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Is It A Goodbye? Maybe, Maybe Not

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Hello to my dear fellows, As you can see from the title of my post, this may be my last post. Or not. I don't know. Maybe, it is just a break.  As you all know I write in this blog because it is a requirement of the Material Design course I take this year. I am supposed to tell you about the tools we have learned to create materials and what I have gone through while using them.  When I first heard this from our teacher Dr Gökçe Kurt Tiftik, it seemed like it would be tiring. But it was not like that at all. Writing here, talking with you, introducing all those tools with my own words... All of them was a great way to learn using those tools. I must say it also develops my English quite a lot. You know my first language is Turkish. ALSO, another plus point is that I feel like an up-to-date person who uses technology while keeping this blog. So we use technology while learning how to use technology to create materials. Isn't it amazing? Sometimes graduating and being a teacher s
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A Journey for Students: WebQuest

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Hello to my dear fellows.  Here I am with the same introduction of mine. I realize that I always lead in my posts with "here I am". Hehe. But I cannot help it. Every time I come here to write you a post, I come with a new way of teaching. And this time it is called "WebQuest".  Click here to see this picture To put it simply, WebQuest is a quest in Web for students to set off. Of course with the lead of the teacher. Since the teacher is only a helper in this journey, students develop their 21st-century skills which include their critical thinking skills. Because the outcome of this quest is only the work of students which they have created alone by using the websites they are given. You, as teachers, give the links of websites and they create. That's all. And, of course, together with my friends Rabia Tuğlu and Bilge Yengel , we have created a WebQuest! In our WebQuest, we have wanted our students to create a movie poster and write a movie review. We have given
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Did You Know AR Can Be Used to Teach English? I Did Not!

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Hello to my dear fellows, Here I am again with a real mind-blowing way of teaching. It is AR. Yes. Augmented Reality. We are going to use AR to teach English. And I am going to tell you about an assignment in which we have used this technology. I have done this assignment with my friends, Rabia Tuğlu and Bilge Yengel . First let me introduce AR to those who have never heard of it. Do you remember the game PokemonGo which everyone played in 2016? What makes those creatures in the game look real is AR technology. Here is how Wikipedia defines it: "Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory." I have said that we are going to use AR to teach English, right? Well, actually, we couldn't. Because we could not find a tool to cre
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Flipped Classroom but This Time, to Teach Grammar

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Hello to my dear fellows, Here I am again with the mind-blowing (maybe I exaggerated just a little bit) flipped classroom strategy. But this time, it is grammar teaching.  I would like to start with my experience of making a flipped video for grammar teaching.  I have made this video with my friends Rabia Tuğlu and Zeynep Uslu again. We used Animaker this time, as well. Actually, we have tried other tools like Moovly and Powtoon, but We felt more comfortable and free while using Animaker.  Before starting to prepare our video, we chose a grammar rule to teach a preparatory class. We chose "quantifiers" to teach them. Then we started to prepare the video. The last thing we have done was vocalizing. I was the one who vocalized many and a few, Zeynep was the one who vocalized the a little and much, and Rabia was the one who vocalized some and any.  Here our fruit of labour. I hope you like it. Please leave your comments below and criticise us as much as you want. Also, later w
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A New Strategy for ELT: Flipped Classroom

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Hello, my dear fellows, I am here again to introduce you to a completely new way of teaching! Well, when our teacher introduced us to this way of teaching, I had never heard of it before. But maybe you may have heard it because when I looked up to the internet, I saw it is actually really common. So maybe it is not completely new for you. But I would like to share my experience of using this way of teaching with you.  Before sharing my experience, first, let me make a little introduction about it. This new way of teaching is called "flipped classroom". As the name suggests, you literally flip your way of teaching. As the teacher, you record yourself or use a video that teaches your students the intended topic. Your students watch this video and when they come to class, they practice what they have learned. I really think it is such an innovative way to teach. It is also quite advantageous for learners to use English in the classroom. You know, normally, the time we have in cl
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A Sea of Information- Corpora

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Hello to you my dear fellows, Now it is time to share my handout with you. If you remember I have spoken of it in my last post and said that I would use a corpus while preparing my handout.  Here is the fruit of my labour: I have prepared this with my partner, Rabia Tuğlu . "Was the process of preparing this hard," you will ask. Yes, it was hard at the beginning. Because it was my first time preparing a handout using corpora.  Then you will ask what corpora is. It is actually "are" because corpora are the plural of the corpus. And a corpus is basically a sea of information that can be used for anything. There are all types of written texts. (Do you know that when preparing a dictionary, people use corpora? I did not know this.)  We, as teachers, use corpora to prepare language awareness tasks. We make students realize a grammar rule or different cases in which a word can be used. For example, if we want our students to learn the rule for using "would", we
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An Unexpected Comeback

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Greetings my readers who are small in number and get my love in much bigger portions, I hope you did not forget who I am or what this blog is about. Well on the other side it is totally normal that you forget about me because I was absent for a long time after I wrote my "farewell post". That is why let me remind you of what I was doing in my old days for you and for the newcomers (I hope there will be :') ). As the title of my blog gives away, my blog was about teaching - and beyond. Together with my readers, we have discovered so many tools that will help me - and us - teaching English in the future. It was sometimes hard to use those tools because in the era I have gone to school, there was nearly no technology to help us in learning. But overall it was a whole new experience for us. It was exciting.  Now, let me explain my sudden comeback. This is my third year in the English Language Teaching Department - sadly I am at home while studying in this department because o
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