Visual Storytelling for Everyone - Storybird

Hi everyone!

For this week's project, we are supposed to write a post about the tool my friend Berna and I have presented in the classroom. I am going to introduce you to Storybird.

Storybird is one of the world's largest storytelling communities. It is a perfect storytelling tool and you can make short and art-inspired stories. You can find out an endless library of free books, picture books and poetry. If you would like to read the story, just click on the picure. If you have any problems, make sure you are signed in to Storybird.

The process of signing in is very easy. You can start to use Storybird through your email address. You just need to enter your user name and password, then you can create new stories or read what you want.

Storybird starts with images first. You must choose an image to inspire your story and click to start.

After choosing the image using the icon "use this art", you must choose your story's style. You have three options:

• Longform Book (multi-chapter)
• Picture Book (multi-page)
• Poem (single page)

After choosing your story's style, you must decide your cover. You have four options:

• Classic
• Landscape
• Journal
• Iconic

After choosing your story's style and cover style, you are ready to write your story and drag your art.

After writing your first page, you can add other pages using the icon "add page". When your story is completed, you can save it and then you can publish your book or go back and edit your story if your book isn't finished yet.

Here is my Picture Book. If you want to share your work on your blog, wiki or other website, you must embed it. If you have any problem, this video will show you how to embed it. 

There is a lot of different ways to use Storybird. One of them might be:

You can want your students to work in pairs and to change the ending of a well-known story or add to it. They write their stories and make it more cheerful and inspiring.

If you wish to learn more about Storybird, you can watch the video or visit this site.

Create your own Puzzle with Puzzlemaker

Hey there! 

This week's other post is introducing a tool. I am going to introduce Puzzlemaker, my friends Seda and Nazife have presented.

Puzzlemaker is a tool which generates puzzles for teachers, students and parents. You can create and print them.

We have ten options while making our own puzzle online for classroom or home use:

• Word Search
• Criss-Cross
• Double Puzzles
• Fallen Phrases
• Math Squares
• Mazes
• Letter Tiles
• Cryptograms
• Number Blocks
• Hidden Message

If you want to create your Criss-Cross, you must follow the steps below:

My Criss-Cross: 1984

If you want to create your Word Search, you must follow the steps below:

My Word Search: 1984

There are a lot of different ways to use Puzzlemaker. One of them can be:

After preparing a lesson about the book 1984, I want my students to complete my Criss-Cross puzzle with words from pages between 255-296 and choose one of these words to fill in the blanks. I use this activity for teaching English through literature. I highly recommend that you give Puzzlemaker a try!

If you wish to learn more about Puzzlemaker, you can watch the video below.

Photo Talks App

Hello everyone!

For this week's project, we are supposed to introduce an app that can be installed and used on a mobile device for language teaching/ learning purposes. I am going to introduce you to Photo Talks.

Photo Talks is an application for smartphones and smart devices. You can create photos to tell stories after installing it on your smartphone. With Photo Talks, you can enhance your photos and generate dialogs shown as speech bubbles.

At the beginning, you can select a photo from your gallery or you can capture a photo. After you add your photo, you can start generating your text. You can choose your bubble's style. Finally, you can constitute your speech text.

Your texts or dialogues can be generated in 9 different languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Malay, Indonesian, Slovene and Portuguese.

 

You can

• write your own texts for a certain occasion like a wedding, a party...
• edit your bubbles.
• decorate your photos with unique photo frames.
• use photo filters and different fonts for texts.

Photo Talks promotes imagination. It is really easy and amusing to use this app. Your studens can tell dialogues about their friendship or send personalized photo cards like invitation to someone's birthday, congrulations for getting high grades.

To learn more about Photo Talks, you can visit this page.

To find out more about and actually download it, you can visit this site.

A Digital Storytelling Project - The Battle of Sarikamish

Hello everyone!

For this week’s project, we are supposed to create a digital storytelling. Digital storytelling is a well-known tool in educational technology as it helps the learners be active in the learning process. You can learn more about digital storytelling from this link.

My friend Berna and I chose the one of the three options and created a fictional story. Our fictional story is about The Battle of Sarikamish. For this work, we are supposed to follow some steps. Firstly we chose a topic and developed 3 characters. Then, we decided on the setting, the sequence of events and wrote the script and prepared our storyboard. After sequencing the images, we completed our story’s video, using Movie Maker. I definitely suggest Movie Maker as it is really easy to use.

According to me, it was really an enjoyable task. I enjoyed doing this video; I hope you will enjoy watching it, as well!

- Here you can find the script -

The Battle of Sarikamish

Third Person: One day, Elif comes back home and runs towards her grandmother, Fatma out of breath. Then, she starts to ask questions consecutively about the battle of Sarikamish to her grandmother who witnessed to the battle and lost her beloved husband and son.

Elif: Grandma, grandma! I have tens and thousands of questions about the battle of Sarikamish to you.

Grandmother: Calm down, honey. Come closer and sit here. That’s really too long and dramatic story. Well darling, tell me what you wonder about it.

Elif: The thing that I wonder most is your feelings. How did you feel during the battle, grandmother?

Grandmother: Oh, my pure and beautiful Elif, I was afraid so much and felt all alone. Every day and night I was thinking about my husband and son who were in the battle field.

Elif: Oh, grandmother. Please, please no more cry. Do not feel sorry. I am beside you all the time you need.

Grandmother: Okay, my darling. When I start to talk about this story, I get upset. What else you wonder, honey?

Elif: I want to learn how you managed to keep living and struggle with difficulties.

Grandmother: Yes, darling. The conditions were really challenging and hard to bear, but I had four other children who needed to be cared. That’s why I stood still on my two feet and kept living for them.

Elif: Grandmother, you are the strongest woman that I have ever seen and you are my role model. I won’t give up anything easily and I will fight for it. I doooooo love you, nanny!

Grandmother: I love you, too honey!

The End

LEARN AND PRACTICE ENGLISH WITH ELLLO

Hi Everyone! For this week's project, we are supposed to introduce an ELT website specifically designed for language learners of English. The website that I will try to introduce is ELLLO.

ELLLO is about learning and practising English especially vocabulary, listening and reading. Since it offers level options, it can be useful for beginner, intermediate and advanced level English learners. It is created by Todd BEUCKENS who is an English teacher in Japan.  It has listening samples of English speakers from around the world with transcriptions and interactive quizzes. The purpose of the site is to engage learners' interest, and motivate them.

You can see lots of listening activities. You can get over 2.300 free lessons!
You can check out newest lessons on Elllo!
At beginner level, the audio is slower with basic words.
At intermediate level, the language is natural speed.
At advanced level, topics and vocabularies are more difficult. 

You can choose any videos or audios. 

If you need while listening, you can get audio script and vocabularies.

You can check and improve your vocabulary, listening or reading skills with the quizzes below and you can rely on them.

I think it is very useful site for learners. It has especially two characteristics I really liked: 

• Firstly, it gives you lots of quizzes.
• Secondly, it gives you level options in lessons and exercises so it is appropriate for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners.

I  would recommend to use Elllo website since it is very helpful to develop students' listening, reading and pronunciation skills. It shapes the students' sense of feeling to become a social and active people and more critical thinkers. Moreover, I would definitely suggest teachers to recommend this website to their students to practice their English. The students can access it easily and they can find lots of contents such as education, health, sport, science and politics in this website. 

If you ask me why we must use Elllo, I can say "Tell me more... I am all ears."

If you wish to learn how to use Elllo, you can watch the video below.

                                     

Feedreader Online

Hi everyone! This week I am going to introduce an online reader which is used for following blogs regularly: Feedreader Online.

If you don't wish to install on your pc, you can use Feedreader Online which is a simple and free RSS reader. You can read or organize news and updates from all your favourite websites in one place. 

The process for signing in is very easy. You can start to use Feedreader Online through your Facebook or your Gmail. You just need to enter your user name and password, then you can find your blogs you wish for.

It has two types of viewing modes: 

• First one is Starred Items which are used for saving RSS feed items.
• Second one is a filter (Show unreaad) which is used for displaying unread items.

I follow lots of blogs and I will keep following them . One of my favourite one is Busy Taecher. This blog offers you worksheets, articles, posters, books, flashcards and so on. In detail it offers grammar,reading, pronunciation, vocabulary, listening, speaking, writing and their subcategories. You can benefit from it thanks to its rich content as a teacher. Teachers easily get papers of  these activities and hand them out to students and it is totally free.

Writing A Film Review - The Wiki Project

Hey there!

After the podcast project, this week we have been introduced to the Wiki projects. As a class we have a Wiki page called “Film Reviews for Magazines”. We have our own page with the name of our films, Dead Poets Society. Here, in this project I worked with Berna.

Creating a Wiki page is very easy, it takes just a few minutes to create it. You just need to enter your user name and password. Then you will have the authority to create, edit or delete.

Advantages of creating wiki are it encourages you a wide investigation and it improves writing and analysing. Difficulties of creating a wiki are you can give some misinformation to the people and it can be time consuming because you have to make a wide investigation.

Here, you can find the link of my wiki. Enjoy it!

MILESTONE

Hello everyone! This week, we are supposed to create a sound rich story and narrate it together. My friend Berna and I prepared a podcast using Vocaroo- Online voice recorder.
The story is about the destruction of an ordinary day. One day, while Emily and Rick are walking in the park, they hear a loud scream and then all the cases happen.

It was our first podcast. It wasn't difficult, in fact we had fun during the project. It was so bizarre to listen our voices from the record.

In foreign language classrooms, preparing podcasts is a great activity for students. You need more time, energy and creativity while creating podcast. It is an easy way to teach language and it is a funny project. Moreover, it grabs chidren's attention. Sound effects make the podcast more attractive and fun. Such a task would be suitable for students whose level is B1 roughly.

-Here you can find the script- 

It was such a lovely sunny day. We were walking in the park. When suddenly we heard a loud scream. Then we turned back to the lake side. A man whose face covered with blood was running towards us in terror. The worse, a Zombie was chasing the man screaming out loud. At that very moment, my boyfriend Rick passed out as we met the Zombie's eye. Upon realizing the case, someone from the crew called 9-1-1 urgently. After the first intervention, the ambulance made tracks for hospital. Unfortunately Rick passed away before arriving the hospital.
As a twist of fate, the actor acting just like Zombie came to light as a friend of ours.
After all, our friend started to see Rick whenever he looked in a mirror and this was the reason he went nuts.
This is the case that Emily made a statement to a well-known newspaper.
Two days after this report, Emily committed suicide by throwing herself off a bridge.


Record music with Vocaroo >>

Welcome!

Hi everyone!

My name is Damla. Currently I am a junior ELT student at Marmara University and a new blogger who is interested in the technology in education.
I will be sharing anything I have learned from my course.
I hope you will enjoy my blog posts.
Looking forward to your comments...