Hi all!

This is the final post of the term as it is coming to an end. It was quite an experience and in this post, I’ll be answering some questions about the course in the section below:

1- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the course?

The course had strengths like encouraging creativity and improving digital literacy. Our instructor was especially great in giving feedback on the assignments, which were difficult to understand at first but she was quite encouraging and inspired us to do better. However, I felt the exam for the course was a drawback. The course was helpful and beneficial in us becoming better teachers overall.

2- What did you find easy or difficult about the course?

As I also mentioned above, the assignments were difficult to understand at first, but our teacher was great at giving feedback. Thus, throughout the whole process, the assignments were at first difficult, then they were easy. However, they were still time-consuming, thus, managing them was somewhat difficult for me.

3- What was your most and least favourite task? Explain your choices.

My favourite was creating the AR/VR teaching material as I felt the most creative during that assignment. Making a choice as to what city we would introduce and viewing it through the lenses of AR/VR was quite an experience. However, I cannot say the same for creating a corpus-based material. Doing this task felt like a chore, and I don’t really think I would apply corpus-based material to my classroom as I don’t think it is very effective. Also, there are way better choices than corpus i.e. using AI.

4- What would be your suggestion to improve it?

I would only suggest one thing, removing the midterm exam and putting in two more assignments that would make us create more teaching materials.

5- What would you tell to the students who would take this course next year?

I would tell them to listen to our Gökçe teacher’s instructions well, take notes of the feedback from her, and not panic about the assignments.

6- How would this course contribute to your professional development?

In this course, I felt as if I was a real teacher creating contemporary and innovative teaching materials for my students. It was like a simulation of what being a teacher would be like. After this course, I feel a lot better and confident about creating materials.

This is the end! I hope you liked my posts for this term!

See you later, fellow learner.

Hi all!

We were given another assignment from our Current Issues course two weeks ago. The assignment was to create an Augmented/Virtual Reality integrated teaching material. Like the last time, I collaborated with my friends Salih Karakaş and Polat Öztürk. First, I’ll talk about our process and then mention how AR/VR technology can benefit teaching.

For our material, we needed to create a worksheet that introduced a city’s two famous landmarks, one of its museums, and one of its signature meals. Firstly, we brainstormed to figure out which city would be interesting to present, and we thought of Osaka, Japan for its rich culture and city layout. Other than Osaka Castle, we didn’t know any other famous landmarks so we did some research about Osaka and looked up a landmark, museum, and famous food from Osaka. After the research was done, we started working on our worksheet. We were asked to integrate AR/VR, thus, we found 360° videos of the landmarks and a video for our selected museum. Salih handled the design of the sheet on Canva while Polat and I found the necessary materials. Finally, we finished off our worksheet with an assignment that students will be able to do after completing the first three sections of the worksheet.

You can check out our material here!

Utilizing contemporary technology such as AR/ VR in a classroom is a great idea. It’s quite beneficial for students to be able to visualize what they’re learning about, so actually seeing the material present the knowledge as if it were right in front of them will definitely help students better internalize the information. All in all, I quite enjoyed this task and I’m sure I’ll be using similar materials in my future teaching endeavours!

See you later, fellow learner.

Hi all!

For our next assignment in our Current Issues in Teaching course, we were assigned to create a video for a flipped classroom and a task to accompany it. For this assignment, I collaborated with my dear friends Salih Karakaş and Polat Öztürk.

In this post, I’ll first talk about what a Flipped classroom is. Then, I’ll be going through our process in this assignment.

Flipped Classroom

The flipped classroom is a unique teaching approach where traditional roles of in-class learning and at-home study are reversed. In this method, students independently go into course topics at home, engaging in exercises or activities they would usually do during classroom sessions. This strategy provides teachers with ample time to reinforce the learned concepts through various activities, offering flexibility as it can be introduced even mid-semester. Despite its advantages, setbacks may arise as school administration and parents may not agree with this approach due to the non-traditional nature of this teaching style. Furthermore, the flipped classroom limits immediate student-teacher interaction, leaving students without feedback where clarification might be necessary. Also, it requires instructors to ensure that students have the necessary access to technology and materials to prevent inequalities in learning outcomes. However, this approach fosters student-centred learning, interactivity, and communication, and can be beneficial if integrated meticulously.

Our Process

As for choosing our topic, we either had to make a video about flipped vocabulary teaching or flipped grammar teaching. We went for the latter as we thought these kinds of videos would be better suited for teaching vocabulary, and we chose to teach vocabulary from the topic of Games and Hobbies from MEB’s English coursebook for grade 5 students. At first, we were confused about the whole process, but after getting feedback from our instructor our ways were set. Our target audience was 5th-grade students, thus, we used vibrant colours, child models, and simplified language to suit young learners’ needs. Salih was responsible for creating the animation, which we made from Animaker, but Polat and I also helped as creative support. While Salih, was handling the details of the video Polat and I wrote the script and created the task from Wordwall. After the video and the script were finished, we all recorded our lines and Salih added them to the video.

To sum up, the whole process was thought-provoking and somewhat difficult, but in the end, it was quite the experience, and I believe it enriched my capabilities as a teacher candidate.

You can find the video here.

You can find our task here.

See you later, fellow learner.

Hi all!

For our first assignment in our Current Issues in Teaching course, we were assigned to create a corpus-based material for students. For this assignment, I collaborated with my dear friend Ceren.

In this post, I’ll outline the steps and walk you through the process, intended audience, key areas of focus, and potential challenges that may arise when utilizing the content.

For corpus, we used SKELL. We chose this corpus because it was easy to use, and since our intended audience is high school students, we thought its simplicity would be appropriate.

Objective

Students will be able to differentiate between the functions of “how many” and “how much” and apply them accurately in sentences based on provided scenarios and real-life contexts.

The Process

At first, we were quite confused as to what corpus was and how it was utilized properly. However, our instructor provided us examples and gave feedback on prior assignments which were from last year’s course. Thus, we were more on track as to what we would need to do. The first thing for us to do was analyze the coursebook that our instructor gave us and decide on the topic of the material, which was “How Many?/How Much?”. After that, we chose the corpus suitable for our needs, SKELL, being the most suitable one for our audience as mentioned before. While Ceren started to create the design of our material from Canva, I was preparing the activities and what we would write on them. After this initial start, we both started to go hand-in-hand and mixed up our responsibilities. Our plan was to be fundamental and give real-life contexts that would interest the students.

Target Audience

Our material has been designed for 9th-grade Turkish high school students. The general level of 9th-graders is intermediate, and we designed the activities that would suit their levels. These students are presumed to have already learned to differentiate between “how many” and “how much”. However, as their distinctions can be difficult, the employment of corpus can be beneficial in teaching their differences in the classroom.

Material’s Key Focus

The main goal of the lesson is to instruct the learners on the distinctions between “how many” and “how much” function words, and to encourage students to make their own discoveries through the use of the corpus.

Potential Issues

This material’s design considers possible classroom challenges, like students’ access to digital devices, despite the majority of the students having access to devices it can still pose a problem, thus, it could be a good idea for students to be noticed about bringing in devices before the material is ready for use. Additionally, students might feel disoriented in a teacher-centred classroom, but their teacher will be there to provide support if they need help.

To sum it all up, the final outcome of our material made me happy and renovated to do something I have never done before as a teacher candidate. You can see our material here.

See you later, fellow learner.

Hi all!

After a long term of posting about my course, Education Technologies, I’m back with my new course Current Issues in Teaching. I hope that my posts about this course will be beneficial for all!

See you later, fellow learner.