SS' Archive

  Greetings! Have you ever wondered what it would be like if homework and class switched places?   Well, I haven’t, but that is what I thought when I first heard about the flipped approach. It is a type of classroom practice where you assign your students with learning the subject of the class at home. For example, making them watch a video about it. And in the actual lesson you spend time practicing said subject. In language classes, where exposure to the language is critical and often difficult to obtain, this method can serve as a means to let students interact with the language as much as possible. However, listening to a teacher in person and watching a video of a lesson is not quite the same for most people so there is a risk of students not understanding the core subjects. In the Flipped Approach, a teacher can choose from a variety of options to make students learn the subject at home. One of those options is to record a video of them teaching the subject thems...

Greetings! Have you ever used a corpus? It is basically a massive collection of written or spoken text to analyze language use. When presented with such a tool one cannot help but wonder "how can this be used to teach language?". So, people did, and they came up with Data Driven Learning.   As teacher candidates, me and my partners Berat , Mustafa and Abdülhamid  were tasked to create materials and a lesson plan using DDL. We used the Corpus of Contemporary American English to design a class that would make students discover the differences of the words "make" and "do". Materials were created using Canva. We made sure to provide sufficient instructions for the students to get the results they need from the corpus so that they can discover how make and do are used in context. We also created worksheets for them to practice their discoveries. Which also allows us to see if they successfully grasped the correct use of the words. I believe our material ...

Greetings! And also, Goodbye. We came to the end of the school term and thus the updates on this blog will end along with my course.  Before this course my view on technology was mainly about using projections, smart boards and some websites that made classroom content more convenient to use. However, through the course I came to realize that current technology can do much more than showing PowerPoint slides. Our technology can help the students put their knowledge into action, allow them to receive authentic input or even encourage them to create their own products. Such advantages can support their learning process greatly and significantly increase the quality of education. Of the many tasks we have completed, I had the most fun while making a fictional story with my friends. The production was a brilliant experience from the base scratch of the story to the final touches on the voice-over. Truthfully the end result was mediocre at best, but I am proud of our creation as it ...

 Greetings, have you ever wondered what it would be like to talk to someone who passaed away long ago or someone who did not exist at all? Well, humans still can't do that. However, we do have something that is quite similar. That is Artificial Intelligence Chatbots. With enough data about a person's characteristics, AI chatbots are capable of mimicking real or fictional people and engage in conversations with us.  For this purpose I used Magic School 's character chatbot feature to fetch the soul of Erwin Rommel and had a chat about his experiences in WWII. The Chatbot provided a teacher-student context between me and Rommel in which I was the student so Rommel responded to my questions as if he was eagerly tutoring an officer under his care. Through this session of question and answers I gained new insight on a great historical figure's ideals and worldview while also learning about new facts. However, as it is a common limitation of the current state of AI, it some...

Greetings! Have you watched any stop-motion movies recently ? You can take a look at the review we made which will most likely make you want to watch one.  As per our instructions Reyhan , Serra and I created a review of the movie "Mary and Max" on Google Docs. The subject movie was not a part of the instructions though, it was suggested by Miss Reyhan and thanks to her great taste we didn't spend a lot of time pondering which movie to review. Since none of us use Google Docs regularly it took us a little time to get used to its functions. After learning which buttons to press it is actually a really good tool to write something with different people. My personal favourite is the suggestion function which allows you to propose a change without having to delete your partner's work. However, we still used other means to communicate what those proposals meant. It feels better to talk about changes through texting eachother but that might be because we're not comfor...

 Greetings! You probably know the story of Snow White right?  A beautiful princess becomes cursed by an evil witch and falls to a coma. But what if the cause of that curse wasn't magic but something we all already have? Well that is what me and my friends Berat and Mustafa wondered about aswell so we made a small video about it. We first decided on the scenario of the story and used our own voiced to give life to it. Then we used a website called Pixton to make a nice little movie. Lastly we combined the visuals and the audio with a video editing tool named CapCut . I thought it'd be easy enough to voice act then swiftly attach the voice to a picture. Appearently that is not quite how it works. Preparing the character models for visuals took a lot of effort and time. Then we realized some of our lines were longer than they needed to be so we had to do cut out some parts of them. I also realized how much I paused in between words while doing that. Even after all that we deci...

  Greetings! Have you ever thought about what it means to learn?   You probably think it is the process of taking information and that would be correct. However, there is still much more to learning and the process of learning. There are many techniques and methods developed throughout decades or even centuries to offer the best and most effective learning experience possible. Especially with the rapid technological advancements and ease of access to information in the 21st century, learning and teaching must be updated regularly to keep up with the time.   Since almost everyone has a device to access the internet, we no longer depend on hard copies of books and articles to find the information we seek. Supported by the ever-innovative creators on the internet we have countless ways to process, organize and fact-check this seemingly endless stream of information.   With endless information and options comes endless misinformation and unreliable options. I...