CONFESSIONS OF AN ELT STUDENT

Hieee! Hello everyone. Or should I say goodbye. Please prepare your tissues because this post marks the end of this semester. I know, I know, I’ll miss you too. But all good things must come to an end. Well, this doesn’t mean that I won’t use this blog anymore but I’m sure that I’ll be taking a break. All the good writers need their breaks sometimes :)

To sum up the semester and the course, I’d like to state my opinions about technology integration in ELT and overall reflect on what I’ve learned. Not forgetting that this is my second time taking this course, I must say I enjoyed it far more than the first time around. This time I got to be in the classroom at a reasonable hour (:D), and work with people that I could see eye-to-eye with. I also learned more about technology and how to use it for teaching/learning purposes. Even though, me and technology do not always get along well with each other, I was able to use it in a beneficial way for my assignment. I’ll definitely be using some of the assignments for my future students.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed while preparing for this course. First of all blogs, I really enjoyed writing my opinions seeing that I’m quite an opinionated person. I also really enjoyed creating a podcast. Podcasts and voice-acting were already amongst my interests and I got to further develope them. But my favourite one was definitely writing a film review with my friends. I love films and I love writing so that’s no surprise :) My least favourite was unfortunately the infographinc. Not because I didn’t like it but more because the other ones were more my cup of tea.

Anyways, this was a fun semester. Dare I say my favourite semester so far. I hope next year will be even better. We shall live to see. I hope you enjoyed my blog posts and thank you for accompanying me on my journey. This was the final stop. For now at least. I hope to see you guys on another journey. Until then, take care <3

Hiee! Hello guys. Today I had the honour of interviewing a saint. Well, she was more than a saint. But before we come to that I want to explain to you about my task.

For this task we were assigned to use AI. We used Magic School and asked the chatbot to pretend like a famous historical figure so that we can interview them. Afterwards we wrote a report and asked Magic School’s writing feedback tool for any pointers. As the final part we revised our reports according to the feedback.

Well, I cannot say that I am a big fan of AI. But using it as a guider and as a tool for help was quite beneficial. I’m surprised I enjoyed chatting with it this much. And to be honest, where else would I get the chance to interview THE Joan of Arc. Yes, the icon herself Joan of Arc. She is one of my favourite historical figures and if you are curious about the reason, maybe you should read my interview(It’s linked below).

Anyways, I think integrating AI to a homework assignment can be a good idea. To be honest, we know students are gonna use it regardless. So, if we are the ones who ask the to use it, they can maybe actually learn something while guiding the AI to do their homework. I’m still unsure if i like AI tho :)

All and all, this was my last assignment for this course. And I am glad that we are finishing on a high note with an assignment like this. I really enjoyed chatting with Joan and also AI. This was all for this post. Let’s see what the future holds. Until then, take care <3

Hieee!

What’s up everybody? Today I’m presenting you with a film review that me and my friends Evrim and Yusuf wrote together. Our assignment was about collaborative writing and we decided to write about Kill Bill because it’s a film we all watched and liked. Here is how it went.

Writing collaboratively is not something I’m a stranger to. However, it was a new experience to write a film review this way. I really enjoyed the process of exchanging ideas and seeing what my friends were writing while adding my own comment. I could never imagine having to review something through the same lense as someone else but it was really fun.

We used Google Docs for this task. It’s also a platform I’m used to and I like it very much. Considering I do my homeworks on an Ipad I can even say that I like it more than Word. We also had the chance to comment on other groups’ reviews. They also commented on our post. Seeing their toughts and giving feedback was very helpful for my writing.

I’ll be sharing our review and the comments we recieved down below for you to see too. I hope you like our work and maybe feel inspired to try writing a review with your friends. If you do, please share them. That was all for today. I’ll see you guys on another post. Until then, take care <3

Hieee!

Hello everybody. This week my friend Yusuf and I prepared you a demonstration video about How to Make a Sandwich. We were assigned to create a digital story and we chose the how to video option.

I think how to videos are very helpful. I use them on a bunch of different tasks that I don’t know how to do. I always thought that there is nothing I cannot do if there is a YouTube video about it.

Anyways, preparing this video was really fun. I hope you like it and I hope after watching our video you’ll have no problems about preparing yourselves a delicious sandwich. I can’t wait to hear your ideas. See you on another assignment, take care <3

Hieee!

Hello everyone. We are met at another stop of our journey. Today we will be talking about podcasts. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the concept and are listening to at least one podcast from time to time. Honestly, I love podcasts. I usually listen to them when I’m doing something like cleaning my room or cooking. They are really helpful while being busy with a task because you don’t have to watch anything you can just listen and enjoy. My go to podcasts are The Bald and the Beautiful by Trixie and Katya or Anything Goes by Emma Chamberlain. If you have any other suggestions I’d love to hear them.

Anyways, let’s talk about this week’s task. We were assigned to record a podcast and I chose the one about a 60 second idea to improve the world. Trying to come up with an idea was not easy. I chose education as a topic given that it is something I’m already studying about and I also think that every great change should start with educating people. 60 seconds felt a little short to explain my thoughts but I tried my best. I hope it was clear and that you liked my special interest in voice acting shine through :)

All and all, I hope that you like my podcast. I can’t wait to hear you thoughts about it and check out your podcast suggestions while I’m trying to clean up my room the next time(which is unfortunately right now). So see you guys on the next stop. Until then, take care <3

On this stop of our journey, I’m presenting you another infographic that I made. But this time, the information is about “Netiquette”. We were instructed to select a topic amongst cyberbullying, plagiarism, copyright and fair use, safety and privacy and of course netiquette. I chose netiquette because it was the topic that I had the least amount of knowledge and it seemed like an interesting one too. Once again, I used Canva for this assignment and I got help from the many templates the app provides. It was really fun to make and I got to learn more about how to use the internet more ethically.

This was relatively an easy task maybe because I had done it before or that I’ve had more practice with Canva compared to my first time with this task. Regardless, I think the usage of infographics are very helpful for both the person who prepares it and the ones who see it. They are a good starting point to gather information about bigger topics and they are really nice to look at most of the time.

Anyways, to cut it short, I had a great time with this task and I’d like to see your opinions about my infographic too. Until the next stop, take care <3

Hieee!

Hello people. On today’s stop I’ll be sharing my opinions about 21st century learning again. We’ll see if and how my views have changed about the integration of technology into ELT.

21st century learning talks about the methods used for meeting the needs and demands of the learners in the age of technology. It views the changes our lives are going under and adapts the teaching as best to keep up.

The best way to keep up with the technological changes is to use the technology itself. Or trying to teach the ways technology can be used for the benefit of the learners. Technology makes most parts of our lives easier, so it doesn’t sound like a bad idea to use it to make learning easier, am I right?

Well, maybe not exactly making learning easier, but using technology to support our learners and their needs sure is a good idea. In my old post -which I’ll be linking down below- I talked about supporting learners with different learning styles through technology and my views haven't changed. Moreover, I had the chance to see the benefits of technology use while working on some lesson plan designs for a course I took last semester called Current Issues in Teaching. You can also find some of my work for it on my blog.

I know this post itself is not detailed but I wanted to show you my mindset and refer to my old works about the matter so that you can see the basis of this blog better. That was all for the first stop of our old-but-new journey. I hope to see you on our next stop. Until then, take care. See ya <3

Hieee!

Hello and welcome back to my blog. I didn’t think I’ll be doing this again. At least not this early but here we are.

As you may know, this blog was about a course in my department that I was taking. Flash news, I failed by attendance (please don’t tell my mom :D) and I’m retaking the same course. So for this semester, I’ll be redoing some of my old assignments while lerning and writing abput brand new things. I hope this year will be different.

By the way, this whole blogging thing is kinda growing on me so who knows, maybe this time it’ll be more than just a school assignment.

Hieee! Hello guys, as you can see from the title, this is a goodbye. This post marks the end of the semester and end of the course this blog has been inspiring. On our last stop, I’d like to talk about about our overall journey.

Throughout the semester, I had a lot of struggles. Not only for this course but for most of my courses. There were a ton of assignments to keep up with and I had some issues regarding some of my pair/group mates. But this courses assignments are amongst my favourites. Because with all of them, I learned to work with different tools and look through different perspectives. I think my favourite one was the AR integrated teaching one. It was quite interesting to to use 360 videos as a part of a worksheet. For my fellow ELT students who’ll be taking this course in the future, I’d like to say that they should be excited and enjoy the time that they are gonna spend while working on the assignments. They seem like a lot at first, but when you work together with your groupmates, you can get through them easily.

Hieee! Hello y’all. The stop of our journey today is about artificial intelligence. More specifically, Using AI as a tool for teaching and learning. As a group, me and my friends prepared a teaching material. In this material we focused on writing and designed 3 activities. The first one is a pre-writing activity focusing on vocabulary knowledge about what goes in a story. The second one is the target activity part, where students write a story and use help from ChatGPT to develop their stories. And the last one is a post activity where the students write a self-reflection paragraph.

Preparing this material and finding a way to incorporate AI into teaching is not easy. But in my opinion, it can be quite beneficial for students. In the near future, we will start seeing AI in more parts of our lives and learning with it can maybe help us understand it beter as well.

I’ll be adding our material and ASSURE lesson plan down below for u to examine. I’m looking forward to hearing, actually reading, your feedback and opinions. Until the next stop, take care <3

Hieee! Today I’ll be sharing with you a material I prepared using AR technology. In order to prepare this material, I learned what AR is, and how can it be used in teaching. There is also an ASSURE lesson plan alongside my material.

In this material, I have included some 360 videos for students to explore the city of Edinburgh. They toured around, visited a museum and learned about a festival.

If I was a student, using AR to learn would be a lot of fun and I think I’d be quite beneficial. It allows us to feel like we traveled to a places that is kms away from us. Normally I am not a huge fan of the developing technology, but benefits like this makes me question myself sometimes :)

I hope you will like what I prepared and feel free to share your thoughts. I hope to see you on another stop on the road. See you <3

Hieee!

Hello again. On this stop of our journey I’ll be talking about a corpus-based teaching material me and my friends (Merve and Polat) prepared. While working on this project we learned what corpus is and how to use it for teaching purposes. We also prepared a lesson plan based on the ASSURE model.

The teaching material we designed is about the usage of would and could. We prepared tasks for our possible students and we also included how they can use corpus to better their learning.

In my opinion, using corpus-based materials can be beneficial because they let the students see themselves how a form is used in a language and I myself support the idea of learning through interacting with the language itself. Corpus usage is a nice fit for that.

Down below you can find our teaching materials and our lesson plan. Hope you like it and I’ll see you on our next stop. Take care <3

Hi eveyone! As you may know I’m Lara. I’m a 20 year old ELT student and I’ve created this blog as a school requirement last year. But this term I’ll be using this same blog for another course I’m taking called Current Issues in Teaching. I’ll continue sharing what I’ll be doing regarding teaching English. I hope you’ll enjoy them just the same :)

Hieee!

Hello guys. Today our stop is digital storytelling. For our course project me and my friend @ashakalilnose worked together to create a demonstration video. It was really fun working on this project. We decided to choose doing a demonstration because we both are crafty people and thought it would be good if we made our video about it too.

We had a lot of opinions about what to demonstrate in our video and I thought we could show how to make a bird out of paper since I liked doing origami since I was little. We decided that I was gonna be in the video and Merve was gonna do the voiceover and we did the editing together. We used Imovie to edit.

We didn’t come across any challenges because we are used to working together on our projects and I think working with someone you know for a long time is easier compared to others.

Other than that I think creating a video really helps with your communication skills and it poses a great learning experience. I would like to use it in my future classes with my future students :)

To end todays journey I’ll be embedding our video to the bottom. I hope you like it and please send pictures of your paper birds if you try to make one. See you at another stop <3

Hieee!

Hello everybody. Today we will be discussing podcasts. I was assigned to record a podcast for my class. It was a pair-work so I had the chance to work with my friend Merve Arslan @ashakalilnose and together we recorded a sound-rich story that we wrote ourselves. 

While working on this task I had a lot of fun. Of course as all assignments are this was too a little bit stressful but nothing i couldn’t handle. I’m actually interested in voice acting and stuff like that so this task was an incredible opportunity for me and I also think that working on it helped my pronunciation skills. 

If i was a teacher I’d definitely give a similar task to my students. I think, since podcasts are popular nowadays it would interest them too and preparing it would develop their writing and speaking skills. And aren't the best ways of learning the fun and interesting ones anyway :) I’d also prefer a task as such because it creates a place for students to interact. And as someone who struggles with people skills, it’s a nice occasion to work on them. 

I will attach our podcast below. Hope you like it and please don’t be afraid to comment and recommend us some podcasts that you like. See you guys on my next stop <3

Hieee!

Hello everyone. In today’s post I will share an infographic with you that I made. This infographic was a requirement of my class but I had fun while preparing it. I decided to do it about plagiarism. I chose this topic because as students we go through a lot of writing activities and we all should be notified about plagiarism. For the design part, I used Canva. It has some pre-made templates by a ton of amazing artists and those helped me a lot in the process. 

I think infographics are beneficial to use especially for teaching. First of all, they are fun to look at. They are interesting and make us learn without boring us. They don’t contain too much information but they open the door for us to want to learn more about a topic. Besides, students tend to like things that are colourful and they can also use an infographic as a short little reminder after they are done learning. So I thing using infographics for teaching/learning is a great idea.

Here down below is the infographic that I prepared. Hope you like it and let me know your thoughts about infographics in general too. See you at our next stop. Take care<3