ANOTHER PERFECT TOOL: STORYBIRD

Hello everybody!

This post is actually my second presentation post. In my previous post, I introduced you a tool that I had presented. This time, I will introduce you another tool that my classmates, Ecem and Seray, presented. It is Storybird. With Storybird, you can create gorgeous visual stories. Moreover it is free.

How can you use Storybird?

First, you have to sign up an account. Then, click on the create button. You see all the artworks. You can choose one to inspire your story and start.

After choosing the art, click on the use this art button and select the book format. It can be a longform book, picture book or poem. 

Now, you can create your story. I chose the picture book format to show you. As you can see, you have related pictures to your art. Drag the pictures you want, and write your story.

When your story is ready, click on the save and exit button and publish it. You can share your stories privately or to public. Decide yourself.

I want to show you the story that I created: FUN DAY

How the tool can be used in language teaching?

• You can ask them to create a story on Storybird. They can do it alone or collaboratively. I think group work will be better for brain storming.
• Students can give feedback each other after examining their works. You can also give feedback and grades, by this way you will push their imagination and creativity.
• Students can present their stories into the class. They can also portray their stories in the classroom. 

Storybird can be used in order to enhance learning and classroom participation. While doing it, you will both make your lessons enjoyable and integrate technology into your lessons. I think Storybird will be always a good idea planning your lessons. I am sure you will use it.

THE PERFECT TOOL FOR THE PRESENTATION

Hello everyone!

My aim while writing this post is to introduce you a tool that my friend Kader and I have presented in the classroom. The tool is the Zimmer Twins. I hope at the end of this post, you will find very useful implications about it.

The characters: Eva, Edgar and 13

First of all, what is Zimmer Twins and why is it used?

The Zimmer Twins is a site that is fun way to integrate technology into the classroom. It helps both teachers and students to create an amazing movie maker by using animation. You can create your movies by using story starters that allow you to create your own movie endings, or create a movie from scratch. You can tell your stories by choosing actions, characters and background. There are only three characters which are easy to use for young learners: Eva, Edgar and 13.

How the tool can be used?

When you open the site, you will see two different sections: one is kids and families, the other is educators and schools. According the your purpose, you can choose one. As we are interested in English language teaching, we can choose educators and schools section.


Then you have to sign up an account to create and save your movies. When you sign up, you will see the make a movie section. After clicking on it, there is the make from scratch section. Now you can start to create your own movie. There are four different types of clips to choose from: talk bubble clips, action clips, close up clips and star clips. You can use the talk bubble clips to make the characters talk, sing or think. With action clips you can make the characters run, dance or laugh. Close up clips help you make the characters act surprised, bored or scared. Finally the star clips for fun things like typing a newspaper headline. You have many options to choose from. If the movie is ready, you can click on the save movie button and save your movies. It is quite that easy.

Animation clips: talk bubble, action, close up, star clips.

You can also create your own movie endings using the story starters as you can see:

How the Zimmer Twins can be used in language teaching?

1. You can ask your students to watch a starter video and predict the ending of the story.
2. If you want to focus on grammar in your lessons, this tool will be efficient for practicing the newly structured grammar rules.
3. The tool will also improve students' vocabulary because they have to write a dialog for their movies. For example you can choose the topic that you have teached that day, and ask them to create a movie about that specific topic.
4. You can ask them to create a story of a day on their own.
5. You can give them feedback every week on how they can improve their stories and movies.

Of course, every tool has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage of this tool is autonomous learning. They can decide what is the best for their movies. They can learn better when they do something alone. In addition, their creativity and imagination will improve because they think about their stories. The site will also improve their vocabulary knowledge because it helps them visualize the verbs and know how to use the words that they have learned. The tool is fun and motivating for students because they will enjoy using the site, it is easy to use. You can also free lesson plans to use the Zimmer Twins with your students. I strongly advise you to examine the page, you will find very useful things about planning your lessons.

When we come to disadvantages, we see that it does not save your movies unless you sign up an account with Zimmer Twins. You can't make any changes after saving your movie. The video that you produced cannot be embedded onto your blogs or other websites and you have to purchase a VIP membership to share your movies or view other movies.

I can't share the video that we created because of the VIP membership so I took a video. Please watch it to see an example.

If you are looking for a tool which is useful, fun and efficient in language teaching, I recommend you the Zimmer Twins. I think it is hard to make your young students love English. At the same time they need to have fun and learn English and you have to integrate technology into the classroom. When all of them come together, Zimmer Twins is a perfect tool that provides them. While we were preparing for the presentation, we had fun exploring and using it. So you can easily use the Zimmer Twins in your classroom. I am sure your students will love it! See you.

 

OTHER EFFECTIVE WAY OF TEACHING

Hello everyone!

We are addicted to use mobile devices every moment in our lives especially mobile phones. In fact, we can’t think a life without our phones now. This is the case in education, too. We always explore new materials related to technology so why don’t we use the mobile phones in our lessons? If our aim is to teach English to students, then we should try all possibilities. I think the students will love to use their mobile phones during the lessons.

I would like to introduce an app that can be installed and used on a mobile device, Learn English with Epic Language Games.

It is an app which includes fun games to expand English vocabulary. It is designed for Iphone and Ipad. Your students will never be stuck with the games. They can always keep playing and will automatically learn the meaning of the words and their pronunciation. There are levels both words and sentences. Also, there are three difficulty levels(easy, medium, high) that can be customized from the settings page. It is super easy to use for all ages. Your students can unlock new levels playing at home and track their progress.

When we come to the lessons, you can use it to practise your student’s vocabulary. For example; when you open this app you will see this page.

               

  

There are sections locked and unlocked. The first section is about foods including words and sentences parts. Click the section and play the game with students. While playing the game, students have to choose the right answer and during the game they can only choose the wrong answers three time. Also there is a time limit. These may challenge them but they will enjoy it. When they see they can pass the levels they will want to use the app out of the lessons. They can also improve their pronunciation, grammar skills besides vocabulary skills. 

Hope you will like this app. Enjoy!

AN EDGE OF TEACHING AND LEARNING: DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Hi everybody!

I am very excited writing this post because I have done an enjoyable, impressive and purposeful task this week, with my friend, and I want to share it with you immediately: it is "digital storytelling."
Have you heard about digital storytelling? If you haven't then you probably guess how it means or how it is used. I will explain anyway. Digital storytelling is integrating sounds, images, videos and creating a short narrative story. You can create your own story; it can be a personal story, historical events or a special topic. After you finish, you can share it.  How amazing it is! Technology definitely develops without stopping.

For our task we have to work collaboratively and I have worked with Kader. Our teacher asked us to choose one option from three options. We chose the third option, creating a fictional story. Actually I was lucky because Kader has good paintings so she drew the pictures and I wrote the story that we narrate. Then, we recorded our voices and finally shot the story with a camera and created it. We used Movie Maker to arrange the whole materials. We had no difficulty in either creating the story or drawing the pictures, but while recording our voices and filming the story we tried a lot. As it was important to be able to give the emotions to our target audience, lower intermediate students, we tried again and again while recording our voices. Moreover, we used sticks to move our two characters and controlling them was a little bit difficult for us because at the same time we had to shoot it with the camera. At the end we were surprised with the outcome after we created our digital storytelling. According to us, it was perfect; our narration, the sequence of visuals, movement of the characters, the background music... They were all in harmony. To see the outcome which we did own made us happy.

If you are now interested in using digital storytelling in your lessons as a teacher it can serve a lot of affordance to you because children fancy the technology today. You can create your own digital storytelling and use it in the classroom to make the learning permanent. Furthermore, you can ask your students to prepare their own digital storytelling. Even you may cooperate with your students and other teachers to make well-designed digital storytelling. Both you and your students will enjoy this process and it will improve their language skills; writing, speaking and listening. As the day goes on new teaching materials come out and we should know these materials because teaching and learning are rough processes and in these processes we should make teaching and learning fun but at the same time efficient and permanent. Digital storytelling is one of the most important material I will use in my classroom easily. So, I recommend you to use it. Remember the importance of technology in teaching and learning process and apply the technology in your lessons.
Here is our digital storytelling, strongly advised to watch! See you soon.

                   

An Easy And Efficient Way of Learning English: WEBSITES

Hi everybody!

Today I will mention you about "websites". A website is a page that provides services like texts, visuals and animations to their visitors. As I am interested in English, I want to talk to you about ELT websites. Thanks to technology, there are a lot of ELT websites which has to be paid for it and is free. If you are an ELT student, you can improve your English working regularly on the websites or if you are an ELT teacher, you can find different kind of materials on them. On the other hand, it has become difficult to choose an efficient website convenient to your purpose because many of websites are useless. I'll explain I have found the website and I'll evaluate it.

Here the website is: Interesting Things for ESL Students

In this website there are a lot of activities for studying English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL). There are quizzes, word games, word puzzles, proverbs, slang expressions, anagrams, a random-sentence generator and other computer assisted language learning activities. This site is free and has no advertising in it. It is authored by Charles & Lawrence Kelly but there is no information about them. The sections are listed on the top of the page as reading, sentences, listening, vocabulary, flash&java and more. There are also subtopics of these sections. The target audience of the website is not clearly stated but when you enter the page you can understand that it is for beginners and others who are learning English as a second language and even native speakers of English. The purpose of the website is to teach English to students and speed up the process of learning a foreign language with reading, listening and vocabulary exercises. When I have a look at the website I can't see openly a date that shows the site has last been updated but I discover that there is a "daily listen & repeat" section and it is stated that this section is updated every day. Also I saw this. Look at the following:

I have inferred that the site has been regularly updated and also realized that there is not any error in the information. I guess this is because the authors of the page are native speakers of English. According to my observation, there is no broken link but they stated that they were updating their pages and no URLs would change. As far as I see the pictures used in games are high quality but not appealing. I want to show you two examples, you can understand what I mean if you examine them:

This website can be applied to EFL teaching. If you are a teacher of beginner students, you can open this website and you can practise with the games, after lecturing the topic as you can see. Your students will learn the lesson more efficiently. If you are a teacher of high school, for example you can use these in your lessons. In the first example there is a vocabulary exercise, in the second one there is a listening activity. These are just examples I chose to show you. You can find another examples on the site. Have a look at them:

I actually didn't like this website so much because I think the design of the site is a little bit complicated. I have spent a lot of time to explore it. Apart from this, many of the contents are not efficient and useful although some are. As an ELT teacher, you can't permanently use this website because of the inadequacy of contents. The materials are not totally sufficient to use your lessons. If you are a perfectionist person you care about the details and probably you will not use this website. If I were a teacher now, I wouldn't use this website so I honestly don't recommend you to use it. Of course, it is my opinion. Be curious, visit the website and decide yourself, you will absolutely not lose anything!  See you soon.

The Power of Using RSS for Blogs

Hello everybody!

I am here to talk to you about RSS (Rich Site Summary; originally RDF Site Summary; often called Really Simple Syndication). It is used for following recently information such as blog entries, news headlines, audio or video. For example if you are a blogger, you may follow a lot of bloggers and want to be aware of new posts that the bloggers entry. But being always on your blog or waiting whether they write a new post or not, is not possible. So how do you know this?  Thanks to RSS Feedreader that I mention above, you can know this. I haven't heard and used this program before but my teacher informed us, the new bloggers, about it. Now I have become aware of the importance of using RSS, because it gives a sign to your computer as soon as a new post is published. In this way, you can open that page from the program and read the new post. There are a lots of service you can use RSS (software or online) and I want to show the service that I use.

As you can see in this screenshot, I follow a lot of blogs and they are all useful. But I have a favourite one. With simple page design but full of useful materials and information about ELT, All at C have become my favourite blog. The blog is about video lesson plans for teachers. Their idea is to share the materials that can be used for lessons. Also, they aim to help learners ( C1 and C2 ) improve their listening and speaking skills, at the same time, in a stimulating, fun, and an effective way. When I read the posts in the blog, I got very inspired because I have realized that I can adjust the videos into my lessons in the future and make the learning efficient as an ELT teacher. I recommend you to follow this page and take inspiration. If you are a teacher, you will definitely find quality materials to use in your lessons. Believe me, you won't be disappointed. Just visit it and you will see!

ALL VIEWS AT ONE POINT

Hello Everyone!

The task of this week is creating a Wiki page, writing a film review on Wikispace and organizing it in peers. Our teacher prepared the Wikispace and we studied on it. I worked with Kader Budak for this task.

In Wiki page, you can easily create a page about something and edit other pages like you do. So we chose a film which is our favourite and the precious one, My Left Foot. Honestly, I have never written a review and had a Wiki page before but while doing the task, I had no difficulty. Because using a Wiki page is not quite difficult as well as writing a review, as I have seen. It may be because of working with my friend. Doing a task together helps us manage the time and relieve the burden of the work and correct the faults in the writing. If I worked alone, I would have some difficulties.

We see that Wiki is useful for  sharing the information with other people. You can use Wikispaces in your ELT classroom and students could share their works in this way. It will absolutely help them improve their writing and reading skills.

You can read our review here. I also added a screenshot, so that you can see the Wiki site of our review.

Hope you enjoy!