This Goodbye Text Was Not Generated with AI

 Greetings, dearest folks! How have you been? 

As for me, I literally have this chronic exhaustion in my body, and I really do not know how to break out of it. It really is frustrating to work on assignments while knowing very well that I probably will not have any time to focus on my final week, but I guess I will find a way. This will be our last (but maybe not last?) blog post for the semester, so before I legit turn this text into a therapy session, let's start! 

For the last assignment of this course, my default trio (Melis, Elena and Berfin) and I did another worksheet on teaching the difference between two important phonemes, integrating AI into our lesson. The main AI tools we wanted the students to use were MagicSchool and ChatGPT, and as always, the preparation process was fun. I believe AI would benefit our students if we also know how to use it effectively and ethically, so we can teach them how to use AI technologies. Even though I could use AI with my future students, I am concerned about the addictive part of these technologies. I don't want my students to become brain-dead or slaves while benefiting from a technology, so I'd try to balance things out. You can find our project and my friends' blogs at the bottom of this post!

I believe this concludes our adventures for now, humble folks! This course was filled with ups and downs, and I gained so many things about integrating technologies into our lessons. Even though the course was tiring, I believe it will benefit me in the long run. What I would suggest to you for the course is researching certain technologies such as AR/VR and AI, and explore around. Don't be shy, there are thousands of options waiting for you to notice them! 

To my humble course teachers, I express my gratitude for guiding us through this journey and for your efforts in teaching us about everything we know. The one criticism I'd give would be the timetables of the assignments. We already had so many deadlines to deal with, and this course's assignments often clashed with the others. Especially the deadline we had right after the midterms, that specific one felt like pure torture. I'm not trying to be mean but maybe that can be put into consideration for the future students? Please?

 Nevertheless, thank you for your efforts and I'm sorry if I worded anything wrong or disrespectful, it's never my intention. It's a great opportunity to work with you and I'm looking forward to our future courses where we can learn even more from you!

I always believed that endings are essentially new beginnings, so I don't feel sad for my blog adventures to end. Who knows, maybe we will find each other in another project? 

See you, and don't forget to always take care of yourself!

AI Lesson Plan

Worksheet

Melis

Elena

Berfin

We Even Stepped Into AR/VR World, Huh?

 Greetings, dearest folks! How's your life been going? 

For me, I think it's been a bit better than my last weeks. I managed to get small moments of rest and actually went out with my friends to rejuvenate. It felt refreshing to finally do such activities, but now it's time for me to return to the world of assignments.

For this week's homework, we worked on making AR/VR integrated materials. Me and my friends (a.k.a my fixed group) Melis, Elena and Berfin once again worked together and blended our powers together to handle this, and I believe we did such a good job again! This assignment felt easier to do, and finally I found myself having fun while making all these. Finding all these 3D objects and 360 videos and tours were sometimes hard, but the overall activity we made is engaging. 

I've learned so much while preparing this activity, such as how interactive and interesting an activity or worksheet actually can be with the help of such technologies. In the future, I think I might use such technologies, as VR and AR can enhance children's motivation and enable them to see things they may not be able to see in real life. Also, who wouldn't want to go to a museum from where you sit anyway? I think that's perfect for students, and very interesting!

I think that's all for now. I'd like to write more but I think I'm not in the mood for writing more and I think it's one of my worst writings so far through this semester. Time to relax a little.

See you and don't forget to drink water and take care! You can see our lesson plan, our worksheet and my friends' blogs!

Melis

Berfin

Elena

Lesson Plan 

Worksheet

Hey, I Just Made a Teaching Video!

 Greetings, dearest folks! How's your life been going? 

For me, I think I'm going through 1805th cycle of my torture, but I'm not changing majors yet, no worries. All of you are stuck with me until I graduate, so before I start talking about things that are completely unrelated and rant about things, let's dive into today's topic, shall we? 

Today, we're going to talk about the flipped classroom approach. It's an approach that suggests the classroom time is not sufficient for lectures, so the topic is given before the class time and the time is used for activities that mainly focus on high order thinking skills. It's a great opportunity to make more advanced activities with the students in the classroom, but I don't think this approach can be suitable for everyone. Now that we think about it, no approach can be suitable for everyone anyway, since everyone is different, but I think we still need to keep it in mind. 

Me and my dearest friends, Melis, Elena and Berfin worked together again, this time for our homework about the flipped approach. We were required to prepare a lesson plan and a video for high school preparatory class students, whose English is between A1-A2. Our topic was Present Simple Tense, which is an important topic despite seeming like a piece of candy to us. The process was smooth in my opinion, at least when it comes to communication between me and my group members. The whole assignment, however, made me lose another piece of my soul and I think I need a good sleep to rejuvenate. Despite that, I think we did a good job, so shout out to my dearest friends for their efforts! 

This was pretty much the summary of our process. You can find our lesson plan, our video's YouTube link and my friends’ blog pages down below! 

See you in a new post, and don't forget to drink water and take care! 

The Video

The Lesson Plan

Melis

Elena

Berfin

Help I Lost Myself in Corpora Concordances

 Salutations, dear readers. How have you been since our last encounter? 

For me, I've been a bit tired lately due to sheer amount of homework and the exam week I survived. However, I kinda signed up for this while enrolling in this major, so I'll endure whatever they throw at me without trying to be stabbed from my tenth thoracic vertebra. Let us dive straight into today's topic. 

Today, I want to talk about my experience with corpora and GenAI. Even though I know GenAI and how to use it, never in my life that I ever heard of corpus, let alone using it, so seeing the whole thing detailed this year was a bit of a new territory for me. I actually remember learning about it in my previous year, but this year it is more detailed and it focuses on how we can use it as a teacher. So, we did and our homework was actually about corpus and GenAI! Me and my group mates Elena, Berlin and Melis worked on a lesson plan and a teaching material on learning the difference between mustn't and don't have to. I have to say, it was a pleasant experience for me, since it's always so nice to work with them! We used Canva to make our worksheets and we selected ChatGPT as the GenAI and SKELL as the corpus we selected for the students to use and learn. We aimed to teach the students "mustn't" and "don't have to" with using ASSURE model as our guide. Oh, and we used Google Docs while preparing our lesson plan! 

Overall, the experience was fun, but the timing was ABSOLUTELY BAD for me. I don't think I'll recover anytime soon at this rate, thank you very much. 

But besides the fact that I'm about to lose my last remnants of sanity with going through 33,550,336 cycles of pure torture, I think the usage of corpora could be very beneficial for our students. It's authentic, and it lets students discover things by themselves such as grammar rules, sentence structure etc.  The AI, though? Well... I'm so in-between. I get that AI has many benefits, and trust me, I'm aware that my future students' Google will probably be ChatGPT. But excessive usage of it will only lead us to a downfall. I don't think AI will be in my top 5 priorities list when it comes to preparing materials or showing students new technologies, but regardless I'll be sure to follow the advancements to know my students better.

Aside from the corpus and AI, I also believe this can cause some problems tech-wise. 

Come on now, we all know not everyone or every school can get access to technology THIS MUCH. Let's be real here. I know we did all of these with assumptions of everyone has access and all, but we all know it isn't the case. If we want this to be the case, we should work on how we can make students gain access to such things, even though we casually restrict all kinds of technology in the schools sometimes. 

That's all I have to say for today, and I hope you enjoyed reading my entry! Don't forget to consume H2O and take care of yourselves! 

Don't forget to check out my friends' blog posts and our work down below!

Melis

Berfin

Elena 

Our Lesson Plan

Our Worksheets

A Brand New Start

 Welcome back, everyone! How's everything going for you? 

In the last blog post, I mentioned that the endings were only the new beginnings. And today, we're starting a new beginning with a brand new course! But before starting, let mFe introduce myself once again! 

My name is Buse, and I'm a student in Marmara University ELT program. Currently, I'm a third year student and I'll continue keeping this blog, but this time for another course. (Oh wow, I'm already in third year. Help.) This year's course feels like a continuation of the last semester's, in which we will do the assignments in the teacher's perspective. The course is named Current Issues in ELT, and I'll keep this blog to show my progress. 

I look forward and don't look forward to this semester. Even though the course is similar to the last semester's, the thought of the assignments scare me a little, especially considering I have bunch of assignments from other courses as well, and I fear they may pile up on me like a building wreck. But if I managed to survive and pass my assignments until now, I think I might as well survive another semester. After all, this major won't finish by itself, will it? 

That's all for today's blog. Make sure to keep checking for updates to see what I did! 

Have a good day and don't forget to consume H2O! 

Endings Are Just New Beginnings

 Hello, everyone! I hope you are doing well. I am writing this blog post to mark the end of this term.

It was by far the most draining semester I've ever had. Nevertheless, I've learned so much this semester, and I even got some experience on topics I thought I'd never try, such as podcasting! ( I do not think I will ever try podcasting again, thank you very much.) I enjoyed writing blog posts and digital stories the most, to be honest with you. However, we must conclude this journey of mine right here, as we are entering the summer break. 

It was the greatest opportunity to meet all of you and share my experiences on different instructional technologies. As much as I do not want to end this here, not everything lasts forever, right? If it does not last forever, we must conclude it, with pride on our faces for accomplishing so much.  I accomplished many things during this semester and for once in my life, I am so proud of myself. These experiences showed me the different ways of teaching my students, different materials to present and different approaches. I am happy that I get to have this course, regardless of all the hardships and mental breakdowns I faced. 

We may be ending our adventures here, but rest assured and do not be sad. 

“Endings are never really endings, only new beginnings.”

May we see each other again in a new beginning.

Today's Education Tools: Artificial Intelligence!

 Greetings, my fellow friends! How are you today? 

My day was nice so far, aside from the final exams approaching quickly. Everyone who is preparing for the exams, I wish you a successful exam week! However, today's topic is not the exams; it is AI. 

For today's blog, our teachers gave us an AI task, which included talking to a Character chatbot and using a writing feedback tool. My overall experience was fun, especially since I got to talk with my favourite fictional character of all time! I loved the experience and how AI managed to remain in-character in many of the situations. I also liked the way the writing feedback tool worked; it certainly gave many correct suggestions about my writing. I used some of those suggestions to make my writing better in many aspects, such as flow and coherence.

I believe these AI chatbots can be used to strengthen our writing skills in a language, but we must be careful. We need to supervise children who are using AI, since it can affect their emotional well-being. I'd definitely give such tasks to my students, but I would make sure the bot remains safe and does not give students any dangerous suggestions. I might also use AI in my own teaching experience, but not to the point that my creativity and autonomy are affected. To be honest, I love to use AI as entertainment rather than a tool.

AI, overall, is a great tool to use. However, there are many concerns we cannot overlook. It lacks emotional intelligence, which humans crave in everyday life. It, unfortunately, can make people lazier since human beings tend to look for the easier solutions. It can lead to job displacement; however, I do not believe it can take over the teacher's job since teaching does not only involve transferring knowledge. There are also many advantages, such as availability, enhanced decision-making, etc. Whether the AI will be useful or not depends completely on your AI literacy, so it is crucial for us to educate ourselves. 

They were my brief experience and comments. You can use the link below to have access to my document on my AI experience! 

Take care and do not forget to drink water, stay safe!

My AI Task

A Masterpiece: Dead Poets Society

 Hello everyone! I wish all of you a happy and peaceful evening. Today, I want to talk about my experiences with collaborative writing. 

Me and my friends Melis and Gülşen made a film review on Dead Poets Society and our peers Elena, Berdin, and Baran expressed their thoughts after our writing process. The assignment that was given to us required us to review the movie accordingly, and we did the task together with communication and distribution for the tasks. You can see some of our peers' comments on the screenshot below!

Overall, the task was very fun to do, especially since I love writing. With open communication with my friends and the beauty of the film itself, the writing task turned out to be a fun and engaging activity. We used Google Docs as the collaborative writing tool, and to be fair, it is one of the best writing tools that you can use with your friends to do such activities, I highly recommend you to make use of it. It is very easy to use and allows you to comment on the writing. The only concern is, you may have difficulty in communication and may not want to do it from there, as you may not always see the comments on time. You probably need to use apps such as Whatsapp for quicker communication, but other than this it is amazing!

That was it for today's entry. You can find the review link below. Also, do not forget to check my peers' and reviewers' blogs! 

Thank you for reading!

The Review Page

The Melis Approach

Educational Diary of Sevgi

The Reviewers: 

Elena

Berfin

Baran

Story Time, Everyone!

 Hello, hello! I hope everything is going fine for all of you, dear readers! Today, I will share the experiences of video material preparations that I had. 

 For this new assignment of ours, me and my dear friend Melis made a storytelling video, using our own drawings. The story is about the solar system, and we intended to teach the planet names and the distance between the Sun and the other planets. Overall, the whole process was both fun and challenging. I enjoyed the drawing and character design process, even though it took so much effort and time. I am not 100% confident about my drawings, but it was nevertheless entertaining. However, it was also the most challenging part. My back and neck are still aching from the hours and hours of drawing. Even though they were simple drawings, they took a great time. The easiest part was to integrate the drawings with the sounds; it felt like nothing compared to whatever we did during this process. 

In the future, I am not sure about giving such a task to my students. It all depends on what age group I am going to teach. Young students would have difficulty in doing such a challenging task, since the process requires a lot of elements. However, I would absolutely try to make my own video materials, since it would give me an excuse to draw! I love drawing, and I want to integrate my skills into my teaching experience.

You can check our video from the link below, and please do not forget to check my friend's blog page as well!

To Reach the Brightest Star

The Melis Approach

A New Audio Experience

 Greetings, my fellow folks! I hope all of you are doing well. Today, I want to share my experiences on podcasting. 

For this new assignment of mine, I created a short story with my friend, Melis. The story is about a woman who claimed that a magician in a circus stole her earrings. The process of making this podcast was a bit interesting and sometimes hard. Recording voice was harder than I thought it would be. No matter how much I tried, there was always an issue, whether a pronunciation mistake or a loud noise in the background. Thankfully, I somehow managed to record my voice. but this time, the editing process was waiting for me. Playing with so many voices was confusing; I do not think I could manage it if it weren't for my past with editing programs. It was stressful, but at the same time, it was fun as well. 

However, I am not sure whether I would give such an assignment to my students or not in the future. They may have issues with finding accurate sound effects, as there are copyright concerns. They may also have technical problems, such as inappropriate materials and not being able to find the correct format. It is also time consuming, and making such a challenging task in such a short time might stress the students. However, it also has advantages, such as increasing creativity and collaboration skills. Nevertheless, I am unsure about this type of assignment. 

You can find the podcast link below. There is also the link to my friend's blog, please do not forget tp check!

That was it for today's blog entry. Take care and do not forget to drink water!

A Trickster's Treachery

The Melis Approach

An Urgent Issue of Today: CYBERBULLYING

 Salutations everyone! How have you been on this fine day? I hope you are doing well. 

        In today's entry, I would like to talk briefly about cyberbullying. If you do not know what it means, it means to bully someone through online platforms. Some of you might be confused or have some questions; I already anticipate that. I can list some of those questions for you. 

                                     "Is cyberbullying a real form of bullying?"

      Yes, it is real. It is more real than you can ever realize. Did you know that according to the Cyberbullying Research Center, 30% of the teens have been cyberbullied at least once in their lives? 

     People, presumably uneducated ones, always assume that cyberbullying is not a form of bullying just because it does not consist of physical abuse. But what they don't know is that bullying is not stopping with just physical stuff. It includes verbal abuse and property abuse too, and cyberbullying is just the place for that. 

         In cyberbullying, people may give hateful and harmful comments, repetitively text someone through DMs or SMS and disturb them, and even send viruses to destroy one's digital property or steal information. Unfortunately, these actions can lead to depression and even suicide among the teens, and we must start to take urgent action to stop it or at least slow it down

                    " What can we do to stop the cyberbullying?"

         To help you, I have prepared an infographic about this question using Canva. I believe it can be used in ELT classes as well to inform students briefly about some topics. That way, we could get their attention by using visuals and short sentences, since today's children do not like mundane texts. Also, by creating an infographic, we can learn to prepare visual learning tools and understand the topic we have better. For us future teachers, it is highly important to learn using such advances, so I thought to myself, "Why not choose cyberbullying to educate?".

         You can access my infographic from the link below. Thank you for reading this entry! Remember to drink water and protect yourself.

My Infographic

Why Advanced Rather Than Traditional?

         Learning has always been a significant aspect of life throughout history and it advanced as the years went on. Every period, new methods emerged and finally, we met with the technology which accelerated the pace of developments in learning. In the 21st century, learning is going forward at an incredibly quick rate due to technological development, and it has become almost exhausting to catch up with for some people. Nevertheless, it is crucial to keep up with the advances. 

           But why is it important to be updated about our century's advances?

        This century is the era of technology and AI, and of course, both of them are everywhere around the world. Everyone utilizes technology, which means our future students are intimately connected to it.  They would get easily bored with having absolutely no internet just only for an hour, which can give us the conclusion that the peers may prefer having or seeing at least a small part of techs. Think about your students in the classroom. Have you ever observed they get bored or distracted? If yes, why not use necessary technologies to attract their minds to us? The new advances give us plenty of choices, so we might as well use them. 

        I am highly aware that not everyone has a good relationship with technology, but what we must prioritize is the students' needs rather than our own comfort. The traditional methods, unfortunately do not work as much as they did in the past anymore. We are living with technology, not sticks and stones.  In conclusion, we should learn and move forward with technology for our students. 

       This is my overall view of this topic. We must update ourselves and our collagues if we want to have an effective learning process. I hope my entry is worth your time! 

   Stay well! Do not forget to drink water and eat!

WELCOME!!

         Salutations, my dearest visitors! I wish all of you a great and successful life full of joy. Here, I will briefly talk about myself. 

         My name is Buse and I am a Marmara University ELT Department student. I have many hobbies, sıch as drawing, writing, playing video games, watching series and films, listening to music, studying my courses etc.I was born in 2005 in Bursa and am my family's oldest child. I have a little sister whom I adore so dearly. 

      Teaching and learning are vital parts of this life, and both should be done with great care.  In this blog, I will post about the courses I am taking in my university. I intend to make this experience as pleasant as possible for readers and myself. I love writing, so I believe this experience will be very fun.

                             Do not forget to drink water and eat well! Have a great day.