Final Ref(resh)lection

Time to sum up the whole semester! I can say that this semester is the hardest one for me during four year! I’m really very tired of school and very happy that is going to finish (I hope) soon.

I want to thank to my CALL lesson teacher that I have learned very much during the semester. I was happy with the lesson and content but only I want to say everything went very fast. One topic for one lesson and task for it immediately is not good idea, I think! If learners will do some task during lesson, it’d be better both for them and for teacher. Too much task for every week makes learner tired of lesson

I have been learning English and I’ve started to like teaching English. Using technology in teaching is part of us. Whatever we’ve learned made many contributions to us but even they are not enough. Everyday everything is changing, many new things exist and we have to follow them.

Being only “teacher” is not enough! If you are TEACHER you must be a LEARNER all the time! You can’t without learning! 

Weebly and Second Life

This week we had two topics together. First one was Weebly and this topic is the reason for our teacher to change our final project. I don’t complain about it, I liked this idea very much. Weebly helps us to create a website. We had done this when we were first year student. We used FrontPage to create a website, it was complicated and very difficult. However, Weebly makes it easier!

Thanks to our silly mind we couldn’t able to access the second life. We just saw some photos of the site. It was like a game and also used for education or chat. As we can understand from the name “Second Life” it is really like second life 🙂

PodCast and Audioboo

I didn’t have any idea about pod casting. I have iPod and I was using iTunes but I didn’t pay attention to podcast before. Actually after I learned how it works I understood the importance and usefulness of it. Podcast offers us to have the news or anything that we were not able to catch such as radio program or anything. We can download them and listen again and again.

We mentioned audioboo this week. It’s useful I think we can make voice record there. We can use it for our teaching periods. We may want our students to record their voice and then we can check it easy. We can see the development of their speaking and so on… 

Movie Maker & Digital Story Telling & Story Jumper

I didn’t use movie maker before. It seemed very complicated to me and I was afraid of doing something wrong with my computer to be honest. However, I understand that it was so silly to think like this. It’s very easy and useful. We can create even our own story by pictures and music/sound. Very interesting and attractive I think.

Story Jumper is a website that we can create our own digital story book! How cool isn’t it? As new generation love to do something with computer and love using internet we can use this website. It’s very good for kids. Colorful, interesting and charming…

Facebook Twitter and Skype

As this week’s topic was Facebook Twitter and Skype I can say that at least those two portals have become the heart of world’s population.

First of all I want to start with Facebook, it’s an addiction! Even you don’t have anything to do you just open this and refresh the page and wait something new to come! 🙂 I don’t know how people use this but most of the users lives pass on like this. Easy to share anything you want and it’s free. We can use it for education also. I believe that in the future, in the near future students will start to pass along to their homework via mails or this kind of social networks. Even now we start to do this piece by piece.

Secondly, twitter, this is also a social platform that has captured most of people’s time. Everybody loves to write everything they do immediately via twitter. I didn’t use to have twitter till the CALL lesson but I also have my account now. It’s very useful actually. Actually I used my twitter account recent days to learn the news about my own country! Anyway for education we can use it efficiently. As the new generation has, most of them have, Facebook and twitter account keeping in touch with anyone via FB or Twitter will be easy.

Skype; I was using it many many times ago then I change my opinion with messenger. Most of people thinks Skype is better but I thought messenger was better  :// I don’t know why but I like messenger more than Skype 🙂 but Skype offers more opportunity then MSN. You can even call someone’s cell phone. You can make group talking and so on…

This topic is already located in our lives… Everybody more or less knows all of them. 🙂

WizIQ

This is an online education platform that can help both teachers and learners to improve their ability. I think online learning is getting more common day by day. This is an online and free. You can meet other people who work in the same field of you. You can talk with them as you wish..

I’ll tell the same things again because this is the main idea of this course! As an English teacher if we want to make some differences in our job, we have to (yes we have to because it’s obligatory for me) know and follow technological developments. 

Learning out of 4 walls!

When somebody says teaching/learning all the time we think about schools or other buildings for education. We think that education occurs only in particular place, face to face with teacher and together with other students in a building, in a room.

I’ve heard about correspondence study but actually this is only a terminology for me cause I don’t know how it works. I have no idea about how to join it  etc.

However, with the last weeks subject we discovered two very helpful website that can help us to make easy our works. We covered nicenet.org and compus.dokeos.com. They are very useful as long as we saw in the lesson. We can not only learn something via this websites but also we can teach/share our knowledge for other to benefit from.

Every week, after each CALL lesson, I say myself that “This internet is another huge world that i consider myself  as i don’t know anything!”

As the tecnology getting smaller to fit in our pocket, and we have such a great sources for learning in easy way! I dont understand people why they hesitate to use this treasure for good benefit! How can they still say ” English is my nightmare. I’m not able to learn it! ”

As future English teachers we have a lot to do with our jobs!mFortunately we know te easy way 😉

New Presentations…

We have talked about prezi previous week. We discovered the beauty of presentation. I really enjoyed that lesson cause i like learning new things and try to understand it by doing. Not only theoretical but also practical lesson! 

We have been using powerpoint for our presentations. Still we are using it. It’s okay somehow but in some cases powerpoint is not enough. I’ve heard about about Prezi before but to tell the truth i didn’t know what it was, how it was working.

Thank to this lesson i had opportunity to learn how to use Prezi and I’m still eager to learn about it. Everytime I try to make something on it, i learn new options. That’s very good and enjoyable. 

I don’t like the lessons which based on only theoretical part. Acting and trying is my job. Hope I can have more time to discover all other new things about Prezi to use for my presentations.

Technology is getting smarter :)

Our topic was smart phones and how to use them properly. As the lesson was theoretical and i don’t have smart phone i got little bored. During the lesson i like trying to do while teacher is telling about lesson. it wasn’t one of that lessons but i think it’s useful. 

We are future teacher and technology is becoming the main tool in education as it’s becoming for anything. We need to, even not need to, we have to follow what’s new and how to use in education. Technology is one of the most attractive tool for the kids to have their attention to lesson. We have to use it! 

Our lesson wasn’t about what’s above directly but indirectly yes it’s! Smart phones make everything easier for us to follow. Our mails, our blog pages… Everything…

Technology is reaching larger points as it’s becoming smaller to suit to our pockets! What a world! 🙂   

Late Work!!! Again!!!

I’m really forcing my limit!!! Everything is in chaos these days. I’ve a lot to do! I know about it! However, i cannot even move my hand :/// I have to get my mind in gear.

Last week was very enjoyable actually. I had a lot of fun while we were trying to write something all together on Google documents! :)) Everybody tried to write something at the same time and all has gone in a second and started to write again. It was fun! 

We have talked about PB Works and Google Documents. We have learned how helpful and easy to use them. Teacher showed us how to use these pages in education. He showed us how he has used and using! They are very useful, easy and enjoyable at the same time. 

Class was better than the previous week. But internet was the problematic subject again! fortunately one of our classmate knows about changing IP Codes. I dont know how it happens but when others started to change their ip numbers, i could automatically got the internet access. I don’t know why but i think i was just my luck for that day :)) 

All is going very well with this lesson. Every time we solve our problems and getting better solutions. I’m very excited about the end of this semester for this course. I think i like technology very much 🙂