Digital Storytelling Project: The Cactus

Hellooo! Today's topic is digital story telling. Our task is to tell a story or do a tutorial with our narration. İn our 3 minutes long video, Betül and i tried to show you how to grow a cactus in a fun way.

Was it hard? 

Ofcourse, not every bit of preparing this video was fun. We had some difficulties. We initially wanted to prepare the video on Powtoon. But little did we know! The website was very slow and kind of hard to use. So we gave up and used Camtasia instead.

Follow us step by step: 

First we found some cute cactus pictures on the internet. İ took photos of my own cactus too :') We searched for some info and used mostly Wikihow for that. We wrote down our text and recorded our voices. We -actually i- had many difficulties in this part. İt was so hard to get the perfect record. The moment i thought i got it, then we had difficulties with the computer blah blah. Anyways, we edited the photos and wrote something on them using photoshop, put them in order, at last we completed our video.

The only thing we could do with Powtoon actually.

Working together with Betül was quite fun. We thought of many ideas, couldnt decide in one at first but when we did it was so easy to continue. We could understand what eachother meant very quickly. İm glad that i had her because if i didnt, my video woulnt probably be this well prepared since my computer is broken and im left with a tablet, so... yeah. You can imagine the struggle, right? And i think i helped her with wording her opinions too. So we are mutually glad i guess? ._.

İs it useful to give students such tasks? 

İ think this digital storytelling activity will be very helpful in ELT. Telling your own story, with your own photos and words is kind of special in my opinion.  And the children of this generation love spending time with their electronic devices, so it must not be a burden to them.

İ enjoyed this activity a little more than the other ones i have done so far to be honest.

Click here to watch our video! 

Cat in a box, words on a map

Oh, hey! Didnt see you there.

Just kidding. What a surprise. Anyways. Now i am going to tell you about something i didnt do. My friends' presentation.

When we were doing our presentations, one caught my attention. İt is presented by my dear friends Sinem & Nilgün. Dont forget to check their blogs out, they are uh-mazing.

Enough talking, lets get right into it.

The website is wordle.net. İt lets you create your own word maps.

 

How does it work? 

You can just click the 'create' button and paste your text that you want to work on. Then it chooses the words that are most repeated and puts them on the word map.

You can just list the words that you want to appear.

You can personalize your word map, choosing the themes, the font types and such.

This is the word map made by Sinem & Nilgün

How can we use this in our classrooms?   

We can make word lists and posters so they can learn words that are releated to eachother.

We can just create games etc.

Here is a word map full of adjectives:

Not a day goes by without learning something new, does it? See you on my next post!

We've got tales to tell

Hello there children! (Please read this again with Chef's voice, thank you)

Today i am  going to introduce you a website called LittleBirdTales.com about which i and my partner Betül did a presentation earlier in the classroom. This website lets you create your own digital story or storybook (if you want it printed) by drawing, reading, writing and uploading pictures.

Lets see how one is created.

Step 1 

This is the frst thing you see when you open the website. Go to the 'create a tale' page.

Step 2 

Create a cover page. You can give your tale a name and write your name in these two boxes which are placed in the upper part of the screen.

Step 3 

As you can see the mindset is pretty similar to Paint. You can use the brushes the shapes eraser and such. For audio you can record your voice. When you save the first page, it directs you to the next page. 

Step 4

This is where your story begins. You can draw again or upload pictures. You can write your story in the box placed on the bottom right of the page and, again, record it. You can repeat this process as your story goes on.

Step 5

You can save and preview everything you did. Now you are done!

You can go to 'my tales' page and see all of your tales there. You can edit them whenever you want. You can also share them with your friends your teacher your students etc.

There is a 'public tales' section which includes tales made by different people. And another section which is full of classes that are already prepared to inspire and guide people about their tales. They are separated by languages and grades.

For what purposes can we use LittleBirdTales.com?

• Since you can do tutorials with this website, you can make your students do some easy tutorials or just maybe want them to tell about their last summer vacation.

• They can tell their daily lives.

• They can create their own tale OR work in groups. Here is an idea: divide the class by three groups. First group will create characters, a setting, places and such. Second group will create a complicated problem using these. Third group will find a solution to the problem and finish the story.

• İmagine that you give your students an unfinished story as a handout, you may want your students to finish that story however they want and illustrate it on littlebirdtales.com. As there is not really an age limit, any child (as long as they know what the buttons mean) can use this website for various reasons.

İ find this website very useful and entertaining. İf you have any suggestions about what purposes we can use it, please let me know :)

Now i am going to continue studying for my finals. See you.

Before you leave, check out our video we made during our presentation. A masterpiece indeed.

• Click to view my tale.
• 

English Only Zone

Hello there! 

No jokes this week, i am as serious as this 'english muffin'. Why? We shall see.
                                                                                                 

Today we'll be checking out a language teaching app called Rosetta Stone. Tadah!

İf you're a language lover i assume that you're already familiar with it.

"Rosetta Stone Language Learning isproprietary computer-assisted language learning (CALL) software published by Rosetta Stone Inc. The software uses images, text, and sound to teach words and grammar by spaced repetition, without translation. Rosetta Stone calls its approach Dynamic Immersion" -Wikipedia 
Lets start now -> 

The app requires an account and you need to pay to keep using after 15 days of trial. When you first open the app you see something like this:

Opening an account is very easy and the process is pretty similar to any other app's/website's. When we create our account we are being headed to home page. 

There are lessons by categories such as; core lesson, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, reading. When you complete the lessons you can get to the next levels. 

These lessons basically involves matching practices. To be clearer, a word/sentence is written on the upper part of the screen, the narrator reads the word/sentence and you're supposed the match the word/sentence with the pictures below. 

İn some activities you are supposed to talk too. When you sound correct or near correct, you are considered successful.

The narrator tells you the words/sentences and makes you repeat it again and again thorough out the lessons. Since the narrators are native speakers, you get a chance to have a near-native pronunciation. Dont forget that this app is only english. You wont bee seeing your native language here.

What Can Children Do With This App?

Well this app does not really lets you add anything to it -i mean more like creating your own thing with it- but teachers still can use this app to enlarge their students' vocabulary or help them learn the correct pronunciations of words.

Children may prepare their own flashcards by drawing the pictures themselves, this would be a fun activity for children who love drawing and painting.

Bonus:

One thing i noticed about this app is that they did not only use people's pictures of one race. Look at this:

This may not seem like a big deal but i remember my german coursebooks in highchool, there were lots of blondes and gingers all over the place. İ never felt comfortable when i looked at them because i could not find a piece of me.

Also i want them to put pictures of disabled and ill people's too on coursebooks, so that either they wont feel like an outcast or our children wont grow up not knowing about different, meaning special, people.

Let me know your opinions about this matter in the comment section down below if you ever have any (:

Potatoes Can Teach English

Hello, it's me. I've been wondering if, after all these years you spent on learning English, you'd like to meet an online platform which helps you to do so?

What do they offer? 

 This site is called ManyThings. As they claim they are here to help English Language Learners. Lets hear it from them:

"This web site is for people studying English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL). There are quizzes, word games, word puzzles, proverbs, slang expressions, anagrams, a random-sentence generator and other computer assisted language learning activities. Even though the primary focus is for ESL, native English speakers may also find some interesting things on this site. This site is non-commercial and has no advertising. TESL/TEFL teachers may want to recommend this site to their students."

They do not put any age limits, this means that its for any age group but:

Yeah. This is the first thing you see when you enter the website. Not virtually attractive. Not only this page, as far as i lurked the site, i dont remember a time that i saw a picture. Not many people would enjoy this, let alone children.

How is the content? 

The content is rich. There are many passages that you can read about many different topics, such as american history, american stories, health, people, places and more. You can also listen to some podcasts, they provide many listening facilities.

There are quizes, grammar and vocabulary activities and so on. They are useful if you know how to use them. There is no advertisement on this site nor broken links so visiting is not hard. I haven't seen any errors or false information either. As i didnt notice any info about the updates, i can not tell you if it's updated. But at the very end of the page, we see a copyright text which goes like "2007-2010". This should give us an idea that is, the page is not updated anymore. Or maybe it is, i'm not very good at this kind of things so excuse my ignorance.

To point out a negative side; they didnt seperated the age groups from one another. Five minutes ago i was reading heavy literature texts, now i'm jamming to children songs. Jokes aside; this can be very annoying for people who struggles to keep their concentration. Like me.

As i kept lurking, i found their video archieve, they have categories of them, basics, culture, songs, bussiness english, spelling, stories, comedy. Ofcourse i didnt pass the comedy section. They got some cool jokes. See this one:

What a time to be alive. But its not over till its over, check this song out: 

Definitely a masterpiece. I just dont want to let this glorious song go without analizing its lyrics:

"My name is Erika. I'm from America. I like hamburgers and potatoes." 

 First things first, Erika is apparently a potatoe and she says she enjoys potatoes. This disturbs my imagination. I mean cannibalism in a song for children? Not cool.

There's more, we get to know about Americans' unhealthy eating habits. (I'm not even going to mention how this song strengths the stereotypes about Americans)

Who are the people behind this project? 

We don't know. We seriously don't. I've searched on the internet, checked their own website but i couldn't find it. They don't provide any information about themselves which decreases the level of their credibility in a way. We can not be sure if they are really English teachers or some bunch of 10 year old kids who like to listen to potatoe songs. We don't know.

Actually, this is my opinion by the way, this site is maybe a platform which many people can contribute and add content, and some people are there to only manage things or keep the site on track. Nevertheless, it would be nice know who are those admins/moderators.

Would i recommend it?

Yes, but not every bit of it. I learn the best vith visuals, interesting facts, games and such. Just reading and doing quizes is not for me. As i pointed out, the fun part of the website is not really fun for my age group either.

Since this one was a little let down for me, i would love to learn about some good websites for ELL. If you have any, please let me know in the comment section below.

Here is a photo of the stars of today's post:

I definitely know how to entertain myself, don't i?

Two Bloggers Walked İnto a Bar...

Well, not really. But they followed each other's blogs, without wasting their time checking every morning if anyone shared anything new, INSTEAD they used an online platform which updates the newest posts from the blogs they choose to follow. Pretty much doing all the work for them, huh?

What is that magical, awesome, life savin- ok, I may be sarcastic at times. This cool online platform/app/tool is called RSS. What i did was opening an account on FeedReader, which happened very easily, following the blogs I want to by clicking the 'add a new feed' button at the left bottom part of the page and I was done! This process was a lot easier than I thought.

This is how my FeedReader acc looks like

Actually everything I did for my Materials Design class was a lot easier than I thought. I thought that I would suffer, try to commit suicide because I could not take it anymore, hate every single thing but I pretty much liked it to the point that I considered quitting school and be an all-time blogger, at times. 

I happened to read a very interesting blog, by the way. It's ESL Lesson Plan. It's not specifically about teaching English but more like some interesting facts/games/questions that tickles your brain. I think ELT students should follow this blog so that they can enjoy their times while learning. Studying, coursebooks are not everything in our lives. Going back to the blog i mentioned, I took this How Well Do You Know English quiz and i noticed something really tricky. First, you take the quiz too, if you want to, then continue reading.

Ok, what i noticed is, in one of the questions, you are supposed to differantiate between their, they're and there. The thing is, that question was so easy for me but i saw many native speakers getting confused since the three words sound very similar. Not really sure if i should be proud of myself. Maybe I'm too aware of my use of English?

Over-thinking is not good for your health you guys. I'm out.

"Am I Going Mad?"

Is it possible that one cannot recall this quote? Such an amazing book it was. I remember how amazed i was at Alice's adventures. How i wish i was her, stepping on the Wonderland! 

Now this adventure came to life -not literally but i wish it did- with a movie directed by mad Tim Burton starring even madder Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway and Helen Bonham Carter. With this cast, i could not help but get excited and fortunately the movie managed to deliver. 

In this week's task we are told to write a review about a movie on a wiki page. I advised my partner Betül this movie and she excitedly agreed. I was so happy to find someone who is as mad as- oh sorry, as excited as i am. We watched the movie again, discussing the details, talking about author's personality, the cast, the director, the film set they used. We both learned more about the movie which we are never regretful about. 

You can read our review here

This task was so fun yet time consuming. I think in small classes we can give this wiki task, if we have time but in larger classes it might be hard to check every student's work and give them feedback. As the number of students gets bigger it there will be more students who are not really familiar with computer work or some who do not find it interesting. But if we look at the bright side, with this task, student may learn more about cinematography as they make reasearches. I think this may be a good opportunity to give them a break from their exams and text books. 

As i am saying my last words, i recommend this movie to everyone who wants to get rid of madness of their life and experience Alice's. Maybe going mad is not that bad?