Create Your Own Comic !

Hello everyone !

I am here again to introduce another awesome tool. It's name is MakeBeliefsComix. This site allows users to create their own digital comic strips like the ones that appear in many Sunday newspapers.  Make Beliefs Comix is free to use and requires no login or sign up and also you can download it for your phone. Everything from the images to the text is editable, and users can print the final version of their strip for sharing.  MakeBeliefsComix has an illustrated look, which adds to the enjoyment of using the site. There isn’t a lot of navigation because a large part of the site is contained on a single page. Other pages include the standard “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages. For simple fun, MakeBeliefsComix is tremendous. When put in the hands of a talented teacher, it can be even better. English language lessons will take on a whole new dimension with this site, as students can create visuals to match original stories, or craft the images to fit existing prose. While the comic creator tools are very easy to use, some instruction should be given for younger students, who may need more practice. If you use the site for the first time and you have an difficulty undertanding the usage of site, you can follow the steps below which can be helpful.

                               

                           

Many uses exist for using MakeBeliefsComix in an educational setting. It helps with enhancing reading, writing, and communication skills. It can help with summarization of reading content in any subject. It helps with team collaboration by having groups create comics together. Students can use it for vocabulary by using the new vocabulary words within their comic. This is a great tool to introduce students to creative and journal writing. When students participate in journal writing they can express themselves in writing about their feelings, achievements, and challenges. This tool is also a great way to get students to create a story and add to their comic every day until the end of the school year. You can also use the site to help second language students and kids learning French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Latin; the site accepts words written in those languages.


Parents and teachers get additional help using the site, too. Make Beliefs Comix has a extensive parenting advice section, stocked with family activity ideas and tips on communicating with younger learners. Educators will find numerous resources, including lesson plans that provide literature, writing, and foreign language instruction ideas.


Make Beliefs Comix provides a list of ways you can use site content in the classroom to teach writing, storytelling, and other works. But it unfortunately doesn't save the work in a file on the internet to be opened at a later time. When a student finishes a comix and wants to save it for future use, only 2 options exist: print or email. Another limitation is the color. You can change the background color, but characters will stay black and white anyway.


I am sure educators will appreciate the area of the site designed especially for them. Users can read a lot of ideas sent in by teachers about learning challenges, and activity suggestions, including 300 printable comics with additional space to enter more content, can be used to help students practice writing stories or any other purposes

I really like this site and I hope it will helpful for your lessons :)

Creative Learning Tool "Timeline"

Hello everyone :)

Last week my dear friend Rumeysa and I made a presentation about an educational tool in the our Technology and Material Design lesson. It is a Timeline tool of readwritethink.org. All of us know that timeline is a graphical representation of related items or events in sequntial order and displayed along a line. For example, most of you created a timeline to history class about the historical events or seasonal strip to English class in school years, now imagine how easy and fun it would be to do with technology without strive to draw it. Yess it is possible with Timeline tool. Lets see how you can create your timeline simply !

                                                                               

  

This is the home page, as you can see the tool can be organized by time, date, or event.

After you select your topic you are ready to start. The tool allows users to create a label with short or long texts. Adding an image for each label makes a timeline more visually appealing. You can edit your photo. You can create more and more labels as you wish. But be careful to chose the best one that fits your purpose.

This is the final situation of our timeline that we prepared for presentation. Creating a timeline with technology is so easy that preparing it took about ten minutes and it was really entertaining experience for us.










Teachers may find the timeline as a useful strategy for a variety of educational purposes. It can provide comprehension support for language learners helping them make connections and recognize patterns in a series or process. Because learning numerical markers such as hours, years, days, months, seasons or grammatical structures like tenses can be complicated for young learners at first, timeline can appear visually less complex than pure text, helping learners more easily relate events to their corresponding times. For example: Students can create simple timelines in which they describe a day in their life, or they can describe what happened in a story they just heard or read. Or, we know that there are a lot of students who admire famous people. As a teacher you can give creating a timeline homework about a life of their favourite singer, actor or so on. I think, it is amusing homework for students since it will take less time and they will do it with using technology.

One benefit to creating a digital timeline (as opposed to the old fashioned way with pen and paper) is it’s easy to edit your timeline and make adjustments when necessary. You’re also able to share your timeline virtually via email or social media. You can even embed your timeline on your class website or blog, and maybe even have a special timeline outlining class events for the year that you can update over time with links, photos, and video clips of classroom activities.

We can produce a lot of ideas like these. As a teacher we should strieve to make lessons more entertaining and interesting for students. And it is not difficult with using technology like timeline. I hope this post will be useful for you :)

Innovative Teaching with Glogster Edu !

Hello everyone :)

All of us know that technological devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops are very essential in our today's world and thanks to these devices, acquiring a second language is much easier for learners. For example, everyone who want to learn an English can easily find a lot of useful apps that help their English learning process. And today I am here to introduce one of these apps, it is GlogsterEdu.

GlogsterEdu is an interactive visual platform in which teachers and students create a poster or web page containing text, audio, video, images, graphics and backgrounds.The app has both paid and free version and you can choose one of them.-I have a Free Basic Teacher account and I found it enough for me.-After you choose account level and sign up, you can simply create your own GLOGS. There are two categories: Dashboard and Glogpedia. If you select a Glogpedia you will see a lot of glogs that others users create and share with people related to very kind of topics like science, art, music, language and so on. When you choose Dashboard, you can create your own glog about whatever is on your mind.   

Steps of creating a new Glog: Write what you think related to any topic and don't forget add picture ! But words and pictures aren't enough ? Pump it up with some audio ! And also you can enhance your glog by adding a video. Then save, publish and share. Yes, that is so easy.                                                                 

                                     

• Example of Glogpedia:

Simply stated, a glog is an online poster, yet it offers much more through its multimedia components and its ability to share glogs with others. Overall, the site is great for creation and outstanding visual, interactive displays. Teachers can use this tool to a lot of activities in the classroom. For example: They can send glogs to their students with links, videos, audio, and photos as well as guided questions for them to answer! It is a fun and exciting way to get students to do their homework. Or students can create personal timelines or timelines of historical events and so on. Also Teachers can use glogster to explain any subject so that the lesson become more interesting. GlogsterEdu has really extensive usage as a teacher or student you can simply benefit from glogster for any purpose. You can explore more than what I explained visiting the site by clicking here.

Powerful Tool for Teaching and Learning: Digital Storytelling

Hi everyone :)

This week's post of Technology and Material Design lesson is creating a Digital Storytelling. Some of yours may think "What is the digital story ?" well then firtly I mention about it. Digital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sounds and video to create a short movie. In this project I worked with Nazife, yeahh as always :) Choosing a considerate and responsible partner for these project is really helpful to complete the work successfully. And nazife is really one of them ! We chose the one of the three options which was given to us by the Gokçe Kurt, and It is creating the fictional story. For this work we had to advance step by step so firstly we created a story including topic and according to topic developing characters then writing scripts, preparing storyboard, finding suitable images, which was the most difficult part for us, to the story and so on. After we completed these steps, to create a our story's video we used to movie maker. I definitely recommend movie maker because usage of it really easy. You can both arrange your images or videos and aldo you can dub your story. Finally we dubbed the our story and this part was very amusing because our story intended for young learners, we adapt our voices to childish sound. 

As a result I think that digital storytelling is one of the best project ever. It is beneficial to both teachers and learners' educational development, creating a positive atmosphere between teachers and students, enhancing creavity and so on. 

Now you can watch our digital story, have a nice watch :)

Lots of Fun Through KidsWorldFun !

Hello everyone ! All of us know that in our present day internet is the powerful media to whom wants to learn english and there are many websites which are designed for learning english. But are all of them really beneficial to learners ?  To determine which of them are beneficial or which of them are useless, there are some certain criterions like accuracy, currency, content and functionality. Yeah, I am here today to evaluate website related to EFL. And as you can see from the picture I'll  evaluate the KidsWorldFun which is a free online portal website suited for small children and has variety of activities for them. Also this website is quitely helpful for both parents and teachers. As a teacher or parent you can find a lot of suitable resources that can be used in school practice section and at home. Okay lets evaluate this website step by step to decide whether it is useful or not !

What is The Content of  The Website ?

KidsWorldFun has a lot of activities intented for young learners. These activities are subdivided into four different sections, which are Fun Time, Reading, Activities and Learn with Fun.

Fun Time section includes activities that a child can do to have fun like Animated Stories, Animated Movies, Online Games. Most of us know that reading stories develops kids' imagination and thinking. Therefore the reading section which is dedicated to various types of short stories is really exclusive. The Learn section allows children to strengthen their English, Science and Math subjects through a variety of handpicked websites that provide that material. And finally the activities section comprise a whole host of activities and hobbies that are related to making things with one's hands and skill.

What is The Purpose of The Website ?

The aim of the website is providing a fun-filled learnig environment through games, stories and much more.

Is There a Date that Shows When The Site Has Last Been Updated ?

Although there is not a certain date of sharings you can understand that the site is constantly updated. Because when I enter the website, I generally come across new stories or games. Furthermore in the blog section you can see a lot of post with their dates.

Are The Images of High Quality and Appealing to The Target Audience?

Colors' effect on children can not be denied. Colors make a big impression on children's young mind.Also kids will remember and return to a website if their experience is a happy one. Therefore element should be cheerful and attractive. According to these KidsWorldFun is definetely suitable for kids because the design of the site is full with bright colors, attractive pictures, animated characters and interesting sharings which can easily capture and hold a child’s attention for long periods of time.


KidsWorldFun is safe online space to learn while having fun and as far as I examine, I did not come across any harmful thing for kids in the website. The only shortcoming of the website is although the website has a About Us section, there in no information about author(s) of the website.

I can recommend this website to English teachers who need resources that they can utilize in their proffesional life. Because it offers a lot of useful and attractive materials that every teacher can do in classroom. Furthermore parents who would like to give their kids something to work on while they finish some job, can do this. Both parents and teacher can benefit from the Resources section.

Useful Tool RSS !

If you spend much time online to follow new content in the blogs or websites, certainly you know that it is very hard to check these websites individually. But using RSS you can easily scan through headlines and read each article to decide which ones are worth reading right away. But what exactly is this technology? And, more importantly, how can it benefit you ? Let's learn together ! 


What is RSS ?

RSS means that Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary however it is often referred to as the feed or news feed. In the early days, if you wanted to keep track of updates on your favorite website, then you had to bookmark it in your browser and manually visit it frequently to see if there were any updates. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell your favorite websites to let you know every time they update? Well, this is exactly what RSS does. RSS allows users to keep track of their favorite websites without having to manually visit the website each time.

Exactly I had no idea about RSS until the Tecnology and Material Design Course class. In the lesson our teacher said that we have to follow blogs about education or anything attract our attention. And when she showed a lot of educational blogs as an advice, firstly I thought that "Upps how I read these blogs one by one ?" Fortunately, right after she mentioned about RSS and I felt great relief. RSS reader (software) can be downloaded on a computer or used as an online. I use Feedreader. Thanks to the feedreader I can follow blogs regularly and manually. 

This is my feedreader's secreenshot:

I am following several educational blogs and my favorite is ozgekaraoglu. Because her sharings are about teaching English through technology and web tools and applications to help educators to develop themselves. Her blog is really impressive and I totally appreciate her projects which inspire me about being effective teacher in the future.

I'm glad if this post assists you :)

Wikispace Experience !

Hello everyone !

This week's creavity task for our Technology and Materials Design Course is Wikis which are website that allow its users to freely add, delete or modify content. And so we created a wiki page to write a film review. As in the podcast project my partner is Nazife İnan. For the wiki page project we choose a movie "3 Idiots" that both me and Nazife watched fondly in advance. The film is about two friends who are searching for their long lost companion. They revisit their college days and recall the memories of their friend who inspired them to think differently. You can already find more knowledge about the movie in our wiki page clicking here.

 

This project is really entartaining to me and nazife bacause of watching movie is great delight for us so we worked eagerly to create a wiki page and we had a good time. In these project like wiki, podcast ex. collaboration is definetely helpful to the participants. Since collaboration develops higher level thinking skill and create an environment of active and involved, it promotes a positive attitude toward the subject matter instead of increasing the anxiety about the project. And also it provides a sense of responsibility in individuals.  

When I think advantegeous of using wikis in class, based on my experience in wiki page project, I can say a lot of things. Firstly they encourage students to create a fun corner on website to share their interests and matters about lesson and create an opportunity that require students to work together continuously communicating as part of team as they would in the real world and this sitution provide broader perspective thinking among students. Also both teachers and students can read other people's and classes' wikis and this can give ideas and inspiration to them. Briefly wikis are really effective tool to use in class since they provide very different kind of online experience. 

I hope you like our wiki page

See you in next project :)