Teacher Training - Project Week #1

After our last session with Teacher Training, we started to plan our project, and in this project we wanted to explore the future of  ELT and how we can adept this future in our classrooms. Firstly, we started with deciding the main headline which is going to be "English as a Global Language".  I have mentioned this before as we talk this a lot in teacher training but we will be look into this subject deeply and we will be exploring this in the context of Turkey too. We decided our subject after a group meeting in zoom, it took nearly an hour, later we continue to discuss more about the content of this topic and we separated it into four main headlines. Later we discuss more about this headlines/topics in an WhatsApp meeting, that also took about an hour and we shared who will be researching what topics. I will be looking into ELT classrooms all over the world and how they teach English as a foreign or second language, are there any specific methods that is been used, etc. So we mainly talked about our topic and how can we do what we want, find some answers for that and shared four headlines among ourselves. 

See you next week. 

Teacher Training #6

 Welcome again!

This was the last week of our teacher training, I had so much fun exploring, working on the subjects that I mentioned in my previous posts. I learned a lot and I'm looking forward to use the things that I learned in my classroom. In this last wee our topic was materials and how we can integrate Global English to our materials and our classes. Below, you will see our thought on how to integrate Global English with an activity, enjoy;

After the final session of our teacher training, we designed an activity under the title of ‘Global English’ as team ELT Z. For the process of preparation, we met on Zoom at 2pm and had approximately two hours of meeting to brainstorm, exchange ideas and distribute the duties. We wanted to use what we learned during the sessions of teacher training while trying to maintain World Englishes as the main focus. After sharing various precious ideas and placing most of our thoughts on the project, we decided to benefit from Lino.it and IDEA: International Dialects of English Archive as the materials we learned through the teacher training sessions. Here comes our activity below, take care!

XOXO,  Team ELT Z  

Global English Activity of “ELT Z”

Designed by: Bilge Güral, Zeynep Ahsen Karasoy, Öken Demir, Zeynep Çetintaş

Classroom setting: 20 students 

Level: B2+/C1 

Skills: Speaking, Listening

*It is assumed that the students are being taught ‘British English’ 

• Activity

*It is assumed that students already have a virtual classroom on “Google Classroom”. 

1. Students will be paired and in total there will be 10 pairs of 20 students. 

2. The teacher will share the link of “IDEA: International Dialects of English Archive” with the students on “Google Classroom”. *The link to the website: https://www.dialectsarchive.com/globalmap 

3. After sharing the link, teacher will ask students to go to the link and will assign each pair a different place on the map the places will be like this: Pair 1: Naples 15 / Pair 2: Germany 11 / Pair 3: India 3 / Pair 4: Russia 24 / Pair 5: Spain 3 / Pair 6: Ghana 2 / Pair 7: Turkey 3 / Pair 8: Kuwait 1 / Pair 9: Jiangsu 3 / Pair 10: France 8 

4. Each and every pair will be asked to listen to the podcast about the assigned place on the map and will be asked to investigate the podcast in depth with multiple aspects.

5. When the investigation part is over, students will be provided an another link on “Google Classroom” again and that link will bring them to the website called “Linoit” The link to the website is: http://linoit.com/users/zeynepcetintas/canvases/inbox

6. The students will see a sticky note and on that note the reflection questions about the podcasts will be written:

• What did draw your attention when you first listened to the audio?

• Did you have difficulty in understanding it? Why or why not?

• Is there any difference from the British accent in terms of pronunciation, intonation, word stress? If yes, explain how by giving examples.

• Would you like to talk to someone who speaks this accent? Why or why not?

7. The teacher will ask each and every pair to reflect upon the questions given on the sticky note. Basically students will create a new sticky note on linoit to write down their answers to the reflection questions. 

8. When the students complete writing their sticky notes, the teacher will ask each pair to present their reflections already written on the sticky notes that they have created about the podcasts that they have listened to. 

9. Each pair will start their presentation by making their fellow students listen to the most striking 10-15 seconds of the podcasts. After this listening stage, the pairs will continue on with presenting their reflections on their sticky notes. 

10. When the activity is completed, students will be exposed to 10 different dialects of English and will be able to find out the differences as well as the similarities between the “Standard English” that they are currently learning (British English) and the different dialects that they have listened to.  

Teacher Training #5

 Hi!

Unfortunately we are getting really close to the end of our teacher training and I'm really grateful for our teachers effort to introduce us 21th century skills. This week we mainly talk about the educational websites and softwares and how can we use them in ELT classroom. I learned a lot of websites and softwares which I think would be very useful for my teaching experience. There are couple websites that I really like, let me introduce them to you :

 Edpuzzle, is a teaching tool used to place interactive content into pre-existing videos from a variety of sources such as YouTube or into videos you have made. We used this website for our own class, teacher training, and I found it really engaging because teacher can add the information about the video at the start and ask question about the subject in the video in the minute that is told and as teachers we can also ask students opinion about the subject, later we can evaluate their answers and give feedbacks. I do think that I will use this website for my teachings.

Renderforest, is similar to animator which I write an introduction about it. With Renderforest you can easily create slideshows, promotional animations, music visualizations, logo animations, and other types of videos. I think we can also use this website to encourage students to create their own videos of the topic they like. 

Tiki-Toki, is a timeline maker. Unfortunately you can only create one timeline per account with the free version. However, this websites can be used for all kinds of studies so you may have a chance to persuade your school to buy the premium version. It is web-based software for creating interactive timelines. Tiki-Toki allows you to create a fully-functional timeline also it provides an opportunity to make the timeline interesting with the help of images and videos from other websites. You can also encourage your students to create their timeline and share with you.

iSpring. "iSpring Suite is a PowerPoint-based authoring toolkit produced by iSpring Solutions that allows users to create slide-based courses, quizzes, dialog simulations, screencasts, video lectures, and other interactive learning materials". It is really next generation teaching material. It has so much potential and I advise you to explore it yourself. Also we talked about Seesaw, you can find a my review on this blog.

Lastly, another good website is Quizlet."Quizlet is an American online study application that allows students to study various topics via learning tools and games". We can use quizlet as a vocabulary teaching or vocabulary knowledge testing tool in ELT classrooms because app offers variable options for testing the vocabulary. Firstly, teacher needs to create vocabulary cards,  the teacher can use imagines and further explanation about the words. Later, students can study the words with flashcards until they get themselves familiar with the words. After this, students can test themselves with testing,matching and other fun games available in the Quizlet. Also as a teacher we can add voice recordings of the words and sentences on to the website, with this students can also study spelling.

Teacher Training #4

Hi! I hope everyone is doing well.

This week was the fourth week of our training, we are getting close to the end already! Before I mentioned what we did in this week lesson I should tell you all that we decided our groups for our end project. We have couple ideas that we have in mind but nothing clear yet.

So, this week we talk about integrating technology into teaching of English. There is no doubt that technology effecting every bit of our lives and we talk about what can we do to make this experience better for our learners, what are some barriers we can encounter and how to solve them. Of course there are problems that we cannot solve our own like foundational needs for technological use in school such as need for electricity, the lack of technological devices etc. The areas that we can help are to create and use relevant tools for the learning goals and objectives and make these tools engaging for learners to use. In addition to this, to address the demands, we need to test technology to determine its appropriateness, ensuring that privacy settings align with student privacy. We need to introduce new technologies to the students and explain how and why it is relevant to student learning.

We also shared our general fears about these issues and try to find solutions for each of them. The general idea was to not give up in the hard situation and always have a plan B or even a plan C because we can't always predict what will happen. My concern was that learning knowledge is like finding the exit in a maze. The longer you spend time in the maze the more familiar you get to the grounds, and eventually you find the exit and you never get lost in it again. It can be time consuming, you may get lost a lot but you learn. Technology is like giving a map to the person who is in the maze. They know exactly where they are going and they can get to the exit faster and easier. The problem is that if they are sent there again without a map they will get lost, also because they never lift their faces from the map they don’t know anything about the maze. They did not spend enough time to figure out themselves. It makes the knowledge they learn less permanent I think and I found the solution that I can deal with this using a variety of different activities to teach the same content or use different approaches for every different types of learners.

So, as pre-sevice teachers and on-service teachers we need to know how to use technology and why we use it. We need digital literacy to understand, search, evaluate and organize what we need to know and use. Also we need to make students aware of the reasons why we use technology in the classroom and make them more comfortable around the technology