On December 15, 2016, I made a presentation on what I learned in the great course I attended in York, England. All my colleagues were invited so that I could share what I had learned from 'Making use of ICT Skills' course. I believe it was a nice, fruitful presentation an I was really happy to show my colleagues the easy-to-use and effective ideas concerning technology use in EFL classrooms.
Because what I learned in the course was already in my previous blogposts, I won't talk about them again. However, soon, I will be sharing the ones that I use in my classes in detail and please feel free to comment on the posts if you have any questions or if you try different things related to these ideas in your classrooms. Let's share!
Today is a great day because I found the opportunity to learn new ideas to use in classroom. My colleagues who also participated in the Erasmus K104 project are sharing what they have learned in the courses they attended.
We started the day with my colleague, Deniz Saydam's presentation on Aurasma.
Then, my colleague, Yeliz Akel shared her classroom experience in her English 101 Writing Classes where she uses Google Docs to give feedback on her students' paragraphs. The attractive thing is that students can also give feedback on other students' paragraphs. Great opportunity for peer feedback!!!
My colleague, Canset Gecer talked about the nice city 'Cardiff' ; its history, the bilingual life in Cardiff and modern Cardiff! She shared the top 5 places to visit in Cardiff.
One of the most environmentally friendly parliament buildings in the world is in Cardiff.
top 5 places to visit in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales
Now it is the time for my dear friend, (bro :)) Mustafa Yaman to talk about what he learned in the course he attended in Scarborough, England. He focused on two applications: Padlet and Plickers
In padlet, you can create a classroom and create an online blackboard, on which students can all share something and their ideas will appear on the online blackboard immediately. You can use it for: Predicting Activity, Bell ringer activity: (To check whether the students remember what they learned on the previous day) ... Actually anything that you as a teacher can do on the board without tiring yourself :) It will also be a great opportunity to target our students who are born into technology! :) What is better about this online blackboard is that students can also share images and links to videos on this blackboard too! https://tr.padlet.com
How about plickers? It is a student response system that uses a teacher's android tablet or iPad in accordance with a series of QR codes which are assigned to each student specifically. It is really exciting! No need for a pencil or pen ?!?
We created a mini class and tried it ourselves. It was fun. It worked and it was really easier than we thought. Here are some photos of it:
Now it is time to learn different activities with our indispensable application: Whatsapp! My dear colleague Dilek Çeltik, who has been to York in Erasmus project, shared her insights on how to integrate whatsapp in our EFL classes. You can check the following link to learn about these activities:
What can we do with it?: You can record your feedback on your students' products and share it with your students. You can record something maximum for 5 minutes. Şükran gave feedback to a sample paragraph to show us how easy it is to give feedback to paragraphs via this website.
www.polleverywhere.com In this website, after you sign up and create an account, you can create polls very quickly and share it with anyone you like.
www.newsinlevels.com This website shares the news in English for all the levels. Its motto is 'world news for Students of English'. I am so happy that I was introduced this website. I will immediately share this with all my students!
hi everyone! I would like to share the last part of our very fruitful training course. It was informative, inspiring and motivating. My colleagues in the course from different countries made it fun and impeccable! If you want to learn about this course and plan to take it here is the link: http://york-associates.co.uk/course/empowerment-in-ict-skills/ (The course is not only for English teachers but teachers teaching all different subjects.) At the end of our course, we received our certificates :)
here is the last group photo of ours:
thanks for everything guys! I learned a lot and will definitely share what I learned from my colleagues and with you my dear followers :) follow me :)
Such a fruitful day with full of nice discussions
and great exchanges of ideas!
The day started with what we covered the previous
day. We made a list of all the websites, applications and ideas we covered to
make sure that we were ok with them. It is always nice to start the day with
remembering the previous day’s subjects.
We talked about the fact that ‘Silence is good.’ in
classrooms from time to time especially on teachers’ part. We should always
give our students enough time at least to finish their sentences.
Then, our trainer, Chia, shared an interesting
metaphor for teachers: ‘Energetic antenna’. I liked it and I also believe that
teachers are sending energy to the classroom and it generally sets the mood. If
we as teachers have high energy and are positive, our students also reflect
this. This was also mentioned by our teacher trainer Jade in my institution.
She says that our classrooms are our mirror images.
Later, Chia talked about literal videos on YouTube and showed us some
examples. It was a pity that I hadn’t known about them before. They are
hilarious! At the same time, they can be quite interesting to apply in our
classrooms to teach description language. We can each give a group of students
a short music video and ask them to describe at least one minute of it just like
it is done in literal videos. Here are some examples you may want to have a
look at to understand these videos:
Then, we did a very nice activity related to descriptive language again. You can use this activity in your classes. It is very easy and almost no preparation is needed before the lesson.
Pair up the students. They should sit in a way that one of them should face the screen and the other partner the opposite direction just like this:
The student facing the screen describes what s/he sees on the video. The other student is trying to visualise the video. In the second half of the video, teacher pauses the video and pairs swap the chairs and the other student starts describing.
At the end students watch the full video and compare what they have in their minds about the video and how the real video actually look.
It is a great activity to practise the present continuous tense.You can practise certain vocabulary items too. Our trainer used a Misery Bear video with us today. If you want to have a look at it:
Hello! We are back together in the second day of our intensive course! We started the day by evaluating yesterday's session with the website that we were introduced yesterday: answergarden.ch
Later, it was time for homework checking! :) We shared the photos we have taken in York about the things we have found interesting/ strange things about this city. Here are the ones taken by me:
These full two plates were served for one person for lunch! I was so shocked when I saw it that I could actually eat almost nothing.
This is the sugar served at the famous tea room, Betty's Cafe which looked different than the ones we have in Turkey (cube shaped).
I consider myself really lucky because every minute of the course we learn something new both from our trainer and from our colleagues. Here are some of the other websites that have been recommended by our trainer or my colleagues:
https://www.geocaching.com/play: If you travel a lot and want to discover parts of your destination that are really worth visiting, would you like to do that like a treasure hunt? In many different parts of the world, people are hiding little secret things and you need to discover where they are! It is really exciting. You can even try this in your own town. Maybe there are still some places you haven't been yet...
http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/make.html : This is a very nice easy to use moviemaker program with which you can prepare simple animation videos in a minute. It seems it is better for younger learners but I am sure students at all ages would all like to see a very short dvolver video in their lesson. At least we enjoyed it. :)
https://www.spreaker.com: We were introduced this podcast program by our trainer Chia. It is a free program where you can record podcasts with clicking one button only, literally! It is worth trying it with your students because it is really practical, but bear in mind that you cannot edit your podcasts in speaker. If you are going for something more professional, you need to use additional editing websites.
In our course, we also enjoy ourselves a lot! For example, I am the youngest member of the group and my dear colleague Andrea pointed out this fact in a funny way in his blog:
World famous Shambles Street. It is really interesting to see all these different kinds of stores including jewellery stores and thinking that they were all butchers in the past.
York Minster
Train to the National Railway Museum (the biggest in the world)
