21st Century Style Courses / Blogging - An Evaluation

Hi everybody!

Today in this post I am going to talk about all my experiences and reviews  about my material class and my blogging process. 

Well my first thoughts about keeping a blog was not positive to be honest. It is because of I always found myself non-creative and not a writer type. Actually I was right about it for a short time. I don't think I did explain my self in a natural way in the first posts but after a few posts I began to get used to it. Blogging became like talking to a friend more than just writing some words. So I can say I liked it.

About our course. Firstly before taking the class, I thought "Oh my god we are going to waste our time by preparing some posters,handouts,papers etc." But when our teacher introduced the lesson for the first time, I got this feeling " I am going to learn something useful, something related to technology."

We were introduced to how to use technology (some websites,applications,wikis,podcasts,web-tools,etc.) in English Language Teaching.We learned  to choose appropriate tool for appropriate tasks. We learned to become not only  21st century learners but also teachers.

Actually during blogging process, sometimes I had hard times to do somethings like adding video, embedding links, creating a proper post etc. Furthermore I had some difficulties while doing my task like recording my voice for podcast, creating a story and making appropriate edits for digital story telling task, but despite all these difficulties at the end of my studies, when I look the outcome, I felt amazing,happy, enjoyed. Because I really like the feeling of achieving something. During this course, I always felt these feelings.

Only if this course has a prequel or sequel course because I think there is no limitation in

technology, there are more and more tools,websites,applications etc. So if there was one more term for this course, It would be great.

I think I will be keeping a blog for other purposes like reviewing about movies,games and TV series. For this blog I will try to find and share useful materials and information about ELT.

The picture above is taken from here.

The picture bellow is taken from here.

Thank you,

Ahmet Enes

StoryJumper - A Web Tool

Hello everyone!

Today I'm going to talk about StoryJumper, a web 2.0 tool. 2 weeks ago my friend Alper and I presented it for our material class.

Firstly Story Jumper is a web-publishing tool, a digital story telling that enables it users to create their own story books with images, texts, and most importantly with a narration. It's totally free.

Everyone can use it, it has simple and basic usage but I personally think that it has material mostly appropriate for  young learners but again if you add your own materials, you can make it suitable for older learners.

All you have to do is create a free account and then you can create your own story book! In your story book you can add a title and your name to cover page. Then you can add as many pages as you want. You can add props, scenes, speech bubbles to your story.

If you don't like the materials Story Jumper offers to you can find more of them by searching via its search engine or upload your own materials.

While you are working on your story, you can share it with your friends to get some help. After you have completed the story you can share it to public(on social media or any web site by copying embedded code), allow other users to see it or copy and improve it, Furthermore you can even print it ( by purchasing it), making a hard copy!

Among all different digital story telling tools, I selected this one as it enables you to add many visual material but most importantly it enables you to add narrations.

On the other hand my friend and I prepared a task. We tried to figure out how we could use this tool in educational way. We come up with a task for young learners. In the task students are supposed to create a story about their favorite pets. We gave them some instructions like; select 3 characters from your favorite pets, use at least 5 speech bubbles... And we gave the main structure of the story. They have to complete it according to their choices. You can see the other details the hand-out we gave.

We created a story to give an example of the task we created. We followed our instructions one by one and completed our story.

I recommend StoryJumper to all teachers who want to make their students more creative and make English learning more enjoyable!

Here you can find PowerPoint version of our presentation:

 Here you can see our task hand-out:

Here you can find our example story

Read this free book made on StoryJumper

Here you can access my friend Alper's blog

The picture above is taken from here.

Thank You,
Ahmet Enes