing website that enables students to create their own story and the storybook. And also students can read stories that other people shared on the website. It is called Storyjumper. Me and my dear friend Hüsna Uzun presented this website in our classroom. And now, I will talk about it for you. 
This website was designed to create stories with visuals. It is very simple to use it. We also tried to create a story with my friend to try the tool and it was very enjoyable experience for us.



Lets look how it works step by step,
Here is the main page;

You need to enter your name in the little box and you should choose the gender. Then, click the "Make book" button" and go on.

After, you will see a page like this.

 According to your own story you can choose suitable background image by clicking the "scenes" button and also you can upload your own photos. After choosing the background image then it is time to choose characters. By clicking "Props" button you will find a lot of props.

 And you can flip, rotate, move or delete them completely. And it's time to add texts to your storybook. You will see the "Text" button at very top of the page.

After finishing up the story then you can decide on the color of the back cover and front cover page of your book. Finally your book is ready!

Now lets talk about how we use this website as an effective tool for students in language classroom.
Firstly as a teacher you can ask students to create their own story or create one of their favorite story on Storyjumper. Or you can ask them to make up a story concerns the that day's lesson topic for example about Tenses, Modals, etc. By doing so, they can reinforce the topic by themselves. This tool helps students to enhance their ability to think creatively. And they can improve their vocabulary knowledge also. For me the most important benefit of this tool is that students learn in an entertaining way.

Picture reference: https://www.graphite.org/website/storyjumper

One of the Easiest and Entertaining Way to Learn a Language: Duolingo

   

   In our daily life, we use mobile phones for several purposes like texting, surfing on the web, making calls and playing games. Well, what about using them for education? Actually they are ideally suited for this. And in my post I will talk about over this issue and I am going to introduce an educational app that I choose. It is Duolingo. It is designed for Android. It is very simple to use and it is very entertaining. This application serves 23 languages, according to language that you speak you can choose the language that you want to learn for example if you speak Turkish then you can choose either German or English to learn and if you speak English then you can choose a language in sixteen languages include Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese etc. Before starting to use the app, you should choose your target language and after that you should choose your daily goal. By achieving your goal, you gain presents and you can upgrade your level. By the way, you can change the daily goal in time. After these, it is time to do the exercises. The app includes a lot of activities such as translating the given sentence into English or Turkish, writing what you heard and trying to pronounce what you hear. It enables learners to enhance their vocabulary knowledge and improve their speaking and listening abilities. If we want to use this app in classroom setting, then we can set a target level for students and we can ask them to complete it, by this way they compete each other and they learn in an entertaining way.

              

                   

                                                                

Picture reference:  http://www.programindiriyorum.com/duolingo-indir/

                                               
         

Digital Storytelling

   Hi guys! I'm here again. This week's task was rather entertaining. And this was the first time that I've ever did such a wonderful thing. It is Digital Storytelling. Digital Storytelling is a great tool for students to create their own story and demonstrate it. And in my post, I will share my experience with you. In this task, I worked with my dear friend Ezgi Türker. Thanks to her, the process became more easier and enjoyable.
Firstly we create a story that is about a girl called Felicity who lost one of her eyes because of an unlucky accident. It is a fictional story. While we writing the story, we tried to give some positive messages also. After finishing the story, it was time to design the characters. Ezgi found some pictures of cartoon characters on a website named Deviantart. We choose some of them and by using carbon paper, we traced them. It was really difficult to draw because pictures had small and complex details. After that, we moved on to the most enjoyable part of the work, painting! This was the first time that I've ever used the crayons since primary school. I should confess, I realized that I miss this. When we completed painting, we cut the characters with scissors. When all the characters were ready, we took photos and shoot videos of the characters according to the flow of the story. We decided to move the characters by using our fingers. While Ezgi was shooting the video, I was moving them. Sometimes we had to give break because we couldn't shoot the videos because of laughing :) Finally we successfully prepared the videos and pictures. By the way we vocalized the story. In the backyard of our faculty. we recorded our voices with some backward musics. It was so hard to find silent place, we couldn't use the empty classrooms because of echo. In the last part of the task we combined videos, pictures and our voices by using Movie Maker. And our story was ready, The One Eyed Hero.
We had a great time while preparing Digital Storytelling. It is great and useful tool for both students and teachers. It develops the creativity and the ability to think peculiarly. And it is also helpful for teach students to make collaboration. For example, we did this task collaboratively and the process became more fruitful. We shared our ideas with each others and combined them, as a result we could produced a creative story. We hope you find our story useful and worth-watching.

Here you can watch our story,enjoy!

Picture Reference: https://alidelucie.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/media-convergence-and-digital-storytelling/

Like a Perfectly Designed Guide

Hi guys! I'm here with my new task again :)
This week we were asked to make an evaluation about an ELT website that we chose. And now I share my evaluation with you. This site is About Education, Teach ESL-Teaching English as a Second Language. Click here to view the website. The expert of the site is Kenneth  Beare. Kenneth is an ESL teacher, besides being content developer and trainer. He got his Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages diploma from Trinity Collage in London. If you want to know more about him and his works, you can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and on his Google Profile Kenneth Beare.

When it comes to talk about the content of the website, I can honestly say that it has valuable and useful information about teaching English. You can find some ESL teaching tecniques and lesson plans. The site provides lessons for teaching different language categories such as pronunciation, grammer, writing, listening skills. You can find relevant links, also. There are some videos about English language classes from different Universities such as Columbia University but I had a trouble while opening them. Additionaly, there are some quizzes about relevant topics. There's a lot to be said about this site but from now on, its up to you to discover the rest of them :)
Consequently, I really like this website. I quess I will benefit from it a lot as a preservice teacher. I strongly recommend it to all teachers, preservice teachers, students and even to anyone who is interested in learning English. It helps a lot and it gives ideas about what and how to do for teaching English. Namely, it's like a guide.

Here the screenshots of the website,

Picture Reference:http://www.wiziq.com/teachblog/at-last-the-first-english-language-teacher-training-mooc-of-its-kind/

What do you know about RSS?

Hello everyone!. Today I share with you my first experience with RSS. Maybe, some of you already know it but for those who have never heard it before, I start by explaining briefly what it is. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people who likes surfing between different web pages to save time and follow latest posts of their favourite blogs easily. As we know, it is very time consuming and exhaustive to follow the contents of each blogs or news site that  we interested in. And also , it is so hard to remember all sites and urls,but thanks to Rss we don't have to struggle to find pages anymore and we save time also.I started to use RSS feedreader. You can use it online or you can download it to your computer.


 Here you can see the screenshot of my feedreader,

Now it is time to talk about my favorite blog. It is Burcu Akyol's blog. You can find useful information about learning and teaching in there. Especially in  the latest post of her which is about how to make children read books she gives advices to both educators and parents. She also shares experiences from her own life.




Picture Source: http://www.xda-developers.com/add-rss-functionality-to-your-app-with-a-simple-library/

The Film Review: Like Stars on Earth

   Hi everyone. This week we prepared a wiki page about a film review for a school magazine with my friend Şeyma Söylemez. This is the first time that we made a wiki page, at first it seemed to us little bit complex but with the support of my partner, we successfully made it. Firstly, we chose a film that we both like and then we started to write the review. We had difficulty while writing because there should not be spoiler so we had to be careful about it. The easiest part of the review for us was the conclusion because we both had something to say about the film. Finally we could finish it and. It was pretty entertaining task. Actually the most important thing that made this task enjoyable was to work with my friend, we exchanged our ideas with each other and we could complete this task easily. Additionally, using wiki also was a nice experience because it is very useful tool for students to express their thoughts, working with collaboration and write about the things they choose. But they should be careful about not to delete the others' tasks accidentally or someone may delete their task also.

We took the screenshot of the wiki page, here you can read our film review
To view the whole page click here Like Stars on Earth.

Who was screaming?

Hi everyone! Here our first podcast. We prepared this with my friend Hatice Tekiz. It is a story named "Who was screaming?". It is suitable for intermediate students. We hope you will find this story entertaining and useful for you, as well. We are sorry for some technological problems  we faced with. We had a difficulty in finding a silent place and at last we decided to record this story at our backyard. And finally we made it! We recommend this activity to all teachers who want to teach English in an entertaining way.



HAVE FUN!!!

Audio recording software >>

Picture source: http://tr.depositphotos.com/

Learn But Also Remember to Fun!

  Are you ready to learn some of the easiest and entertaining ways to learn English with me? If your answer is yes, then I am also ready to help you. By following my blog and my posts regularly, we can explore new techniques that facilitates the process of learning together. As I research for myself, you will benefit from the data that I collected. As all we know, learning a foreign language is a troublesome process.

Come and let me help you to turn this process into an enjoyable one!

Picture sources: https://easyfunenglish.wikispaces.com/

                                          http://learnenglishtools.com/english-learn-funny/