eduLab

Finally, we've made it to the end of the fall semester. After an exhausting, long semester that was spent doing assignments, I'm so glad to write this post, to be honest. I'll start with explaining the weaknesses of this course:

I don't love writing blog posts after every assignment. Creating worksheets, videos, and stuff already takes so much time, and I'm not sure whether we actually need more writing. We can write it, but after each pair of assignments or in the final post to sum up everything.

Instructions could be clearer.

Now, let's take a look at the strengths:

We've created many worksheets. If we ever need it, if we can't find what we're looking for on the Internet, we can use the ones we've prepared or create a new one that would meet our needs.

From this point on I'll answer these questions:

What would you tell to the future students of this course?

Well, I'd tell them to find a group or pair who already took this course and completed all the assignments, and received good grades. They can look at their works to have an idea about what they are supposed to do and what leads them to get a good grade.

2. How would this course contribute to your professional deveopment?

Just as I told you in the strengths part, thanks to this course, we've created a variety of materials, and if another course requires me to create similar materials, I think I'm ready to do it.

And, let's rank all the assignments from the best to the least preferable.

Flipped teaching video

AI in ELT

AR/VR integration into ELT

AI- enhanced CBLP

Teaching Material (Draft)

Assure Lesson Plan (Draft)

Assure Lesson Plan (Final version)

Here we come to an end again with this assignment.... This time, it was quite similar to what we did for the first assignment because our intention/target was to make students use AI when completing the worksheet.

Again, we (my friend Hilal and I) used our one and only, beloved tool Canva. In this assignment, our focus was on writing skills, and we wanted students to write an Instagram post about fashion, acting as an influencer.

At first, we were not so sure about whether our focus should be on language skills or grammar and vocabulary, and as a result of this, in the brainstorming part of the worksheet, we asked students to write down the adjectives they know about personality traits, physical appearance, and clothing types. However, after we received feedback, we understood that the main focus wasn't vocabulary teaching; it was writing. We changed that part completely and added some guiding questions that would help students while writing.

Creating such a material was fun for me, and to be honest, this assignment was so much better than the previous one. I hope the outcome looks appealing and is found educational by everyone. Hope to be here next year (or in the spring semester, who knows) for the AI course.

Assure lesson plan (draft)

AR/VR City Exploration (draft)

Assure lesson plan (updated)

AR/VR City Exploration (final version)

The assignment for this week was to prepare an AR/VR integrated material for students to explore a city.

Me and my group members (Hilal, Lisa, and Şevin) used Canva and 360stories.com in the preparation of the teaching material.

Nothing was challenging except that it was group work, again.

To be honest, even though I love integrating technology into our teaching, I'm not really crazy about using AR or VR as a part of teaching. Since most students in public schools don't have headsets, you need to use virtual tours and videos, but they make you feel like you're playing pretend. I don't think the time and effort teachers and students invest in such activities are really worth the results. When you can go for better alternatives, I'd not choose it, I guess. But who knows what I will do in the future!

Final version

Assure lesson plan for the video

Quiz

The feedback we got for the drafts

Click on what you want to see.

Hello, my dear readers!

This time we have prepared a flipped teaching video using Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Principles.

In the flipped teaching approach, you're supposed to turn your physical classroom environment into a digital one. The teacher creates a video using methods such as voice recording or videotaping herself/himself. When the video is ready, the teacher shares it with the students, and the students learn the topic through the video. Their learning should be supported by teacher-made checkpoints, quizzes, or handouts that will be completed by students once they've finished watching. This was basically what we tried to do this time.

Even if I love creating and editing, I find it very challenging due to it being group work. Working individually allows you to be freer, more creative, and faster. Therefore, if I were to assign such an assignment to my own students, I'd allow them to work individually.

Another challenge was the tools I've tried to create a quiz. Most of them want you to boost your account and pay to create different types of questions with no access deadline. I think they are inconvenient for us students to use; the case may differ for teachers, though. So, we preferred Google Forms (you can access our quiz above) rather than Kahoot and Wayground.

Since we're quite familiar with Canva, we used it for creating the video. The two other video creation tools, Powtoon and Renderforest, seemed a bit old and difficult to work on the project simultaneously with my group members.

Our peers told us to add some sound effects, balance all voices, add tables that compare will and going to, and finally number the questions in the quiz.

We've tried to fix these issues, and hopefully y'all will love it.

Draft worksheet

Final version

Assure Lesson Plan (First version)

Assure Lesson Plan (Final version)

Hello everyone! Today I'm here with something I've never made before: a worksheet. My friends Lisa and Şevin, with whom I've previously written a movie review, worked on it with me again. For the details, keep up reading:

Our first assignment for the Current Issues in Teaching course was to create a worksheet that incorporates a corpus and to create a lesson plan using the ASSURE model. We chose simple present and present continuous as our grammatical items to be taught, and SKELL to engage high school EFL students with real-life examples for both tenses.

In the design of the worksheet, we used Canva, and since it's an AI-enhanced material, we resorted to the help of ChatGPT.

Just as I enjoyed creating such material, students would love utilising it as well. Because our corpus-based teaching material not only helps with learning grammar, vocabulary, and accuracy, but it also enables students to understand how grammatical structures appear in a real conversation. If it's used with teacher or AI guidance/instruction, I believe students would make the best of it. Thus, in our worksheet, we created activities that are suitable for AI use. Even though some problems may arise due to technology access, I believe they could be solved by the teacher. I don't assume that students would struggle with using SKELL since it's so easy to use.

Hello everyone. As some of you may remember, on my last post I said "I want to keep using this blog for Elt related things." Even though I said such a thing, I didn't expect to be back here in a really short time. But, gladly here i am... This time, I'm going to use this blog for the Current Issues in English course. Hopefully, there'll be posts such as: Flipped teaching video, AR/VR integrated teaching material, AI project.

There's only been 3 weeks into this course and what I've understood is that we learned teachnology as students until now, but this semester, through Current Issues in Technology, we'll learn to make an use of it like teachers. So, the focus will be on the teaching part.

Last semester, I really enjoyed making infographics, writing movie reviews etc. and if this course is kind of the continuation of ICT, then probably I'll love this one as well.

Hello everyone! with this post, we haven't only come to an end for this ICT course but also for my first year in Marmara University. Time flies so fast...

I really loved the way we produced things rather than focusing merely on theories. I think, this course's objectives match with Bloom's taxonomy's create level and encourage us to be more autonomous. We definitely need more courses like this one at all levels of education.

Throughout this semester we have completed various tasks and if I am to rank them. I'd basically do it in this order:

Infographic = Even though I got 85 out of 100, it is still my favorite. As I mentioned before, i love working individually, and creating new visual aids. Deciding on the graphics to use was fun.

Digital Story = Same thing applies to this one. The only hardship I encountered was finding reliable statistics. Also, we got positive feedbacks from our friends.

Collaborative Writing = I've always loved watching movies.

Podcast = 60 second podcast format will be in my memory from now on. Maybe I'll ask my future students to do same. The only reason i placed this as the 4th one is that my first podcast was so bad that i needed to record a completely new one 💔

AI Chatbot = Obviously assignments aren't meant to be fun, however, compared to the other assignments this one felt so dull.

And this is basically how I rate them. I don't have any suggestions for this course and it better stay the same because it's really one of the most enjoyable courses a teacher candidate can take.

Hello everyone! Today I'm here with our last assignment: Chatting with an AI chatbot. Who you choose to chat with is up to you, and I chose Mary Shelley, the author of the masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Neither my friends nor I used anything other than Magic School, yet when we compared our conversations with chatbots, mine turned out to be noticeably longer (12 pages). I think this is because she is an author. So, if you ever plan to use this AI chatbot for such assignments, keep in mind that the number of words changes depending on the person you choose to talk to.

Since our conversation was really long, it actually challenged me during the process of report writing, and I thought of choosing someone else and conducting a new interview; however, I don't like leaving things unfinished.

In the future, I'd love to give a similar assignment. Students would complain and whine a little, but at the end of the day, it really adds to your writing skills.

It's great to be back here with you!

Lisa, Şevin, and I wrote a film review this time (you can find their blog pages and our review's links below). The film we chose was The Platform (2019). After Şevin's suggestion, I watched it right away during our break time and didn't understand how the time went so quickly, so it was a good choice. Thank you Şevin 😹

It was also my first time writing a film review - I really love watching movies, but I have never tried writing an analysis on Letterboxd or IMDb tbh.- so I'd like to thank our teacher for giving us another opportunity to try something new.

Following the task guideline, we gave a brief but compelling piece of information and then poured our feelings regarding the movie into words by using Google Docs. I found Google Docs very helpful for the purpose of writing, especially when you're working with a group.

As to the context of our review, this time I think I wrote the easiest part. Since it was just an introduction, there was no need for a personal comment. Because of that, I had no problem during the process.

I hope our review sparks an interest in you. If you have already watched it or are planning to watch it, please share it in the comments. That's all for now. Take care and stay curious for my next post!

The Platform movie review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eDqhqWKOCtQdj3ZR9mUdEsbxspY8TqyEUCTEJYI0Xtk/edit?tab=t.0

Lisa's blog: https://lisasohdalae.blogspot.com/?m=1

Hello everyone again!!!

Our last assignment was to create a digital story. Among the three options given, my teammates and I chose this. Initially, we thought that it might be a good idea to make sushi at home and show everyone how to do it, however, we couldn't really put it into practice due to several reasons. And that's basically how we ended up creating a Public Service Announcement.

Our PSA is about something most of us suffer from time to time in this rapidly changing and digitalizing world, digital loneliness. In countries where your opportunities to socialize are limited because of money and time issues, this topic remains vital. Because of that, we wanted to create a PSA on this issue.

The creation was mostly fun, except for the statistics finding part. It wasn't hard to find articles regarding digital loneliness, but I guess I'm more of a creator type of person rather than a researcher.

I hope you all love it. Wish to see you soon with as enjoyable projects as this one.

If you want to check my teammates' blogs, here are the links: https://lisasohdalae.blogspot.com/

WARNING

To avoid confusion, I have to explain myself: This is my second podcast, revised considering Mustafa Hoca's feedback. I'd like to highlight that I uploaded my first podcast on time (before April 21st), but after I received feedback, I needed to record a new one, cancel my previous submission on Google Classroom, and hand in this new one.

Hi everyone again!

After I was told my podcast was wrong by my teacher, I thought that it might be a good idea to upload a new one, which is better than the previous one. This one is about what we can do about animal testing to improve the world. My solution is to check whether products have been tested on animals and buy cruelty-free products. Probably your awareness and careful choices themselves won't stop animal tests right away, yet, they'll catch companies' attention after a while.

In this podcast assignment, we were given three options: 1) vox-pop, 2) improving the world, and 3) A sound-rich story. As you can see, I chose the second option, the one you can do on your own, without a pair or a group. As a result of this choice, I hadn't had a problem while creating. Overall, it was fun, especially finding an inspiring idea. I found multiple ideas that I can say are my own ideas, only to find out they're not a perfect fit for this assignment :D I'll be more careful next time.

As a teacher candidate, I'd like to give a similar task to my students in the future to improve their speaking skills and build digital literacy. This type of assignment not only gets students to check the pronunciation of words and speak more, but it also encourages students to be creators, not only consumers of media. However, there might be some disadvantages, like being self-conscious about your voice or not having good equipment to record it.

Hi!

Today I'm here to present you my infographic about cyberbullying, a topic that should be tackled with care especially by parents and teachers. I designed this by using Piktochart as it was recommended in the class by our teacher. It was a really enjoying task since I love designing visual aids but only if there were more reliable worldwide statistical facts it could have been even more fun. Another thing is: Piktochart is only free for three downloads and most of the good graphics are for the premium accounts. For the next time, I'll use Canva I guess.

Now let's talk about the benefits of an infographic. Just take a look at mine and come back here. Do you remember the definition of cyberbullying, how common is it or what someone can do to stop cyberbullying? Probably you learned something and now you're able to answer these questions. But how did that happen? Well, infographics are designed to facilitate remembering and understanding things. That's why you can answer my questions (probably) With the perfect combination of texts, icons and images infographics can teach you something that would normally take your hours, require you to read hundred pages to learn in the easiest way. That's why it's helpful for students.

Now that it's 2025, it is no longer enough for students and teachers to only know traditional ways of teaching and learning. They need to keep up with the change. But what do we need to know? Well, this is a very popular discussion among experts and they have offered various frameworks to define and highlight the skills we need. If you're interested in education field you might have heard of 4C's, TPACK, CALL, and SAMR frameworks. These four frameworks draw attention to the role of technology integration in education. Before my explanation just imagine yourself as a student in the 80s or even 90s, you have a phone and a computer and etc. But is it enough for your language learning process? Obviously not. In order to improve yourself, you need to listen, speak, write and read. In short, what you need is to be exposed to target language as many times as possible. But unfortunately if you were a student at that time you'd only have a little chance to do those things. But now, there are a wide range of apps, technologies that can facilitate your learning whenever you want no matter where you are, home or train, subway or market. So why not just choose an app and make the whole process easier?

Photo: https://edtech-class.com/2021/06/30/all-about-tpack-a-teachers-guide-to-the-tpack-tech-integration-model/