Sultan Zeydan's Blog

The lyric “They tried to make me teach with Edtech” and an angry teacher who is ready to explode is on the screen. What are the implications of the song? What does it really want to show? The challenge that most of the teachers experience while using technology or the students’ point of view about this issue! Işıl prepared a cocktail for us on that day. She shared with us enormous, valuable information from terminology to applications on ICT. Here are the cornerstones of her session:

Mayer’s Principles for the Design of Multimedia Learning

• Multimedia Principle: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.

• Segmenting principle: People learn better when a multimedia lesson is presented in learner-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.

• Pre-training principle: People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts.

• Modality principle: People learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text. After the session I made a short search of Mayer’s Principles and found loads of information on the web. You can can also read the details about this topic here.

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Virtual Learning Environment vs Personal Learning Environment

Virtual Learning Environment is a computer program that facilitates computerized learning or e-learning (Moodle, Blackboard, Second Life, etc…) VLEs are considered as institution-led “one size fits all” monoliths. On the other hand, Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. (Web 2.0 tools, Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, etc…) PLEs are considered as learner-centered, flexible environments. It seems that each PLE by its nature is unique since each learner chooses his own preferred approaches. As a teacher I have already started to think of the implementations of PLEs into my classes.

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A Bunch of Web Tools

JING is a free image and video capturing tool that can create miracles responding to the requirements of teachers and learning needs of students. I personally prefer to use this tool giving feedback to students’ written homework or clarifying important points of an assignment.

QR Codes is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code). Even though the definition looks complicated, I think that QR codes are among the revolutionary ideas in this century.

Doodle Hangman is a fun animated hangman game which you can use in one or two player mode. It’s possible to choose different categories such as animals, clothes, countries and a few other options.

There is no doubt that many new areas/tools/applications will be discovered in the future. These ones were introduced by Işıl Boy and I found them really helpful and useful to think about. I hope I could reflect the major points of the conference within these serials. See you at the next techy-conference.

 

 

 

References Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia Learning, New York: Cambridge University Press.