The Podcast Task

      Hello everyone, 

     My Educational Technologies teacher gave me a podcasting task last week. We had a number of choices such as a vox-pop, a BBC series ''influencing the world'', a sound-rich story and creating a chant/song. 

Joe Rogan podcasting 

I have picked the influencing the world podcast as it was interesting to talk about something that can change somebodies life. The only issue was to do it in 60 seconds. I really had to find ways to impress others with words. 
 

     I used Audacity as I was familiar with the program. You can do everything possible with it. I had a buzzing microphone while trying to achieve the task and it helped me to get rid of it.

Audacity UI

 At first, I recorded a sample to see how my voice sounded. When I found out it was awful, I started to check for the options on clarifying the voice. The noise limiter helped me on that thankfully. After that I wrote my script, which was really fun. Using my poetic skills I was able to narrow it down to 60 seconds. Finally, the part I loved the most, voicing that script. As someone who wants to be a voice actor, this part felt great as I did feel like one. After reading it for a number of times I was able to get it to 60 seconds exactly. It was easy to add the tictac sound and match it with my voice.

I would give my future learners a similar task as even I was having some troubles with English while doing the task... It feels better when you see that you achieved something after listening to it. It is a good way to make students write, read, listen and speak.

Here is the podcast, I hope you have fun listening to it. It is just 60 seconds, you can give it a try. :)

See you next week!

The Padlet adventure.

     Hi everyone!

     My Educational Technologies teacher gave us a padlet project. We needed to use padlet for a KWL chart. It stands for what we already Know about the subject, what we Want to know about the subject and, what we Learned from the subject. We worked as a group of 4 and our subject was the infamous COVID-19. Each student had to write 3 points for each column. Brainstorming on what we already know about COVID-19 was actually fun.

It was an interesting project as we brainstormed on the topic of COVID-19. Our thoughts were neatly lined thanks to padlet and it was easy to find answers to our questions as COVID is the most famous thing we have in our world nowadays. Doing the project with my friends was the best part of it, I must say.

Padlet is a very useful tool to actually learn something. You can organize your thoughts and ideas neatly and match them with your researches. It is a colourfull site as you can see from the image above. You can use photographs, other sites to strengthen what you are trying to convey. Using only 1 image for every padlet post helps keeping the site clean as you only put the best photograph.

Here is our padlet page about COVID-19. 

Thanks to my friends who made this project easy and helped each other. Here are their blogs.

Muhammet Berkay Seçer

Toprak Kişioğlu

Bora Sarakurt

See you at the next post, have fun while learning!

21st Century Learning???

     

What comes to your mind when I say 21st Century Learning? When my teacher asked this question some weeks ago, nothing popped into my head. However, there are so many great qualities of 21st Century Learning that must be explored! First of all, we have something that the older generations did not have when they were at school. Technology. I believe that my teacher said that the pen and paper of this century is our beloved technology. With that in mind, what should we -the future teachers of the future generation- do? Basic; keep up with the technological news, learn what you need to learn, integrate it into your teaching and make it fun! Did your old teachers lecturing with just an old textbook in their hands motivate you enough to make you learn that subject? For me, it is a big ''No!''. Nevertheless, your students should also have knowledge about technology as well. They have to be digital natives to be able to feel comfortable with a technological teaching style. Even if they are born into an age where everything you do includes technology one way or another, you must not forget that there are always students trying to deal with the digital divide (those who cannot reach to technology). Still, we have a lot to cover, don't we?

REFERENCES

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On The Horizon. 9(5), 1-5. https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

The Starting Point

     Welcome to the English Language Teaching (ELT) blog of the year! I'm going to record everything that I learn throughout the semester and share it with you! This blog is going to be used as a means of seeing my own improvement. Bare with me till the end!