Learning Diaries

It's been only a few months but I already got used to writing and posting on this blog. During this time, I have made some errors, I couldn't get where I was mistaken, how to fix it, etc. But in the end, I found an exit. Sometimes it took longer than it should be, sometimes I clicked everywhere randomly and everything fixed somehow on its own. This is my very first blog, so I think that's normal for me to struggle a little bit.  But besides those difficulties, I enjoyed myself a lot. This course of mine which is called instructional technologies and material design woke me up. I realized that there were tons of different tools that can be used out there, on the internet. Before taking this course, I used to say 'I love discovering new things' etc, but only after this term, I realized that I've never meant it. I used to think that the sites that I don't recognize are full of viruses. But I was wrong. There are a great number of tools waiting for us to be used...

Padlet is an online virtual “bulletin” board, where students and teachers can collaborate, reflect, share links and pictures, in a secure location. There are 8 layouts to choose. Padlet is really easy to use and free. As digital natives, students will most likely love using padlet.  For this task, we were supposed to create a KWL chart on a wall that we created for a specific topic.  Two of my classmates and I have chosen 'Clean Water' as our topic. We thought it might be interesting and productive for us. Plus, there must have been tons of researches about this topic. And we were right. We didn't have any problem with what to write on our padlet. What exactly is a KWL chart? It stands for : K - Knowledge W - Want to know L - Learned It's a graphical organizer designed to help in learning. I think this tool is really useful for ELT because it makes your students think about what they know. When they realize how poor their knowledge is, they'll most probably become m...

Infographic is a visual representation of information or data. It's a collection of images, charts, minimal texts that give an easy-to-understand overview of a topic.  But what's the point of infographics? Well, they give the essential directly. They don't say it in a roundabout way, with tons of transitions, etc. They grab readers' attention and don't let it go.  Plus, since it's visual, it retains in memory longer!  They are really easy to prepare. I think infographics should be used as a tool in ELT because long texts only scare students and make the subject look too difficult to learn or to understand. Having a brief summary in the form of an infographic helps students to schematize the topic and get it better and faster.  I've made an infographic about how to survive online education for other university students as target public.  I used, again, Canva. :)  You can see my first infographic try below. Click  here  to see a clearer image....

Creating something aesthetic can be really difficult sometimes. Especially if you're indecisive like me. But the taste of accomplishment is priceless once you finish it! :) According to option 1 of our task, I have made a movie poster based on a novel, as if my book is being into a movie and I'm responsible for its advertising. Option 2 was to make a magazine cover. I didn't choose it because it seemed to be more detailed and required more creativity.  The very first thing that I've done was deciding on the book. That was real trouble for me. Whenever I chose a book, others got offended. At last, I chose Landline by Rainbow Orwell. If you ask the reason, first of all, Orwell is an enthusiastic writer and you can clearly see this in her work. She always tries to write differently so her plots are unique. The story begins with Georgia's refusal to visit her family at Christmas with her husband, Neal and two children because of her work. Neal and kids go and she keeps ...

Discovering new programs and their new technological features are priceless. I've tried a few times editing videos and each time I was like: someone, please give me more videos to edit! I was so proud of my work and thirsty for making more. That's why I fell in love with digital storytelling.  But what exactly is digital storytelling? It's the art of combining storytelling with some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video, and music to communicate information about a specific theme or topic. They are not over 5 minutes most often told in first-person narrative, sometimes recorded with your own voice, illustrated mostly with still images, and with an optional music track to add emotional tone. I wrote a story about a cat saving another cat and being besties.  In the first place, I created an e-book , then made a youtube video .  I also made a storytelling template. Since I used free version of the editting program, a surprise awaited me in the e...

I’ve never heard of Wiki pages until this week. As one of the tasks of our instructional technologies and material design course, this week, we were supposed to watch a film and write a review as if it was for a school magazine. After posting it by creating a new page under the wiki page given by our teacher, we were supposed to visit another page, and ask a question about the reviewed film and answer a question that is asked on our page. Before keeping on talking about the task, I want to clarify what a wiki page is. This term is a derivation of a Hawaiian phrase: wiki-wiki and it means quick. A wiki is a collaborative website whose content can be edited (with permission) by visitors to the site (Chao, 2007). A wiki is like a public website, or public webpage, started by one person, but visitors can add to, delete or change it as they wish. They can be a great source of information especially when the information is intended to be modified and enhanced as part of a collaborative eff...

I’m pretty sure that every second language learner has heard of podcasts. They are digital media files that can be on any topic and can include music and video. They can be authentic or specially made for language learners (Dudeney & Hockly, 2007). What I love about podcasts is they are simple to use. You can easily download on your mobile phone and listen to them anywhere, anytime. This week, I dawned that they are easy to create as well. Thus  I would definitely recommend creating and listening to podcasts to my students.  Our task was to create a podcast and we had three options: Option 1 was about creating a chant of 1 minute.   We would choose a character from a fable, story or a fairytale, create an 8-10-line song and sing it to a podcast. Option 2 was about coming up with a radical, inspiring, controversial idea to make the world a better world to live in and explaining it in exactly 60 seconds which I think is quite difficult to make. You know, not 59 se...

Success in the 21st century requires knowing how to learn. We aren’t dependent on teachers anymore who were the only source of knowledge once. We learn in a global classroom and it’s not necessarily within four walls. There are a lot of powerful learning tools allowing us to acquire knowledge much more quickly than ever. In addition to the core subjects, 21st-century themes which are global awareness, civic, health, economic literacy are being tackled. Besides, it’s no longer enough to “know things.” Within the framework of 21st century learning some skills are indispensable and these skills differ from traditional academic skills in that they are not primarily content knowledge-based. Here these skills grouped into three main areas: Learning and innovation skills: critical thinking & problem solving, creativity, communication, collaboration Digital literacy skills: information, media and ICT literacy Career and life skills: flexibility & adaptability, initiative, productivit...

Hello everyone! This is my first blog page. As a newbie blogger, I'm going to try to do my best. My intention as creating this blog is to share with everyone everything that I learn within my instructional technologies and material design course. I'll be sharing the tasks and instructions with the tools that I used. I'll also try to explain why they can / should be used in ELT lessons, what are advantages or disadvantages, where I struggled, etc. I hope you'll like it and keep connected!