DS PROJECT

Hi everyone! Today, I will share a digital story that we created with my classmate Büşra Özdemir. We prepared this short movie by using Microsoft Movie Maker. We added some pictures, videos, sounds and recordings. Enjoy it..

     

Reference: Youtube

LITTLE STORY CREATOR

       Hi there! In my new project I'll introduce you a mobile learning application. I want to present you one of the amazing digital story telling apps named Little Story Creator for iPhone and iPad. It is quite easy and fun, especially for little children who want to create stories in their own way. After a short period reserved for how to use  the tools by an adult tutoring they will benefit from it and they will be in a transport of joy. I myself tutored a little girl and saw what gorgeous products came out.

Here you can see the tools.

You can create many stories and easily add a new one.

Using the text tool you can add your story lines.

     

        You can select the text colors

           

             You can change text fonts

...and record  your voice.

      

            You can add new pages

...with different backgrounds.

You can import pictures...
Also you can add 30-second videos.

You can add stickers...

Using pencil and eraser tools you can add your own drawings.

 Little Story Creator is a free app which allows users to prepare digital stories with texts, borders, videos, audios, stickers, drawings and pictures. It lets you import pictures from library, Facebook, Flicker, Picassa and Dropbox. I think it is not complicated and even children can start to use the tool in short time and with great ease. What I find most useful is, during voice recording children can practice pronunciation over and over. Furthermore, they can improve their reading and writing skills. Students can create stories about the subject matter being learned, prepare role plays and act them out by recording their voices and share them with their classmates and teacher. Also they may keep their diary enriched with day's memorable pictures and videos. Above all anyone using this app gets more creative.

Here are some other sample pages that we prepared:

 

 

  

 

             

           



However, we encountered a few problems. The text would ran far out off the page if you slide on them to see the next page. Be careful to use the outer space to slide the pages. The application allows to share your creations via e-mail but I had trouble sharing it because parental gate blocked me.

BUSYTEACHER

Hi, there! In this post I'll introduce you a website which I think useful for learning and practicing English; BusyTeacher... Primary audience of this website are the teachers. However, a self-learner can also take advantage of the website. It's an open source website. English Language teachers all around the world share materials which they either created or used and consider worth spreading. Other English teaching websites also submit materials.

The website mainly hosts thousands of worksheets about Grammar, Pronunciation, Writing, Speaking, Vocabulary and Listening
Here are a couple of screenshots, worksheets  and the link of the site.

http://busyteacher.org/

Classroom Video: It's a very cute and energizing morning activity for young learners. It's performed to the tune of the famous 'Happy Birthday' song that kids surely know and love.

Role Playing and Speaking: There you can find many shopping activities, including "Shopping" vocabulary, texts about British shops and examples of dialogues. These exercises will be useful for beginners. You can watch the video about shopping. Also there are a set of model dialogues for learners to practice. They refer to everyday situations e.g.: at a hotel, at a restaurant,at a travel agent's, at the cinema, in a clothes shop and a shoe shop, reporting an accident, at the doctor's and more.

Writing: This worksheet contains a short explanation on how to write a paragraph, explaining what the topic sentence, the supporting sentences and the closing sentence is. An activity for the learners is also included to practice the skill of writing a paragraph correctly.

Vocabulary: This worksheet is appropriate for learning food quantities. This worksheet includes two pages, first it contains some pictures with detailed sentences, and in the second page there are some concept checking questions.

Grammar : Past Simple vs. Present Perfect:  The teacher says "I've just prepared this worksheet based on Obama's speech on Nelson Mandela's death to work with one of my students today. It should be preceded by some brainstorming on his life. You can find the video here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25250278 On this same link there's another very interesting video on the life of Mandela, it could also be used with a little preparation."

Listening This worksheet is for elementary level learners to practice listening and building new vocabulary (bold). It can be used to teach grammar concepts like superlatives or a lesson on Mother's Day. Pre-teaching the vocabulary first and then listening to the song twice is recommended- once just to listen and then second to fill-in-the-blanks.

In addition you can find;

• Free double puzzle makers
• Classroom posters
• Flash cards
• Warmer, filler, ice-breakers
• ESL Website reviews
• Free Word scramble makers
• Free word search makers
• Creative writing prompts
• Cartoons
• Riddles
• Crafts
• Tips
• Games such as Bingo, Taboo etc.

I love the richness of the site in terms of materials and worksheets. All materials are ranked by levels and their popularity. Beyond all of these it is a free web site and you can make topic based research in terms of your needs. Furthermore it directs you to authentic sites as well as other ESL sites. However, if you are a teacher, you should double check the content before you hand in them to students. If you are a student you would be drowned in enormous number of various materials; therefore, students should be oriented by an expert. After you get used to it, it is fairly beneficial although the site is not that much attractive at first sight. The site is daily modified. I came across corrected and updated handouts but  there are a couple of broken links which is reasonable considering the huge amount of content. Most of the content can be run on an ordinary computer. Site loads quite fast. There exist both up to date and old stuff. Hope you enjoy it...

The Wiki Project

This week we were supposed to recommend one of our favorite books by creating a page in ourfavouritebooks wiki site. I chose the novel, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

Since this was the first time I had encountered wiki getting used to the tools was kind of tedious. However, after several trial and error occasions you get used to them and editing a wiki page becomes as easy as editing a word document. There are many advantages of using wiki sites. You can post comments, you can edit typing errors or wrong information. It is another beautiful projection of opensource information community.
I would like to mention a difficulty that I came across during the creation process. I  made a typing error while creating the page title and the system did not allow me to fix because I did not have the permission to fix it. But other then that everything else is fine.

I hope my recommendation page incites you to read the book. Enjoy it!
Here is the link...

https://ourfavouritebooks.wikispaces.com/KITERUNNER

THE TWILIGHT CHAOS

This week we were supposed to prepare podcasts, and we had 3 different options; record a chant, a myth or a sound rich story with our own voices and we were asked to study in pairs. My workmate was Büşra Özdemir in this project. We created the story and started to record it. Before trying to record it, in fact, we did not realize that it would be that much difficult to do. There were different characters with different genders and we were two females, that's why it was harder than we thought. Also, we had to record it many many times till we were satisfied with our performance. However, we shared the dialogues and finally could record it. I have to confess that we really had fun during this process. Here is the story, enjoy!

Voice Recorder >>

Why did I decide to blog about ELT?

Hi!
This is my first blog. I'll be blogging about online sources for English language learning and teaching.  As the technology develops at a dizzy pace and accessing these technologies gets affordable day by day sources for English learning and teaching abound. However, people do not have that much time to be able to scrutinize each and every single source. Therefore, I decided to publish a blog site about these new technologies ,web sites and tools in accordance with my study involvements. I hope my projects will provide you with applicable examples.Wish you an enjoyful journey...