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/