Hi!

Today I will mention you about a site for storytelling. It is  Zimmer twins.

Zimmer Twins helps us create and share our own animated stories.Using this simple moviemaker students can easily create movies about any topic.

Now I will tell you how to make a movie step by step.

There are four different types of clips.

Use the talk bubble to make your character talk, yell or sing. 

Action clips let you make the characters act surprised dizzy or scared.

Star clips for fun things like crush.

As you can see 3 things happen when you add a clip. You see the preview of the clip, the sentence and the clip added to the timeline.

As you can see some words are underlined. When you click on those listed options appears. You can change the characters the background or even the thing they are holding.

Then you can watch your film.

Zimmer Twins is a site for storytelling so it can encourage active participation in the classroom and increase verbal or nonverbal language skills proficiency and lastly improve the imagination of the students.

An App for foreign language learning

Hi friends!

This week I will tell you about an app for foreign language learning. It is Babbel. Babbel is very useful and enjoyable app. It puts the lessons in parts and makes target language very simple. Registration with Babbel is completely free of charge and the first lesson in every course, in every language, is free to try. They only charge if you want full access to the courses in your learning language, but all other parts of Babbel are free to use. There are more than 3000 words for each of the following learning languages: English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The following learning languages have more than 2000 words: Danish, Dutch, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

Now I will tell you how to use it step by step. It is very simple to use it.

Firstly,  You can choose the language that  you want to learn. I chose French.

As you see, we begin with four important vocabularies and the differences tu and vous.

Then, you can see the words and the most beautiful thing is that you can hear the pronunciations of the words.

Then, there is a little quiz which makes 

the words more memorable.               

Then you are supposed to complete a dialogue so you can both hear the pronunciations of the sentences and learn other words too.

And it shows your score and skips part 2. You can also choose challenge part and learn daily vocabularies.

There are a lot of sample sentences with their pronunciations. The images are very colorful. 

I like this app so much and if you want to learn about it more you can visit here.

That's all!

DİGİTAL STORYTELLİNG PROJECT

Hello everyone!

This week our assignment was digital storytelling. Digital storytelling is kind of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story. People can share their birthdays, hobbies, stories and so many things they wish.I made this project with my friend Sinem. We shared a story named ‘’Flowers’’. It is about friendship. I think it is very useful in education because it can develop the creativity of the children or help their writing or speaking skills or it makes the even most boring subjects funnier. While doing this assignment we had some difficulties some points. For example, we made it by storybird. It is very useful it includes a lot of images and you can create a story very easily but it lacks of audio recording so we had to take the screenshots of the images and made it by movie maker. Nevertheless it was very enjoyable and I am very happy to learn Digital Storytelling. I apply it my classroom in the future because I believe that it helps students to create their own life story.

Hello! This week I evaluated a website which I like so much for you. It is Starfall!

Its purpose is to create an environment where children can have fun learning to read. Really even if it is for young learners I enjoyed so much. It is very colorful and each activity is very enjoyable.

All the images, sounds are interesting. There are lots of stories, songs, and games to develop the learners’ skills.

And another beautiful thing is that there is American Sign Language in some activities so deaf children and learners who want to learn sign language also benefit from this website.

 Its founder is Stephen Schutz and when he was a child he struggled to read so he decided to create this website to help children like him. There is also a great team. It is produced by a dedicated and talented international team of educators, writers, artists, designers, animators, musicians, and programmers led by President and Founding Director Brandi Chase. If you wnt more information about it you  can visit here.

                                                                                     Hi!

This week I will mention you about RSS- Really Simple Syndication
RSS is like bookmarking. Rather than waiting for an e-mail, you go to your RSS reader when you want to read news. It will save you a lot of time. RSS Feed comes in the form of headlines and a brief description so that you can easily scan the headlines and click only those stories that interest you. These are some advantages of it and as you see it is very useful. I use Feed reader as it is very simple. You can download it or use it online. Instead of having to go out to each individual website and see if there is any new content, content comes to you in one centralized location. So I do not need to go to every page one by one and I can read them whenever I want to. 

Now I will mention you about a blog that I find useful.

Edudemic provides teachers with advice, ideas, and lesson plans to better integrate technology in the classroom. You will always be able to find new ideas that make your visit worth your time. I like this blog because it puts emphasis on children’s feelings. In the blog there are many issues about how to improve social skills or earn confidence. I think these are more important than how to teach something. Firstly we as teachers should understand and help students.

Hello everyone!

This week our task was to create a wiki page and My friend Sinem and I created a wiki page. We were assigned to writing a film review. I think this assignment is very useful for language classes because writing a film review improves their writing skills and they have a chance to see new fims which are of course related to education.While doing this task we enjoyed a lot. The film is great and we are happy to share it with other people.

Here is the link of our wiki page.

Audio recording >>
Hi!

Here is my podcast!

This week our assignment was how to make a podcast and we created our podcasts. We were told to write a sound rich story. I think it is very useful for English education of children because not only writing a story improves their imagination and writing skills but also it helps their pronunciation as it includes lots of speaking practices. By recording their sounds children can get used to speak confidently. I did this homework with my classmate BuğraGündoğmuş. I wrote the story and we vocalized it together. Here is the story..

As it was a sunny day my friend and I went to a park and suddenly we heard a loud scream. We looked at each other and we started to run where the scream came. We were shocked by the sight because there was a huge lake and it was very red like blood. We looked around curiously and saw that there was a basket at the edge of the lake. There were fresh fruits, cakes, cookies and a violin in the basket. It looked like some people had a picnic here but howling wind was whispering us that the picnic had already finished. Suddenly we heard a heavy thunder and it started to rain. We took shelter under a tree and heard clip clop sounds approaching to us. We saw a man coming towards us with a horse. He walked to the edge of the lake and took the violin and started to play it. He played it so amazingly that we felt ourselves in another world. But really everything around us started to change. The horrible lake became blue again and the sun rose again and the birds began to sing. The music made us happy and our fears disappeared. When the song finished the man took the violin and walked away and disappeared slowly. When I looked at the lake again everywhere was dark and I waked up and I heard the same song from my headphones.