What and Why of the Fourseasonstechnology blog?
Hi! Welcome to my first blog post!
Ahh, I am so excited to be writing this right now and even more excited knowing that you are finally reading and examining it. As I mentioned before, this blog is a platform created to share knowledge and experience with you, using technology to our needs and various web-based applications and studies.
I hope it will be a long-term blog and you will enjoy following it.
See ya in the next post.
A reflection on our century
Hi again! In this post, we will focus on learning in the twenty-first cc and we will examine it from many different perspectives.
What is 21'st century learning?
First of all, if we need to define twenty-first cc learning, we can say that it is a flexible, creative, complex education approach that offers new opportunities, but also aims at a world that has so many problems and is changing extremely fast.
Why is it significant for language learning?
Also, considering that we are in a period where access to information is so easy, learning a foreign language, which can not be independent of technological developments and using it effectively in the profession and life, is an excellent advantage for all individuals to reach twenty-first cc skills. Another point we need to mention is that the quality of teaching activities is a desired situation in the education process. Teachers should convey knowledge to students in a variety of ways.
Why technology integration into the English classroom is significant?
Because while learning is taking place, the individual combines what he or she sees and hears and codes it in his/her mind. In this way, it will be easier for him/her to recall it in his/her mind when he or she needs it. In this process, computer and technological opportunities gain importance. To give another example; pictures, and videos, which may be difficult or expensive to display, can be shown to students via computers and the internet, regardless of cost or order. To sum up, especially in today's cc, technology has an unavoidable and important effect in many areas, especially in language, and will have a permanent relationship between them.
See ya my dear readers!
On My Wiki Experience: Film Review
Hi, everyone!
We are together again after a long time. In this post, I will tell you about the wiki page that we created with my homework friend Feiza Kara Chousein to review a movie called The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I will leave below the blog link of my friend Feiza Kara Chousein and screenshots of the wiki page we created together. You can visit whenever you want and take a look at the movie we are reviewing. I am sure, you will love it.
The process of our collaborative writing
As I mentioned before, I opened a wiki account with my friend in a collaborative way and made a review about the movie we watched together there. Then we examined and commented on the pages of our friends who made other movie reviews. Now, it is time to share our experience with you about our wiki work. First of all, working on this review assignment with my friend was a different experience for me. Because I have never done anything like this before. We interacted on many issues, such as watching and talking about a movie together, sharing our views, opening an account, and arranging it together.
My opinions on the wiki
In addition, this study allowed us to visit other wiki pages, get different movie suggestions, and make edits and comments on the pages. Besides, expressing our opinions also shows our readers what kind of movie taste we have. Thus, I can say that it has contributed a lot to me in many subjects. We can not ignore that the wiki, the application we use by collaborating with this contribution, also has an impact. Therefore, we would like to thank our teacher who gave us this assignment to use this tool.
See yaa in many other posts! :)
On My Padlet Experience:Universal Pandemic Covid-19
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Hello, all my dear readers!
First of all, I am very happy to be with you again. Yes, I am here today to explain to you the project I had to do for my educational technologies course, the tool I used in the project, the group I came together with for the project, and everything I experienced during this project process. Let's talk about the project we have to do with my group mates that they are Ebru Efe, Feiza Kara Chousein and Hüdaye Nur Duranoğlu.
ABOUT OUR PROJECT PROCESS
In the beginning, we all opened a padlet account and started working on a common padlet board collaboratively. We chose a topic among the current topics determined by our teacher, which was Covid-19, the virus that affected almost the whole world. Then everyone wrote on the padlet wall what they knew about the subject beforehand, what they wanted to learn, and finally what they learned as a result of their research. Of course, since it is a subject we are familiar with, we completed our task with pleasure and ease.
WHAT ROLE DID PADLET PLAY IN OUR PROJECT?
If I have to talk about the Padlet, first of all, it was a very comfortable and practical tool to use. I also saw that the use of group work offers group members the opportunity to be active at the same time, to see how group members work, and most importantly, it enables them to work collaboratively.
Thanks to the padlet project, I learned how to work in a common space and what effect this application has had on individual or group work in our century. Briefly, it was a very pleasant experience for me to complete this task by meeting with my group of friends on common ground. I left a screenshot and a link from our padlet project below.
That's all I have to say. See yaa in many posts! :)
On My Podcast Experience: 60-sec idea to improve the world.
Hello, all my dear readers!
We are together again after a long time. Yeah, today I'm here to explain to you the assignment I had to complete for my course on educational technologies, the device I utilized for the project, how the project process works, and everything I went through while working on this project. Unlike the previous ones, this time it was work that I completed individually. If you're ready, let's start talking about this work of mine.
ABOUT MY TASK PROCESS
First of all, I created an account as a student user on Voki, the application suggested by our teacher. Then I generated an avatar or character to voice my podcast. Even my avatar's backdrop was a creation of mine, and I was now ready to record audio for my podcast. Our teacher gave 4 different suggestions for us to create a podcast. Of these, I chose the work called 60 seconds to heal the world, which has a series on the BBC. Of course, it is important and I think the hardest part of the work was to come up with a creative idea. And in the end, I believed that with the union of all world states/countries and the establishment of a single world state, many problems will come to an end and the world will be a much more beautiful and livable place. And I recorded the audio of my speaking on the subject and had my avatar voice it and the task was completed.
MY GENERAL IMPRESSION OF THE PROJECT
I can say that I really enjoyed completing the assignment. It was like I wasn't doing homework. The only challenge was to come up with a creative idea, as I mentioned before. Will I give this task to my students in the future? I definitely will, because first of all, the avatar creation event will make students more enthusiastic to do the homework. It will also make them think about our world. And of course, the wiki was a very comfortable platform to use and create podcasts. I will recommend the application to my students with peace of mind. For those who are curious, I leave the link and screenshot of my podcast below. That's all I have to say in this post, I hope it helps you. Wait for me in the next post! :)
See yaa!
On My Digital Storytelling Experience: PSA On Smoking
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Hi, all my dear readers!
Yes, we are together again today. I would like to talk to you about digital storytelling, which we have prepared on cigarettes and PSA (Public Service Announcement) type given to us as a group work by our teacher for my course called educational technologies. I should state that we have created our work with great pleasure with my bandmate Feiza Kara Chousein. Now, as always, it's time to share with you the application we used for the study, my views on the process and how I experienced this process. Shall we begin to tell?
ABOUT OUR STUDY PROCESS
For our study, we first made a general internet search to find a problem in Turkey and we decided to prepare a public service announcement about smoking due to its great impact on our country. Then, we made many adjustments such as visual additions, animations, effects and time adjustments on the Canva application that we used. Then we adjusted the voice-over, that is, the sound effect added it to the video we created and prepared our work without any problems.
MY IMPRESSIONS OF OUR STUDY
If I have to talk about the tool we used, Canva was a very useful and practical application, although it might seem a bit complicated at first. We did everything we needed to do by using it, so I can say that it met all of our needs. Only some of the content such as background and visuals had few options and most of them were paid as in many applications. As for his contribution to language lessons, it definitely develops both speaking and writing skills first. It is also a very important activity as it integrates students into technology, which is an important part of our age. Yes, we have come to the end of another very entertaining work. I leave the link and screenshot of our work below in case you want to review it.
See yaa in many posts!
On My Digital Movie Poster Experience: My Sweet Orange Tree
Hello, all my dear readers!
Today is the time to introduce you to a project I've been working on individually for the second time. In this study, I first assumed that a book I had read before was adapted into a movie. Then I prepared a poster for this movie on the digital platform. On this poster, I researched and added a lot of information that should be on the poster by our teacher, such as the name of the movie, the director, the poster producer, excerpts from the movie, and tags. And I completed my last mission happily and without any problems.
ABOUT MY PROJECT PROCESS
I chose the novel My Sweet Orange Tree, which I had read many times before, to design my digital poster. Then, I decided to work on an application called PosterMyWall, which is one of the application recommendations given by my teacher. Finally, after doing some research about the book and adding it on my poster, I completed the last study of the Educational Technologies course I took, as I mentioned before.
MY OPINIONS ON THE PROJECT
Let me tell you a little about the app I use. PosterMyWall was primarily a basic application that was not at all complicated to use. The number of varieties it offered, whether it was a template or a background, was low. But it was very useful in terms of ease of use. In the future, of course, I will try to make my students do such studies with great enthusiasm. These are works that are very enjoyable, worth dealing with, and you learn a lot of things every time you do them. I believe that especially children will be one of the biggest factors that enable them to love the lesson. And it's time to leave my poster and link below for our final work.
See yaa in my last post!
Hello, all my dear readers!
Yes, today I will give you some news. As you know, my blogging journey started through the education technology course I took and we got to know each other. I designed many projects or assignments in this course during the semester, individually and with my group of friends. I shared many things with you, including all my completed projects and my experience in this process. I am about to leave behind a whole semester of enjoyable, full, sometimes tiring, challenging course. And I regret to say that this is my last blog post. Let's take an overview of the time I spent on this course!
REFLECTING ON MY LEARNING PROCESS DURING THE TERM
First of all, before taking this course, I thought that there might be some confusion about integrating technology into the English course. Also, when we first started taking the course and the first task was given to us, I had great difficulty with our teacher and I found it too tiring and unnecessarily challenging. But then, thanks to the effect of technology, we see how the lesson becomes enjoyable and colorful both after successfully completing the assigned tasks and when we have fun with the increase in group work and complete all the tasks as if we are not doing homework. So we understand that it changed my thinking quite a bit. In conclusion, I can honestly say that the course has been of great benefit to me. Let's put everything aside, first of all, I have gained a great knowledge of many things that I have never heard or heard but have no idea about. And I discovered many tools on the internet and gained experience in how to use them. Also, I realized how fun English teaching can be and how it can be integrated with today's technology.
CLOSING
I can only say that the time given for the given tasks was short because we were given many tasks in many lessons and I can say that I was in a hurry to complete all of them in a semester. However, I cannot pass without saying this, I am very grateful to my teacher for improving me in many subjects. Yes, life is full of excitement and miracles, we all know. I said that we have come to the end of our journey, but no one can say that one day I will not continue this journey again, right? Hope to be together on many more journeys!
Good people, last time see yaa!!
Back to Blogging and On My Corpus-based Teaching Material Experience: See vs. Watch
Hello, all my dear readers after a long time!
As you guessed, I am a 3rd grader and we prepared a corpus-based teaching material in pairs based on my course, Current Issues, which I am taking this year. While designing our material with my pair Feiza Kara Chousein, first, we needed to identify a collocation verb pair that confused English preparatory class students. After choosing our collocation pair, we followed four design principles when designing corpus-based learning and teaching material. We also used the Canva application in our material design and we successfully completed our material design in collaboration.
ABOUT OUR PROJECT PROCESS
As I mentioned before, before starting our design, we chose to see vs watch, which is one of the collocation verbs that could confuse our target audience, English preparatory classes. That's why our design is vocabulary-focused. And then, when designing our material, we expect students to use Sketch Engine, which is a tool for automatic term extraction for identifying words typical of a particular corpus, document, or text. Finally, we completed our material design by following 4 design principles via Canva.
Finally, let's talk about some things about the material we designed. If we need to talk about the purposes of our material, first of all, students will be able to easily distinguish the verbs see and watch and learn which words can be used with the verbs see and watch. Outside of the classroom environment, students can easily access all collocates of a word as they wish by following the instructions we stated in step 2 and using the corpus. Outside of the classroom environment, students can easily access all collocates of a word as they wish by following the instructions we stated in step 2 and using the corpus. Coming to the end, assuming that we apply our material in a real classroom environment, students may not have the opportunity to examine the sketch engine individually due to the lack of tools in the school. Because of time constraints, students may not have the time to examine many example sentences using collocations. I believe that we have designed a material that will be both useful and interesting to students. I left a few photos of the material and our design link below the post in case you want to review it.
See yaa in other posts!
On My Creating a Vocabulary Teaching Video for a Flipped EFL Classroom Experience: Animals
Hi, all my dear readers again!
Today, firstly, I will explain the flipped classroom approach, and we will discuss its advantages/disadvantages for language classes.
Secondly, I will discuss a vocabulary-teaching video in accordance with an EFL flipped classroom format that we need to prepare with my pair Feiza Kara Chousein for this year’s course, Current Issues, as I mentioned before.
Finally, I will tell you what we experienced in creating this video and what tools we used while creating the video.
If we start by learning what the flipped classroom approach is, it is an approach that assists teachers in prioritizing active learning during class time by assigning lecture materials and presentations to students to view at home or outside of class. Now, let’s consider its advantages and disadvantages. The flipped classroom approach saves time, encourages active, personalized, and flexible learning, and supports student-centered learning, which is increasingly preferred today. But, it also has some disadvantages, including student’s lack of self-discipline, resistance to change, and technological issues such as not all students having access to a computer or the internet outside the classroom, etc.
It’s time to give you some information about our task and its preparation process. When it comes to explaining our homework and preparation process, we first decided what our video will aim to teach, that is, it will teach vocabulary, and which grade students we will prepare this video for. Then, we created our vocabulary teaching video, in which we aim to teach the words of the Animals unit in line with the 5th grade Ministry of Education book, by using the Animaker application and adding various photographs and voice recordings. We also designed a word exercise using the Wordwall application that we asked the students to solve at the end of the video and we completed our homework.
We did many things about our video together, such as choosing photos, adding background music, etc., but we prepared our audio recordings one by one for each transition. We had no issues with Wordwall, one of the applications we used to create our video, but Animaker had certain drawbacks, such as charging a price to utilize many photos and moving images and charging a cost if the duration limit exceeded two minutes. Requiring the length of our homework to be approximately three minutes helped us overcome the time constraint. We did a lot of research and obtained appropriate images for our assignment from other sources and eventually completed our assignment. I have added the link to the applications we use and the link to the video we have prepared in case you want to review it.
Hope to see you in more posts.
See yaa!
On My AR/VR Integrated Teaching Material Experience: Paris
Hello, all my dear readers!
Today, I am here to tell you about the AR/VR integrated Teaching Materials homework that we have prepared with Hüdaye Nur Duranoğlu and Feiza Kara Chousein for our class called Current Issues. Our aim to prepare this homework is to introduce Paris to the students by providing a realistic and unique experience as if they were there. Let's now talk about what we experience in the process of material preparation and the place of AR/VR technologies in language teaching.
EIFFEL TOWER
ARC DE TRIOMPHE
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LOUVRE MUSEUM
Our material preparation consists of a four stage. In the first episode, there are questions that the students should answer through the two Landmark, Eiffel Tower and Arc De Triomphe, which is located in Paris. In the second part, we prepared the Louvre Museum, one of the famous museums of Paris, as in the first part. In the 3rd section, we introduced a prominent figure and a handout that we want to complete the students in the 4th section. We took advantage of the Canva application while preparing them. If we talk about the place of AR/VR integrated teaching materials in language education, by making learning experiental and immersive, they help learners understand complex topics better. Moreover, they facilitate the acquisition of various language skills and help learners beat various common barriers to learning. Finally, I want to add the link below to examine our material.
Hope to meet again soon.
See yaa!
On My AI-Integrated Teaching Material Experience: Writing Task Using Grammarly
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Hi, all my dear readers!
In this post, I will tell you about our process of preparing the AI-integrated teaching material, which is the last assignment of the semester, which I prepared with my group friends Hüdaye Nur Duranoğlu and Feiza Kara Chousein via Canva for my course called Current Issues.
Before we started preparing our material, we first chose our focus, namely writing, and then the writing topic that we would ask the students to write about. Then, we started to prepare our work on Canva, which consists of 3 parts: pre-task, target task and post-task. Additionally, we asked students to use the Grammarly application, an ai tool, to check whether there are any errors in their writings and to learn by verifying these errors. Finally, we prepared some reflective questions that we asked the students to answer regarding the article they wrote.
I said it's the last assignment of the semester. Hope to see you in many more beautiful meetings and sharings.
See yaa!
ON MY EXPERIENCES IN MY CURRENT ISSUES COURSE/ MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THE COURSE AND FAREWELL TO BLOGGING FOR A WHILE
Hello, all my dear readers!
Today, I will share my last post with you and bid farewell to my blogging adventure for a while, and unfortunately for you as well. As you know, in this post, I would like to share with you what I experienced during a semester in my course called Current Issues and my general thoughts about the course.
First and foremost, if I had to discuss the course's strengths and weaknesses, our instructor provided clear directions, first verbally and then in writing, before beginning each activity. In addition, we received comments on the draft version of our assignment from our instructor and our friends. We rectified our mistakes, allowing us to complete our tasks step by step and systematically. I don't think the course has weaknesses. The course's sole challenge was that we had to perform tasks frequently. It needs an intense tempo. I believe this is due to the existence of our other courses and the responsibilities that come with them.
My favorite task we prepared in the course was creating an AR/VR integrated teaching material. My least favorite task was corpus-based teaching material. I don't think there is anything I can suggest to improve the course. It was gorgeous in every detail.
I'd want to say something to the students who will take this course next year: have as much fun as possible while completing the course's duties, advance regularly and systematically, and be eager to learn. Be confident that it will benefit you much. Finally, if I come to the things that this course has given me, first of all, I have learned how to use many applications that I do not even know the names of, how to work in a group, how to give my students clear instructions on how to use many tools in the future, and many more things that I cannot list.
Hoping to meet you as soon as possible.
See yaa good people!
