WİKİS
Before I didn't know how to use wiki. Now, I want to use it more interactively with my friends because it is a beneficial site for colloborative work.I think that this tool can be used between students and teachers effectivelsand can cretae more attractive environment and provide the chance for the teachers to give studentsn more feedback and exercises.
How could you use wikis in teaching
The wikis is interactive, collaborative, up-dated, easy-to-use, and attractive tool for both students and teachers . A teacher can provide practices, assign students, and can check whether students complete a homework on the wikis and laso the studenst can reach easily what the teachers send for them. Also, wikis is also beneficila for colloborative group work. For example, in collaborative group work, students can share their ideas about a subject and build cloud and at the end by analyzing the information, they can reach the results. I haven't still used the wikis in detail, so I couldn't say many things before I use it more in detail.
This wikis is like blogger, but ı think that there are more sources for students to reach and benefit .In teaching, the wikis can be used in group work. For example, as a teacher , I would assign my students to make brainstorming about a topic and share their ideas about the topic and make an outline for writing. I think that many activities that are different form this example can be applied for teaching and learning in the wikis.
When you firstly enter www.Forvo.com , you will see Home, Language, Categories,
Pronounce and Users sections under them, you can see the language of day and
its pronunciations under the right of the page and at the left of the page, you
can see Categories (which includes pronunciations of the words that belong to a
category) and Hot Category which shows the most pronounced words. Moreover, at
the left of the page, you can also see your username, pronunciations and words
that you added and there is ‘’ Add new words’’ button. In addition, at the top
of the page, you can see how many words and language in the text and also at
the left top of the page, you see ‘’Add words,Pronounce,Listen & Learn’’
sections. With these sections, you can add new words, pronounce words and learn
listen and learn random words from different languages.
Next to the Home section,
there is ‘’Languages’’ section. In the section, the languages are ordered
according to alphabetical order and popularity. In addition, under the page,
there is a link that shows all the languages in Forvo with their international
codes and native names.
Beside ‘’Languages’ section,
there is ’’Categories’’ section. In this section, you can find words with their
pronunciations and see which category such as people, music, medicine, holiday
etc. the words belong to. Under the categories, you can find the latest
pronounced words and also by clicking on ‘’Complete Categories list’’ which is
above, you can reach all the categories in Forvo.
By the categories, you can
see ‘’Pronunciation’’ Section. In this section, you can provide the pronunciations
of the words that have not pronounced by selecting the language that you know.
Beside Pronounce section,
you can see Users section. In this section, you can see the number of overall
users and total editors and also you can see the people who added lots of words
and pronunciations.
More Detailed Video
In order to use Forvo more effectively,
you firstly need to register yourself. When you write your keywords on the
search engine in Forvo, you can find key words that are related to your word
from the different parts of the World and also you can download the different pronunciations
of the some words from Forvo. While you are looking the different pronunciations
of the words, you can vote the quality (whether they are good or bad) of them. If
you are not satisfied with your pronunciations, you can repeat the pronunciations
by recording them again. In addition, by writing a word whose pronunciations
you don’t know, you can want someone to provide its pronunciation.
If we want to use Forvo in Education,
there are some ways for both teachers and students.
Example,
- - By forming groups in the classroom, teachers
can assign students to find different pronunciations of a word according to
countries or regions (in a country).
- - A student can add words and want people to
pronounce them. When s/he hears different pronunciations of words, s/he becomes
more knowledgeable about the words that are used in the daily life.
- - Teachers can show different pronunciations of
a word in the Classroom and help the learners to become aware of variability in
the pronunciations of words in different languages.
oIn addition, there are some issues that should be considered.
-While using Forvo with aim of learning the
different pronunciation of a word, we should careful about which word we are
learning because somebody can randomly say something that may not be the pronunciation
of the word, so we should be careful about the pronunciations the words in
order to learn in Forvo
-In Forvo, many people can share pronunciations. Although people give correct pronunciation
of a word, listeners may not understand to which dialect the pronunciation belongs to
-A person who look for academic language may not
find what s/he is looking for in Forvo
The application of critical thinking activities in EFL classes has become debatable issue for a long time for educators because the critical thinking activities provide a great deal of benefits to the learners such as using language communicatively and using cognitive skills like analytical and skeptical skills etc. actively while using language, but there are some limitations such as not having similarities with the classical education system about the assessment of the students, not having enough time for the application of the activities. Before I go further, I want to explain what critical thinking is.
Critical thinking has been differently defined for years by many educators. according to Michael Scriven & Richard Paul (1987), critical thinking is cognitively structured process of dynamically and effectively perceiving, understanding, visualizing mentally, analyzing, synthesizing and interpreting the information which is gained from ‘’ observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication’’ as a way to reach a belief and action. When we look at the characteristics of critical thinking in the definition, we can predict how critical thinking can be beneficial for language and thinking skills. When a person has critical thinking skills, s/he has the characteristics such as being skeptical and active thinker, being open-minded etc. My discussion pointing in this blog is that depending on the definition of the critical thinking how the application of critical thinking activities in EFL classes can be beneficial for the learners.
There are many critical thinking activities that can be applied in EFL classes. Project Work, Dialogue Journals, Reading Log and Structured Controversial Dialogue are some of them. Critical thinking activities in language classes urge the students to participate actively and creatively and give the chance of using existing knowledge and communicative skills. Depending on critical thinking, we can say that critical thinking activities provide the chance of meaningful practice and using existing knowledge, the students’ involvement in the activities both emotionally and cognitively, the use of the language apprehensively and productively, taking feedback for the students. (Gaskaree, Mashhady, Dousti, 2010, 38-39)There are several processes in the application of critical thinking activities. At the beginning, a problem that attracts the attention of the students is determined and discussed and then the reasons of the problem are analyzed and the possible solutions are explored. During these processes, the students have the opportunity of practicing and applying activities (Richards and Schmidt, 2002, p 420-421). Also, while these processes are applied, open-ended questions about the problem are asked to the students and they study on the problem by negotiating the meaning. As a result of the problem posing and problem solving process, the students become autonomous learners and realize the potential of their intellectual capacity and also their thinking and language skills with communication skills can be integrated.i
Videos related to critical thinking and critical thinking activities
One teacher bring critical into her classes. Her students are learning to take a "think locally and act globally” approach to problem-solving and new areas of inquiry in their learning as they develop their language skills. In the activities, the students actively involved in collaborative group work and they are open-minded and use their existing knowledge. Also, in this activity, the students analyze, synthesize and interpret the knowledge that they collected. Moreover, in the activities, they took role plays. As a result of these activities, their language, higher order thinking and communication skills develop and these skills are integrated.
Students form opinions about certain issues and demonstrate these opinions by selecting and then moving to a corner. In this critical thinking activity, the students work in collaborative groups or pairs and they use their thinking and communication skills. Also, as they use these skills, they are always active and open-minded.
I chose this topic in order to show the importance of the
application of the critical thinking activities in EFL classes and the according to me , critical thinking
activities are important because in my learning environment such as high school
, old teaching techniques are still applied
and this lead to lack of effective and
meaningful learning skills and this also lead to not able to use thinking
ability more effective , so this situation may lead to the devastation of the
students’ future education life and
becoming poor learners and thinkers.
What do you know about critical thinking?
According to you, what is the importance of critical
thinking activities for you?
What kind of activities would you apply in the EFL classes?
When I read your comments, I saw that all of you connected
the critical thinking activities with the activities that we applied in our
some courses. In brief, I can say that all of you are aware of how you learn
meaningfully. I don’t need to say many things because some of your comments
reflect what the importance of the application of the critical thinking activities
in EFL classes. However, although some critical thinking activities or
activities that seem as critical thinking activities are applied in classes,
not applying critical thinking activities during whole classes and not teaching
to the students how critically think, listen, read and see the life aren’t completely taught with regard to me.
Before I didn’t know what pod cast is. Now, I learned what a
pod cast can be. I want to use it in my studies and share ideas (by this way,
meeting new people). And also, I want to learn to what extend I can use
Podcast.
I learned that Teacher’s Pet is useful and practical tool
for teachers to use. It helps teachers to prepare good supplementary materials
for classroom discussion and also it helps learners to learn things as grammar,
vocabulary etc by urging them thinking and meaningfully understanding the
lesson topic. In brief, I can say that this tool can be supporter of a teacher
and without spending too much time on unnecessary details, a teacher can create
more effective material with these tools.
Before I used Teacher’s Ped, I hadn’t known anything about it.
Now, I know that It is a very effective tool to prepare classroom activities
about words, grammar, synonyms and many things like these. I want to use
Teacher’s Pet during my teaching profession because with this tool, I can
prepare supplementary materials for my classroom activities. The most effective
feature of this activity is, in my opinion, that it can be used easily and
supplementary materials can be prepared quickly. As we saw in the video, this
can help teachers to prepare activities such as word, sentence, punctuation
completion activities, synonym finding activities etc.
Interactive Web Pages(IWP) are really interactive and helpful. Interactive
Web pages give feedback and give chance to the learners to learn until they
learn completely. And also, IWP help the learners to integrate their existing knowledge
as in the listening music and filling gab activity.
From the activity, I learn how to mix sentences and find the right place of
sentences. I think that Jmix in hot potatoes can helps learners to learn the
complex structure of sentences. Secondly, I learned how to prepare tests. In my
opinion, this is the best activity because as a pre-service teacher, I can use
this activity in my teaching process in the classroom. Lastly, I learned how to
use Jcloze. Jcloze helps learners to integrate their existing knowledge and
also this activity makes the learning process enjoyable.
Before I
began to use interactive web pages, I hadn’t known anything about them. Now, I
want to learn to use them and how they can be beneficial form e at my studies.
Also, I want to learn how I can use Interactive Web pages during my profession
in the future.
This
activity is really helpful. With this activity, I learned how to organize
Interactive Web pages and as a pre-service teacher and I learned that I can use
the Internet to create texts or activities that are for deep understanding for
my students during my profession. Also, this activity changed my perspective
about the internet and instructional technology. As a result of this activity,
I learned to use the internet for individual development, assessment and this
activity showed me how I can interactively introduce a new topic to my students
These tools
showed me the frequency of the use of words in the texts and which words are
common in English. These tools can help me to find different forms of words in
the sentences and find out the mistakes in sentence structure.
I think
that BNL and BNC Vocabulary Profiler and Test Document Readability are the ones
of the best tools because I can list the common words in English and know which
words are the key ones and also one of these tools helps me to correct my
mistakes in sentences.
However,
although these tools can be beneficial at many points, there are, in my
opinion, some drawbacks of them. The fist is that in order to use text with
these tools, we need some background knowledge about the texts that we are
going to use with these tools. Second drawback is that in order to use these
tools, there should be a class in which there is computer or other electronic
tools like projection. However, we can't find these facilities almost anywhere
easily, so this sometimes makes the use of these beneficial tools impossible
I could use these text analysis tools to make the teaching and learning process easier. With these tools, I can teach my students the different forms of words and how they are used in sentences.And also, I can teach my students how to handle and read the long texts and how to analyse them with these tools.
Concordance is very beneficial tool in order to see where the words are used in a text, what kind of forms a word take in sentence and how a word is used in sentence stucture.Because of these benefits, this tool can be used as a supplementary source in the classroom environment.
I think that the
nature of readability of texts includes the way that the text transmits the knowledge
to its reader and it can include the ways with which the text is tramsmitted to
its reader. I want to use the computer to design and publish the knowledge with the best way, so the opinion that I want to
transmit can be conveyed correctly by using
the computer.
From
this activity, I learned how to use readability statistics for the texts and
how to find problems in the texts. And also, this activity shows me how to
compare the words in a text with most common English words. Moreover, I learned
to have an idea about a text without reading it by using Wordle. Lastly, I
learned how I can find the use of words and see their different forms in a sentence.
Friday, 5 October 2012
KWL
English lexis structure needs to be practices many
times. In order to be effective at knowing and guessing English words, we
should interact with English language and try to use its vocabulary commonly.
In order to be knowledgeable about word frequency, I think that we should be
good at vocabulary.
Vocabulary Profiling
Prism is an effective for using common words. I don’t
think that the same word has the same color in the different genres because its
frequency always changes according to the genres.
Vocabulary Profiling
As a teacher, I could use vocabulary profile in order
to determine which words that are used by students known frequently or commonly
or at low level. Then, as in the video, I prepare a list of these words. It is
possible for students to use vocabulary profile. Later, I would encourage my
students to interact with each other and make a word list about frequency of
the words, cooperation in the classroom environment can be formed and the most
effective way of preparing vocabulary profile can be prepared. While vocabulary
profile is used more in the teaching and learning activities, work cloud is
usually used to be knowledgeable about the general idea of a text. Vocabulary
profile can be used to develop learners’ vocabulary by teachers, but work cloud
can be used as introduction before beginning to examine a topic deeply.
Vocabulary Profiling
Learning key words with computers things help us to
know the word frequency level according to common English use and which can be
known better. Computers are more effective than humans at finding key words.
The use of a concordance is
helpful to see words in context. Concordance helps met o see how some words are
more common or frequent and also which words are fewer. When I used Concordance
with my text, I saw ‘’digital’’ and ‘’download’’ are used more frequent in the
text and then I saw ‘’claim’’ and ‘’continue’’ are used less frequent.
Multi-concordance is helpful for students to find different use of words and
their collocation in sentences. Teachers should train their students to use and
benefit from these tools.
I think that common used words are helpful in teaching
English because by using them, communication environment can be set and student
can transfer thoughts and ask about atopic when they don’t understand. It isn’t
necessary to teach the common words because they can naturally learn during the
teaching and learning process. I think we don’t need to learn vocabulary explicitly
because it is natural process to learn vocabulary by examining content of the texts.
Although it is a natural process at some points, it needs some care about
learning vocabulary, but it isn’t necessary too much to study on vocabulary.
Knowing vocabulary for daily conversation can be enough. However, people can
prepare vocabulary lists to extend their vocabulary knowledge and also they can
use dictionaries. However, according to me, vocabulary lists can be more
effective.
Vocabulary
Profiling
This test can be quite hard for a non-native speaker
because a non-native speaker may not use the foreign language always and also
there is structure of language that is in mind of the native speaker, so this kind
of test can be quite easy for a native speaker. I was surprised because of
the levels of some words. For example, while I think a word as a common one, I
saw that it isn’t. I don’t as non-native speaker whether the frequency level of
words vary in American or British English. Developing the sense of word
frequency in terms of teaching can bring some advantages to the teacher because
when a teacher has a good sense of word frequency, s/he can easily decide which
word can be better to use according to the conditions in the classroom and
explain the content of the lesson with proper words.
‘’TEACHING IDEAS’’’’CTE319’’ AND ‘’DATA-DRIVEN
LEARNING’’
Technology brings very effective ways to make teaching
and learning process easier. In teaching, Vocabulary Profile and Concordance
can be the ones of the most effective ways because learners can quickly reach
the information with these technological programs. In teaching, I would like to
use these tools in order to provide brief information before examining the
topic in detail. And also, I would like to use these tools to find the
definitions and words that are required to be highlighted.
Vocabulary Profiling
1
While students learn English, they confront many
unknown words. Guessing unknown words, in my opinion, change person to person
because the range of knowledge is different in each person. However, while I am
with new learners of English, I usually see many students who fail to guess of
an unknown word. Failing to guess unknown words sometimes happens to me because
I don’t have the background knowledge of English as native speakers.
2
My course books
don’t include the guessing meaning of unknown word, but in first class, there
were books which included these types of activities. The activities in those
books showed us to guess the words from the context of the texts. No, "9 out of 10" rule wasn’t observed.
3
A person who teaches should develop their sense of word frequency because they use the language in order to teach and interact with the students by using language and also s/he will teach a text in a book in detail. So as not to confront problems during teaching and learning process, a teacher should develop his/her sense of word frequency. Moreover, students show teachers as role models, so they should have a good sense of word frequency to be a good model.
DDL
Task 1
DDL can be suitable for all the activities in f2f
class. I think DDL is more suitable for individual work because it includes
discovery process in learning, so in order to discover, construct, and examine
the new knowledge, an individual work can be more effective than a group work.
I think that the internet can be the most effective way for DDL. The internet
can be used every moment in DDL because DDL includes student’s own discovery
and evaluation of knowledge, so by using activities, searching for information
about a topic, the internet can be the most effective way in DDL.
Task 2
The five words are ‘’language, learning materials,
knowledge and teaching’’. This type view of text can be beneficial in any way because
a person can easily know what the subject of the text is and have an idea about
the text that s/he is going to read.
Task 3
KWC is very effective and it shows me how many times
the word for which I am looking in the text. ‘’Materials’’ is usually after
adjectives like authentic and enhanced and before the nouns and prepositions. I
think the strongest collocation of ‘’materials’’ is ‘’enhanced’’.
Firstly, I could use blogs to give assignments to my students and check how succesful they are at their assignment.
Secondly,I could provide a lot of e-resources for my students by sending them videos, pictures and documents that are related the content of our lesson on the blogs.
Lastly,I could always interact with my students and immediately help them when they need help for their studies.
