.

I would like to nominate Aslı Sağlam’s Blog as the “Best Teacher Blog” and Aybike Oğuz’s Blog as the “Best individual Blog”

Good Luck to everyone and happy blogging.

Where to start

- Get a gmail account

- Sign into Google docs with this account

- Click on “Create” and then “Form”

How to create a test

- Give a name to your form

- Type your question the “Question Title” part

- Choose your “question type”

- Click on “Done”

- To add a second question click on “Add item” button at the top

- Go on with the same procedure

- Finally decide on the “Layout” of the test clicking on “Theme” at the top, which is the most enjoyable part of  preparing a test.

How to add a space for Student Information

 - add in the questions (Text) to allow your students to write their names

 - You can insert headers or page breaks on your test from the  “Section Header” / “Page Break” button under “Add item”

I have created quickly this  sample for you to show how it looks like after following these steps.

 How to Grade the students

-  Open the spreadsheet associated with the form.

-  Click “Script” from the insert menu.

-  Type “Flubaroo” in the box at the top, and click the Search button, and then install it.

-  It appears on the spreadsheet when you have finished installing.

-  Choose “Grade Assignment” and enjoy the results.

I hope this short video will help you to understand the basic functions of Flubaroo and how to use Google Docs.

I think this is an absolutely incredible tool to assign the students outside the class in different ways and grade them in a short time. It is possible to prepare reading, grammar, vocabulary and writing tests (except listening, there isn’t any function to add a podcast to the Form.) “Time” is the biggest concern for us, teachers, so such applications saving our precious time are worthful for everyone to put better use on other tasks.

The first star on the stage was Scott Thornbury who is the founder of the big idea “Dogme”. He gave a speech about the importance of Dogme both for students and teachers and pointed out something very important that most of us have forgotten nowadays. Do we really take the correct action plans for the students’ engagement and talk or just unburden ourselves by using course books and technology more than ever.

“We are looking for ways of exploiting the learning opportunities offered by the raw material of the classroom that is the language that emerges from the needs, interests, concerns, and desires of the people in the room”

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Some Golden Suggestions for the ELT world

1. Don’t complain: You don’t have to be sunny about everything.

2. Ask an unscripted question: If you ask a question the machine begins to feel less like a machine.

3. Count something: If you count something, you find interesting, you will learn something.

4. Write something: By offering your reflections to an audience, even a small one, you make yourself part of a larger world.

5. Change: Be willing to recognize the inadequacies in what you do and to seek out solutions.

Keeping these valuable ideas in mind I will go on looking for how to channel technology into Dogme.  Hope to find many sparkles on this journey.

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The second star was Lindsay Clanfield who writes books and materials for English language learners and teachers. His session was interesting in a way that reminded me the old days before technology developed so much. Lindsay looked at Teacher Development from a triangle perspective: Person, Teaching and Language. He underlined that the length of these items may not be equal, which causing a kind of difference among teachers.

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.

Today Beykent University held a conference called “The Use of Technology in Student Centered Learning”. Even though waking up early and trying to arrive at the university on time were eventful, the conference atmosphere was enough restful to make me calm. The first plenary speaker was Nik Peachey whose session was about developing materials and practices for the digital generation. He started his talk giving some statistics on the usage of technology among teens:

• More than 75 percent of teens own cell phones.

• 73 percent use online social networking sites

• 38 percent share something online that they created, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos.

• Teenagers averaged 3,339 sent and received texts a month!

When you look at the numbers, you again face the reality of digital invasion of all those applications and techy devices, and inevitably start to think how to catch up with these on going innovations. Actually, the way I found on this way is to internalize the innovations/applications at first and then use them in class without wasting time since it is a fact that digital literacy is quite damaged when it is not applied in reality. 

During his talk, Nik shared with us amazing Web applications, which can be integrated into a warmer of an activity or a follow up task outside the classroom. Here are the web tools for you, the digital bees:

TodaysMeet helps you embrace the backchannel and connect with your audience in real time. It is used for Information sharing, audience responses, democratizing the classroom, brainstorming and engagement.

Transl8it is an online SMS converter that changes long texts into a shorthand SMS language. It can also convert any SMS back to normal text. In class teachers can convert long texts into text messages and ask the students to figure out the language/genre/discourse/phonology. without paper, a record of interaction.

Text2Phonetics is an online application that transcribes small English texts into broad phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It is really a great chance for teachers to create phonology based tasks integrating with readings.

Posterous is a simple blogging platform involving sending emails, with attachments of photos, MP3s, documents, and videos. Nik suggested using it to publish content as writing task, creating online materials and a shared private workspace, to work collaboratively with students.

Storify is an online platform to tell stories using social media such as tweets, photos, videos and the o

ther elements form the web. You can add your headline, interaction or text to create a context.

Scrible is a tool that allows you to highlight or annotate any web pages and share it with others. It is helpful for developing study skills, analyzing text (grammar and vocabulary), pinpointing text comprehension and creating different types of projects and assignments.

Evernote is a kind of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving.

Vyou is a video conference tool, which can be used to create Question and Answer Sessions by the teachers or students.

Mailvu is a video mail service allows you to save your videos. Nik suggested using this tool to develop speaking skills and increase self reflection and awareness in class.

Visual.ly is a website on which you can use many types of infographics or visual data such as timelines, flow charts, annotated maps, graphs or venn diagrams.

I think Nik’s stuff is extremely enough for a post so I’ve decided to write about Michael Swan and Işıl Boy’s sessions in another serial. I hope I could portray the details of the session reflectively enough for the ones who couldn’t attend the conference

It’s time to blog for IATEFL Glasgow Online.  I am very happy to be able to share my impressions  and some interesting vide

The first thing that I strongly suggest you to follow the TTEd SIG forums where teachers introduce themselves, presenters give additional information about presentations, young teachers share their experiences and teacher trainers leave comments about the importance of sharing in education. The online action in Glasgow has started on the very first day and still going on. 

Also for those who didn’t have the chance to attend the sessions there, British Council offers all the video sessions of the talks. 

It was a great pleasure to watch Diana Laurillard, the Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab.  During her talk she consistently underlined the importance of helping teachers who want to exploit digital methods and the difficulties they meet. you can watch the videos clicking on the images. 

I also enjoyed a lot while watching  Gareth Rees and Lewis Lansford’s session on 4Cs – communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity in education. They mostly discuss the differences between the real human language and the one taught in class, which is really worth watching.                                                                           

I am very happy to be a Glasgow Online Registered Blogger. Hope you are also ready to attend this online journey. Stay tuned!

Get rid of the cards (Relative Clauses)
You can use this activity to revise vocabulary or some grammar topics. Actually I preferred to use it to revise relative clauses in my class. The aim of the activity is to get rid of all the cards until the end of the game.

- Beforehand prepare the questions and the answers on the same card as in the example.

Question: I talked to the girl. Her car had broken down in front of the shop.
Answer: I talked to the girl whose car had broken down in front of the shop.

- Tell students to fold the paper so that the answers are not readable from the others. On the other hand, the question side is open to the other students. (On one side the question, on the other side the answer is written.)

- Give four question-answer cards to each student

- Tell them to stand up and mingle with others.

- While walking around and they show the questions to others The student who cannot answer any question correctly has to get that card from his friend. If they answer a question correctly, they keep the cards.

Clockwise Speaking
- Divide the class into two groups.

- Tell the first group to line up around the class in a random order.

- Tell the other group members to choose a student from the first group and stand next to him.

- Set a question so that they can start a conversation.

- Don’t forget to set a time limit.

- When the time is up, the members of the second group move in the clockwise and match with a new partner.

- Set another question to be discussed then.

Picture Dictation (How to Teach Articles)

- Have you ever used picture dictation to teach articles

- Tell the students to draw a big table on a piece of paper.

- Tell them to draw a pair of shoes under the table.

- Then go on dictating the picture in your mind.

- The important thing is to start drawing the new object repeating the previous one using “the”.

If you have any memorable activities from your DELTA years; please share them with us.

• Do you always have problems to send or upload large files (video or podcasts)?

• How many hours do you spend getting some screen shots from a video?

• How often do you have internet connection problem in your class?

• Do you have difficulty in finding appropriate podcasts for class activities?

Last week one of my colleagues showed me a new, free program that can deal with all the diffculties mentioned in the questions above. After starting to use Free Studio Manager, I have realized that it will be really a great relief for many teachers so I decided to write about it in this post.                                                                                                                                                                                               

The first thing that you should do is to download the program to your computer. It’s totally free. After the downloading process, the following screen on which there are different categories, appears.                                                                                                                                    

Youtube: When you click on Youtube, you can choose your action on the newly opened menu. It allows you not only to download a youtube video to your computer but also to convert any video to an mp3 file. Actually, what I am really interested in is the second point since I believe podcasts are instrumentally valuable in teaching students a variety of important literacy and listening skills.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

In this post I would like to share a user friendly and free web tool (Time Rime) that I discovered months ago but didn’t have time to go into. If you are one of those teachers who are looking for new and creative projects, you will certainly like this tool that allows you to create your own interactive, graphical timeline on anything you want. You can learn how to use TimeRime and create a timeline on this YouTube video.

Some Ideas to Use TimeRime in Class

• At the beginning of each module/term/semester, we meet new students. You can ask your students to create timelines showing their lives in a chronological order. If they wish, they can add images or videos to their timelines.

• Each unit in the course books are categorized according to topics. It creates a rich environment for teachers to decide on projects and group works. You can divide the class into groups and allocate them different units which they will present the history of something generating a timeline.

• At the end of the courses, you may tell your students to summarize the whole course and reflect what they have learned in a timeline. I believe it will be also a useful feedback both for teachers and the future courses.

• The students may prepare timelines about their favorite films, politicians, celebrities or books they read during the course.

The possibilities are endless!!!

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                                                                    A Timeline Sample: Biography of Barak Obama                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           .

What I really like about TimeRime is it allows you to view timelines that are popular, new, and recently changed. Also after creating your own timeline, you can share it by URL or by embedding in your class blog, wiki, or web page.

Last week we hosted Diane Schmitt (Nottingham Trent University, UK) and Norbert Schmitt (University of Nottingham, UK) at Özyeğin University for three days. Fortunately, I was able to interview with them about the facts of vocabulary in learning/teaching.

- What are the implications of “high, mid and low frequency vocabulary” for teaching and planning? Do you think it is necessary to include “mid and low frequency vocabulary” as main objectives into an intensive English Program Curriculum?

D: The simple answer is yes. What the researchers’ telling us in terms of corpus research is that in order for learners to be able to read an academic text, watch a movie or read a newspaper, they need more vocabulary than the vocabulary target that we previously talked about. According to Robin Rodgers, to be able to get 95% coverage of TV or movies that the students might want to watch for extra listening practice, they’ll need to know 3000 vocabulary words… We need to address the mid frequency vocabulary in the syllabus. What we mean with mid frequency vocabulary is 3000 mid frequent level and it goes up to 9000 level. This range of the vocabulary seems really important in extending the range of the activities that learners can take part in. If they don’t know the essential vocabulary, it will restrict the ability to interact, to read, to listen and to write.

N: … just to be able to speak conversationally, maybe the first 3000 words are enough but most students want to do more than that, particularly students who are studying in English medium schools. High frequency and mid frequency go up to about 9000 word families and that is quite plenty to work in school system. High frequency vocabulary is necessary for any languages; mid frequency vocabulary is necessary for more proficient language use and academic learning. Low frequency vocabulary is not essential for language use but it’s important if you’re interested in a certain topic or want to learn something extra.

- Our students encounter lots of new words in the course books, graded readers and lesson materials each week so it is sometimes very difficult for them to recycle all of them. How often and how should we recycle vocabulary in and out of the class?

N: If you really study and work hard looking up the dictionary, maybe only a few repetitions are enough… The research from incidental learning suggests seeing a word ten times in different context in your reading might get you to the level where you can recognize that word again the next time when you see it in the text, and can understand the meaning. That’s receptive knowledge. However, we don’t really have a good idea about how many times you need to practice a word or repeat it in order to use it productively in your own writing… We know that recycling is important. Recycling can be explicit recycling that teachers put the words on the board using some kind of materials or tasks but other recycling can be just incidental where the word occurs in a reading or in a grammar exercise.

D: The key factor is that “ten repetitions” have to be close enough together… Recycling is not how many times you do it but it’s about whether or not the recycling is close enough together in first instance to make sure that student can remember the earlier recycling words… Even at the 3000 level when you’re designing a syllabus, you have to explicitly insert recycling opportunities into the syllabus because they don’t occur naturally.

- How can we optimize extensive reading?

D: Across learning environments, teachers are finding that students do not read.  A lot has to go into helping students recognize the value of it. One of the key factors is getting students to get any enjoyment out of reading. We should make sure that we are not asking them to read books that are too difficult for them. One of the benefits of extensive reading is that if students know 2000 words; they can start with the lowest level of graded reader series and getting recycling of the vocabulary… We should help students recognize the habits of extensive reading and the impact of extensive reading on other types of things that they may want to do with language (like blogging or internet usage)… Fluency is the biggest thing that you can get from extensive reading.

N: The impact of extensive reading is really strong… What is quite difficult to learn about words is the contextual information, the collocations or connotations in the text because there is no rule but just patterns which teachers cannot teach very well and not very easily. Where do you get that knowledge? You get that knowledge from reading, by seeing that word in all different types’ contexts, hearing it in different contexts, so what extensive reading does is to give lots of repetitions in different contexts.

- Do you think students need pre & while vocabulary input in writing? What kind of vocabulary support should be given to students to increase their performance in writing?

Since two weeks later there will be a final exam for my students, I’ve decided to look for revision activities/games they can enjoy and recall the subjects that were taught before. Here are three of them that I found useful and fun:

The Millionaire Game: It’s an effective game in which I can insert any types of questions. If you wish you can also play the game with groups. The rules are:

• Write the amount of money for each question on the board: $100, $500, $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, $5,000, $7,000, $10,000, $15,000.

• Remind the students they have five lifelines which are mentioned below. (These lifelines are really great to incorporate the other students into the activity)

•  The value of each question answered correctly is added to the student’s bank.

• The student who gives an incorrect answer at any point in the round leaves without any award.

• Don’t forget to set a time-limit depending on the level of the students.

VocabBingo: Although this activity needs a short preparation beforehand, it is a useful recycling activity for students.  

• Prepare a wordlist including the definitions and parts of speech of words (e.g. a preposition or a verb) as a teacher’s resource

• Hand in the list of the words and the blank Bingo Cards to the students.

• They are supposed to choose 10 words from the list and place them on the card.

• The teacher starts to read the definitions randomly.

• Students try to guess the word and its parts of speech. If they have that word on their card, they put a cross on it.

• The first one who finishes first calls out “Bingo”.

Jenga: I’m pretty sure most of you play this game when you come together somewhere with your friends. If you have one at home, why don’t you use it in your class?  You can revise everything with these magic blocks.

• Write your questions on cards. My suggestion is specify the difficulty of the questions in an order.

• Divide the class into groups or play it as a whole class.

• Each time a student comes to the board and pulls out a block. If he/she succeeds pulling out the block, he/she hears the question.

The aim of the game is to balance the tower on top and answer the questions correctly. For each correct answer students get a point. 

2011 has been a year full of beginnings for me. The most important of all is that I started blogging in this year. I didn’t expect to be involved in it so much on the first days of  my posts. However, as I’ve started to share and learn new things, and broaden my PLN, it has occupied a huge part of my life. Suddenly, the weekends are turned into post-time. 

Becoming a blogger made me realize the importance of community. It also added pressure to produce more. When I didn’t have enough time to post anything, feeling of guilt appeared at times. Here I would like to share my list showing what I started to do for blogging in 2011.                                                                                                                                                                                                          

• to use my facebook and twitter more actively

• to read hundreds of posts per week

• to read more books

• to keep more notes in the conferences, workshops and meetings

• to visit millions of websites 

• to upload various programs to my computer and test whether they are useful or not

• to take photos of students, teachers and displayable activities

• to follow the blog carnivals and competitons

• to attend the online Webinars

• to ask for feedback from my friends

• to be patient

• to drink more COFFEE while writing

Now it is time to set new goals for 2012. I hope 2012 will be more productive and innovative for all of us. 

It ‘s already December and we know that it is time to create fruitful tasks for our class in this month. We can guide our students to generate enormous projects about Christmas using various online tools. Here is a fun list that you can assign to your students in this month:

• Amazing Facts about Christmas: Tell your students to research and prepare a presentation on “Amazing Facts about Christmas” using Prezi.

• Christmas Crossword: Assign a group of students to prepare a Christmas Crossword Puzzle using Puzzle- Maker. If they wish, they can also create “Word search Puzzle”.

• Christmas Survey: The students can prepare a questionnaire including questions that they want to ask to their friends by using Survey Monkey.

• Make a Wish: In groups students generate a wall on Wallwisher and write their wishes for the New Year.

• Christmas Jokes: Tell each student to find out a Christmas joke and create an avatar telling this joke by using Voki.

• Christmas Cards: Students can create their own Christmas cards on Picasa, then write their wishes,  and e-mail them to their friends.

• Compose Your Own Christmas Song: Tell the class to compose their own Christmas songs using Edu.Musicshake. Maybe you arrange a little contest later.

• Make a Christmas Movie: Divide the class in groups and ask them to make a movie (they will decide on the characters and the plot) using Zimmertwins.

• Chat with Santa: Your students can chat with Santa on Santabot.

If you have any more original ideas about the topic, please share with us here. Have a fun Christmas!

A fun ice-breaker activity

Suitable for all levels

No preparation

• Draw a picture reflecting an important scene of your life on the board.

• Tell the  students to ask you questions about tit.  (eg: Who is the man in the picture? How old is he? Where are you in this picture?) I enjoyed a lot while drawing the following picture depicting my last holiday in Croatia.

• After this demonstration, divide the class into pairs and ask them to draw an important scene of their life on a piece of paper (birthday, last holiday, family etc..)

• When they complete their drawings, they ask questions to each other about the picture in the given time interval.

• Each student shares what s/he has learned about his/her partner with the others in class

Headlines (L. Meddings & S. Thornbury, Teaching Unplugged, 2009)

Suitable for Intermediate +

No preparation

• As a demonstration, display a headline involving a shopping disaster or traffic accident, and invite the class to ask you questions to get the gist of your story.

• Then, tell the students to think of a story from their lives as in the demonstration, and write a headline for it on a piece of paper in large and legible script.

• Half the class stands in a large circle around the room, holding their headlines. The other half (the interviewers) form a second circle inside the first one. Everyone positions themselves opposite a student who is holding a headline. then, they ask some questions to get the synopsis of the stories.

• Call out “Change!” after a minute, and the interviewers move clockwise so as to read the next headline, and begin asking questions again. This process continues until all the interviewers have interacted with all the headlines.

Guess the word!

Suitable for all levels

• Divide the class into groups of four/ five and give vocabulary-card piles (at least 20 cards) to each group.

• Tell the students to draw four/five columns on a piece of paper and write the group members’ name onto each column.

• The first student chooses a card from the pile and tries to describe the word referring to parts of speech, antonyms, synonyms and necessary examples. When one of the group members is able to guess the word, both the explainer and the person who could guess the answer correctly get a point.

What’s in a Blot? 

Suitable for all levels

• The main aim of the activity is to foster the students’ creativity and assign a meaning to the blurred shapes prepared using the online tool “Splash Up”.

• Divide students into groups and give some blurred pictures to each group.

• Invite the students to interpret them using the target language:

        It reminds me of…                                                                 It looks like….

I get the impression of…                                                     It’s like ….

 

A snapshot from my workshop. Huge thanks to my participants!

 

Best individual blog: Aslı’s blog

Best ed tech / resource sharing blog: Nic Peachey’s blog

Best tweeter hashtag: #eltchat

Best use of podcast blog: http://advanced06.podomatic.com/

Most influential blog posts: Işıl Boy “How to use e-portfolios”

Best teacher blog: Eva Büyüksimkeşyan’s blog

Best class blog:  http://sallgood.edublogs.org/

Lifetime achievement: Shelly Terrell

Best of luck to all of those nominated, thank you all for the intellectual challenge  you provide me. Happy blogging…