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? 

We don't have a room for plastics here

The title may upset quite a few plastics out there but it's for a good deed. Today's post is going to be about a mind opening idea! My classmate Nilgün (you may want to check out her blog) and I thought that we use plastics a little bit too much than we actually need. Then we came up with an idea which will reduce our usage of plastics, if it ever happens in real life of course. 



Audio recording software >>

 Now it may sound a little unrealistic but hey, there is no limit to imagination, right?

Podcast For Students

This podcast can be given to highschool students or learner who are at intermediate level in English. Since this assignment requires long and complex sentences, I don't think that it will be suitable for young learners.

Here is our script: 

Our idea to make the world a better place is reducing the usage of plastics. Plastics are everywhere in our lives. In fact, all of us are aware that plastics are very harmful. But we still continue to use them. We use them everyday, in every area, without thinking too much. This harms nature and also our health in one way or another. To protect our planet a little bit more from harms of plastics, we imagined a world where we can re-use our packages. To clear things up, there wont be plastic packages for each product. Products will be made daily or weekly, this will also reduce the chemicals in our food. Then we will have our own packages with us. In the markets we will pick our food and put them in our packages but we wont throw them into the trash can when we're done, instead we will use them in our next shopping. If we ever make this real, we believe that our lives will get healthier.