Çevre College 11th ELT Conference

Today is the day that 11th ELT Conference held in Çevre College. I was there and i had lots of fun and learnt new things. The openning was with a show about Notre Dame from the high school students of Çevre College. They were very talented. In addition, we watched some parts from the film that "Dead Poets Society" during the conference. It was great that the parts of the film created a coherence with the conference.

 The first plenary speaker was J.J. Wilson and i think  he was amazing! What he talked about was that "What inspires a teacher?". He added to the list these: students, ideas for classroom, teachable moments, colleagues, role models and gurus, a vision of your future self. He mentioned about different interesting projects. Here is the list of projects for you to search:
-Hole in the wall experiment
-Urban Chronicles
-Bill of rights for women
-3 generations project
-Citizen science
-The maker movement

Next, Emre Kınay was on the stage. He is an actor in Turkey and a drama teacher. He talked about the link between drama and teaching and also he answered the questions from the audience. We attended a concurrent session and the one that i chose was that "7 Education Technology Moduls For Teachers From Different Levels and Departments" by Pınar Kadıoğlu and Muhammet R. Ertuğrul from American Robert College. They told that they have a hashtag on Twitter and every wednesday nights they talk about educational problems at 9 p.m. The hashtag is #egtkonus. Don't forget to join the discussion. Edx was suggested for free conferences. Then, the plenary sessions went on. This time Ben Goldstein was on the stage. His speech was about teachers in the movies. I want to share the films that he told: Mona Lisa Smile, Dead Poets Society, To Sir With Love, Freedom Writers, School of Rock, Mr. Holland's Opus, Summer School, Bad Teacher, Detachment, Etre et Avoir, The Class. 

Ken Willson was the last speaker. He mentioned about seven strategies for improving communication between teacher and students. They are on the list below:
-Develop voices
-Talk about yourself
-Switch on your phones
-Find out what your students know
-Teach unplugged (a book about not using books)
-Do something unexpected
-Be memorable

Attending to the conference was a pleasure for me. I want to thank to the Çevre College. Hope to see you again next year. 

TELT Conference

Today ELT teachers from all over the world met in the Terakki Language Teaching Conference and Career Day in Terakki School. I attended the conference and want to share my observations with you.

Philip Kerr was the first plenary speaker and he started the conference. He mentioned about the study which was done by British Council and Tepav. Its name is "Turkish National Needs Assessment of State School English Teaching". You can check it. He also mentioned 3 kinds of teacher: the explainer, the involver and the enabler. He emphasized that teachers become guides/facilitators and students become active/responsible.

For the concurrent session 1 I chose "May I have your attention, please?" and the speaker was Özge Karaoğlu who I feel admiration for. She emphasized that we leave our foot prints in social media. It doesn't matter whether you deleted what you shared(text, pictures etc.) or not. it is still somewhere on the internet. So, we must be careful about what we shared and protect ourselves. She recommeded search engines which provide much more privacy such as duckduckgo, startpage, Ixquick. Mrs. Karaoğlu also recommended tools for privacy as disconnect.me and ghostery.com. In order to create your online identity use linkedin, about.me, visualcv.com, google+ and this online identity will be your reputation. She mentioned e-portfolio and suggested using evernote.

blogs suggested by Özge Karaoğlu

twitter users suggested by Özge Karaoğlu 

hashtags suggested by Özge Karaoğlu

hashtags suggested by Özge Karaoğlu

"Teachers as Learners" by Lucy Griffin was my choice for the roundtables 1. She talked about coursera. Please check it later. I think it is a very useful website. It provides free and online courses. In addition, I attended the sapiential circles. It was about "Project Based Learning" by Nicole Young. In PBL learning must be meaningful to students and the teacher should suggest different topics also by asking students' ideas and suggestions. She mentioned about 21st century skills as collaboration, communication, critical thinking and the use of technology.

For the concurrent session 2 I attended to "Say 'Hello!' to Video: Student-generated Smart Phone Projects" by Pelin Rau. She gave the answer that "It is highly versatile and reliable" to the question of "Why video?". Students have to think first and then write. So, it is as challenging as writing an essay. She offered bie.org for project based learning. There is a quote of her that I want to share with you: Language is a living animal. You can't reach the perfection.

project ideas suggested by Pelin Rau

The last roundtable session that I attended was "A Journey into Yourself as a Teacher" by Bilge Yelaldı. We talked about IB learner profile with her and the adjectives that an IB learner should have. These adjectives are knowledgeable, thinker, communicator, risk-taker, balanced, reflective, caring, open-minded, inquirer. We took notes as the following questions poped up and we wrote our teacher definition individually.
-What is your role as a teacher?
-How does your personality effect your teaching?
-How do you make use of your strengths as a teacher?
-Why did you choose to become  a teacher?
Please try to answer this questions and come up your own teacher definition.

Dr. Deniz Kurtoğlu Eken took the stage in the plenary session 2. She talked about "I hear you... The gem of feedback". I have the voice record of her speech and I will try to share it with you in the coming days.

It was a pleasure for me attending to the conference and I recommend it to you unhesitatingly. Please feel free to comment.

What is your native language?

Hello!!
Today i want to introduce an experiment. The experiment is being conducted by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Click the link , answer some questions about yourself. Then the quiz will start and ask you some questions about English. At the end of the quiz it tells you your native language and gives you 3 possibility.

I had the quiz and it gave me this order: 1. Spanish
                                                                 2.Turkish
                                                                 3.Vietnamese

What did the quiz tell you? What is your native language? Write your order of native languages!

Back Again!

Good night to all of you

I know it has been a long time since i wrote here. During the summer i didn't have many things to write. All summer was a laziness for me and it was a bit stressful because my sister married! Half an hour ago i realized that now i have lots of things to write. 

What have i done until today? 

This summer will be my last holiday during my university years and i have never been abroad as an ELT student! So i'm determined to go abroad this summer. Firstly, i decided to go USA for work and travel. I prefered united towers to deal with my proceedings.  I recommend you this company if you plan to go work and travel or a language school. They are very good at their jobs. I paid the registry fee to them and i had 3 days to change my mind. It was the 3rd day when i changed my mind! Because USA doesn't accept the green passport(personal) to work in there. Red passport(public) is required for work and travel and i have a green passport so i had to take another one. My family told me go to UK and travel other Europen countries. It sounded logical. I decided where to go, where to stay, how long i would stay. I went YDS abroad to make the agreement. It had been my language course during high school years. Mr. Süsler who is the principal of the course told me to go Canada and took a TOEFL course. I was really confused but finally i decided that i wouldn't change my mind and i would go to UK. I decided Stafford House for 10 weeks. I'm going to take the general English course and stay with a family in London. I'm going to there on 15 June 2015 hopefully and i will be writing about my observations and experiences to you from London for 10 weeks!

It wasn't the only thing that i was struggling. I have had lots of projects in the school and in the coming weeks i want to mention about them. 

creating a poster

Hi there!
My project was to create a poster by using glogster. Our topic was "What's 21st century communication for you?" The first thing that came to my mind was about social media. I shared my idea with my friend Melike. She liked the idea and we created the poster together of course with her ideas, too. It is easy to make a poster by using glogster as long as you have an idea in your mind. I hope you will like our idea and our poster!

digital story telling: Alice and Daisy in The Zoo

Hi!!! It has been a long time since I shared my last project with you because of my mid-term exams. However, I think it was worth waiting for the new project. This week I made a digital story telling project with Melike. It was like our podcast project but more challenging. We used different pictures as visual and we taped our voices. Melike drew the pictures and I wrote the script. I felt bad because I couldn’t help Melike while she was drawing. I’m really bad at drawing! We found child songs and our materials were ready. We combined pictures, songs and our voices by using Movie Maker. It was funny for us. I hope you will enjoy and use techniques like that with your students. Here our little digital story telling video:
P.S.: I'm Daisy and Melike is Alice.

puzzle

Hello!!
The project of this week has 3 different options. They are creating a puzzle, creating comic strips and creating a timeline. we are expected to choose one of them and i chose to create a puzzle. I created 2 different puzzles which contain 25 words in total. I used puzzlemaker to create these puzzles. The topics were fruits and professions. It was funny to create a puzzle and try to solve it on my own. I am sure you or your students will enjoy while solving them!

professions

Across
3. A person who operates the flying controls of an aircraft
5. A person whose trade is making and selling bread and cakes
8. A person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or structures
9. A person whose trade is cutting up and selling meat in a shop
10. A person who sings
11. A male firefighter
12. A person who practises or studies law
Down
1. A person who is qualified to treat people who are ill
2. A man whose job is to serve customers at their tables in a restaurant
4. A person who works in a mine
6. A person who creates paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby
7. Relating to the diseases, injuries, and treatment of farm and domestic animals
9. A person who cuts men’s hair

13 of 13 words were placed into the puzzle.

Created by Puzzlemaker at DiscoveryEducation.com 

 

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APPLE	APRICOT	BANANA
BLACKBERRY	CHERRY	GRAPE
MANGO	ORANGE	PEACH
PLUM	STRAWBERRY	WATERMELON

12 of 12 words were placed into the puzzle.

Created by Puzzlemaker at DiscoveryEducation.com