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!

FIRST STEP TO SHARE TECHNOLOGY

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Record music and voice >>"

  Hello, everybody!

  Here I am again, with my project which I have done with my friend       Kader Budak. That Project was about Podcasting. Have you heard that before? Let me explain: A podcast is a form of digital media that consists of an episodic series of audio, video, digital radio, PDF, or ePub files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer or mobile device. We were supposed to write a story and narrate it in pairs, for our podcasting project. Moreover, we had to add rich sounds convenient to the story and record it with our own voices. It had to last one or two minutes. What a difficult but enjoyful experience for us! So we decided that our story was suitable for high school ELT learners and we designed every detail according to our target learners. In order to practice learner’s knowledge about tenses, we used mixed tenses; present simple, past simple, past continuous, present perfect, past perfect and future. In this way they could improve their listening and grammar skills. We also took in consideration our pronunciation and their vocabulary knowledge choosing convenient words so that they could understand.

We had difficulties in creating the story because the first two sentences of the story were expressed already and we had to think according to that. And we tried again and again to record our voices because our voices were different in the sound recording than in real. The time was set up to full in two minutes, too. Apart from these, I think our first experience, podcasting, was fun and a different kind of system that enhance our thinking, speaking, pronunciation skills and the most importantly our creativity. It is very useful and I strongly recommend you to use it in your ELT classrooms. You can also make yours and encourage your students to make their own podcasts. Sure they will have fun in the process of learning English with the podcasts.

Don’t be afraid to interact with the technology, use it!