Pixton

Hey everyone! Today I'll talk about Pixton. It's a "Free Comic, Storyboard & Graphic Novel Maker" They suggest that everyone can make comics, so they have a classic, for educators and for students version. 

Remember my Use of Technology in Education post, I used a comic from Pixton as a visual. You can also use some comics, like I did, as a visual for your presentations, but using something that you created yourself is more impressive, I believe, and your students would think like that as well. 

While you create comics and storyboards as a material, your students can make assignments online by creating their own stories, graphic novels, and comics. 

Or you can choose an unfinished story from the library and use it as a prediction game material. Students can read and guess what might happen next so that there will be an interaction in class.

Here is a YouTube video about how to make a comic with Pixton:

I hope you enjoy!

Take care!

Test your English!

Hello everyone!

I'm writing this post for those who want to test their level in English. Although we are educating ourselves, it's not possible to know our level without testing. And knowing it is important to improve yourself, I believe.

I'll suggest you two most reliable tests:

 Cambridge English and British Council. (both free)

Let me know if you do the test.

Take care! 

Kahoot!

Hey everyone! How are you? I hope you're having a nice day! 

    For today, I am here with an application to make quizzes fun in class, Kahoot! 

It's a platform where you can create/find quizzes and learning games for your students. 

You create the quiz and open it to play, students enter the code to their app on their phones/devices for that quiz and enter it, they need to answer the questions in seconds that you decide. After the quiz finished, everyone can see their score and the top 3 will appear on the screen as well. 

Here I'm leaving a tutorial for you to see the process of creating.

5 Minute Guide to Kahoot

I'm also leaving a mini-quiz that I created about Determiners:

Determiners

Hope you enjoy! 

Take care!

FluentU: Authentic Material

Looking for authentic materials? No worries, I've got you covered! 

No matter what the learner's interest or skill level, FluentU has a wide range of materials from movie trailers to news, from music videos to inspiring talks. 

They have subtitled and translated every word and even created an in-context dictionary, along with example sentences which activate when you click any word.

Videos will help students naturally remember those words in it and therefore they can master new vocabulary. 

 FluentU offers a lot of languages, some of them are Chinese, Japanese, English, German, French, Italian, Korean, and so on.

You can sign up as a student for free, but if you want to be premium and have access to all features, then you have to pay for it.

Here is the introducing video:

 

Enjoy and take care!

Nearpod

Hey guys! We have an award-winning education tool today: Nearpod!  

Nearpod is the most innovative tool I've discovered so far. It offers a great variety of opportunities for you to make your teaching the best. And it is the winner of The EdTech Awards. ("The EdTech Awards recognizes people in and around education for outstanding contributions in transforming education through technology to enrich the lives of learners everywhere." )

 

As Nearpod is combining pedagogy, content, and technology altogether in a very effective and supportive way, once you start using it you'll never want to leave it. 

 

Here is an informative video about Nearpod if you want to learn more:

 

I hope you really try it and make benefits. Take care!

SECOND LIFE

Hello everyone! Today I'll introduce you to a virtual world Second Life. As the name suggests, it is a platform where you can create a new life for yourself. (They have a Youtube channel that you can watch tutorials, bloopers, etc. if you are wondering) Here is a short video about Second Life for you to see what it offers:

As in the videos, you can create your avatar in a world that you can create and live there however you want. Let your creativity do the job for you and enjoy! 

Now let's come to our main point, how to harmonize this app with our education? We can make use of this app to create the best classroom environment with our students. Since students will have a saying in some creation, the affective filter -which is an invisible psychological filter that can either facilitate or hinder language production in a second language- will be lowered so that the learner has no obstacles while acquiring the target language. With Second Life, training, practice, reflection will be much more easier and fun for the learner. 

I have another video, this time it's about the use of Second Life in Istanbul University:

I have also downloaded Second Life and created my avatar, wandered around. If you wanna see, here I am:

I really hope that you download the app and use it. I'm sure you'll see some benefits!

bye for now 

Use of Technology in Education

Hey guys! I want to talk to you about why I've been sharing so many different tools that can help you in the process of creating materials. 

I just wanted to start with a comic that is very much from real life.  Since technology is more and more developing every day, the spread of technology use in different fields is inevitable. One of the current fields is education, of course, and what I was doing from the beginning, is trying to show you the various ways to use the technology in our classes. Learners are not satisfied with the 'old school' approaches to education. In other words, those approaches are not serving them well enough. So what we need to do is catch up with the time and use instructional technologies in our classes. I know that maybe it will take time to adopt, but when it's adopted the efficiency will definitely increase. We shouldn't resist change, we should work with it!
I will keep on sharing new apps/websites for you to try and I believe that, when they are used, they can make a great difference.
I hope you make benefit of it, take care! 

QR Code

Hey everyone! I'll make a quick suggestion for you to use technology in your classes. Since we are in a technology era and more or less all of us are engaged in technology somehow, it's better to use it on behalf of education as well. And the easiest way to use tech in our classes is QR Codes. We are all familiar with these little black and white squares since they are everywhere now. So why don't we use them to reach our activities that are created in so many websites that I have suggested to you? Students can download any QR Code app on their devices- cell phones, tablets- and via scanning it, they can reach out to the activity that you attached to that specific QR Code. 

As an example, you can scan this QR Code and see what's in there:

Here there are some QR Code apps that you can use to create a QR Code:

QR Code Generator, Visualead, 

And here, there are some QR Code apps that your student can download to scan the QR Codes:

(Android) Coreader, QR Code Reader;

(iPhone) 

QR Reader for iPhone, Quick Scan - QR Code Reader

Quizlet

Hello friends, how you doing? I have a very supportive tool for your vocabulary practices today: Quizlet. As they state themselves, "over %90 students who use Quizlet report higher grades". Pretty impressive, right? 

I said vocabulary but actually, Quizlet is a website which gives you the opportunity to discover or create various materials for any profession such as science, languages, and history. Yet, for today, I have focused on some vocabulary practices and selected a ready study test on travel which includes flashcards, games; matching, writing, listening-writing activities and more. 

I insert the link here so that you can check it out and study. 

https://quizlet.com/303255991/travel-flash-cards/

If you like how it works, you can sign up for free and discover more for yourself. 

HP Reveal

Hey guys! Today, I have an Augmented Reality application that will amaze students and make them excited about learning vocabulary. 

First of all, what is Augmented Reality? "Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real-world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory." 

So, why should we use AR in classes? Well, such things while learning a language, like a vocabulary gaining,  can be very very boring for the learner with traditional activities like repetitive drills, writing down the target words, use them in sentences, matching with the equivalent picture, etc. and trying to memorize those. But it is easier when learners are completely involved in an interesting activity. And that's when HP Reveal gets involved. 

HP Reveal is a 'new extended reality platform' as they call it. What you do is, simply, create an animation/ gif/ illustration of the existing item that you photographed. You download the app free, take a picture of the item you want, add a related overlay and save it. After saving, whenever you turn the camera to that item again,  the chosen overlay will pop up on the screen. Isn't that sound funny? I think students, especially younger ones, would love this app and have fun with it. By using this app in your classes, you create a new, dynamic environment for learning. 

I hope you really try using it and love it!

To make it clearer, I left my auras here:

      

Your own avatar on VOKI!

Hello again, now I'll introduce you to the incredible avatar creator website VOKI. This is another website that I've been trying lately and probably the most interesting one. Because what you are doing in this site is to create your own avatar! "Voki is an educational tool that allows users to create their very own talking character." as they define themselves. And it's definitely a fun and creative way for so many purposes from advertisements to education. Of course, our focus is on education, therefore, Voki can be equal to fun time while doing homework. There are ready backgrounds, characters, and objects that can be used, but you can always create from scratch as well! It is a free program but some of the features are priced. But I'm sure that all can create such beautiful things without payment. 

I left what I created by using Voki if you wish to see an example it's right here: 

Looking for online courses?

Hello friends, how you doing? I hope you had a good day and maybe got good news because I had some! Lately, I've been interested in online courses and looking for a platform to get some. And I just completed my first course on Coursera! If you're wondering what is Coursera and how it works; very briefly, it is a platform that one can access the best education experience online. They are partnering with top universities and organizations to offer the courses, so there is no doubt about the quality of education that is being offered. And the courses are available in a wide variety of fields, both for free yet, if you like to receive a certificate, you need to pay a price for it. But if you want to just get the course then the free version is also enough as well. 

I'm excited to take other courses and enjoy my time while discovering new things. I hope you try it and love it as much as I do!

I personally used the free service and when you complete the course, they inform you with an e-mail like this:  

Of course, Coursera is not the only website that offers this service. Here I will leave some other ones for you:

https://www.edx.org/

https://www.udemy.com/

https://www.udacity.com/

Canva

Hello everyone, I'm back after a break and I hope you are all good! I've been exploring new stuff for a while and it's finally time to introduce them to you. Here comes the first one: Canva. It is a website that you can use to create your own designs for logos, posters, flyers, business cards, graphics and even for your resumes and more! And it offers basically everything -i mean literally everything!- like millions of images, photo filters, icons & shapes and hundreds of fonts and it's free! What else would you need, right?

Well, of course, since we are here for English, I used this website with educational purposes and created some posters targeting vocabulary purposes. You can also find templates for lesson plans, worksheets, table of contents, etc. ready to use. And maybe instead of using it yourself as a teacher, you can ask your students to create whatever they want as homework; it would be fun!

Here there are some of what I created, I hope you enjoy!