What Is Real Anyway? My Experience on Designing AR/VR Teaching Material

 

Hi Everyone, It's me again, your favorite ELT student. I am here once again with a teaching material on my hands to present to you.

New year's coming, but that doesn't mean learning should stop. Quite the contrary, learning should never stop. Anyways, our instructor tasked us with designing an AR/VR teaching material, and we got back to work. We chose the city of Barcelona to explore and guide the students. We provided two landmarks, La Sagrada Familia and the hilltop mosaics at Park Güell. We also provided the Barcelona Cathedral Museum, and after that follows a day in Barcelona and an ending activity for students to complete. All activities except for the last activity includes a QR code and a hyperlink to immerse students with technology. They lead the students to a 360 video, or a 3D model of the landmarks, etc. We made sure to enrich their experience by using technology. 

Now, it's time for my reflection. This task was a breath of fresh air after that flipped classroom video. This one was much easier. We changed a huge portion of the material according to feedback though, so that took some time. Still it was much more enjoyable in my experience. We used mainly Canva and Youtube to make the material. If I was using this material in a real classroom, I think some problems could arise. For example, the students may not have access to a technological device at all. That is the biggest hurdle. Even if they have it, they may not be tech savvy, which is another hindrance. However, this material is an ideal product to use in an ideal classroom for Turkey standards. I enjoyed making it, I hope you enjoy it too.

Here is the link to the material: Material

Here is the ASSURE lesson plan

Your home is your school now! My experience on designing a flipped classroom video

   Hi everyone, it's me, your favorite ELT student here. In this post I will be talking about my experience on designing a flipped classroom video.

In this assignment, our instructor has tasked us with creating a flipped classroom video. In case you don't know, a flipped classroom approach is when you listen to the lectures outside of school time. So, when you come to the school, the precious lesson time is used for more engaging and fun activities. It has major advantages such as using the lesson time for engaging activities instead of lecturing. One major disadvantage this approach has that it presumes everyone would have the devices to watch the video. That is usually not the case in Turkey.

We've rolled up our sleeves and got to work. We chose a more professional, publisher style video where there are lots of visuals to engage the students in the topic. The initial process was a bit rough, I had never used a video editing program before (I'm not joking) so it was really rough at the beginning. However, once I got the hang of it, it became easier. There were some technical problems, such as Powtoon (the program I used) limiting us to only 3 minute videos. I circumvented the issue by creating 2 videos and pasting them together. Another issue was, a groupmate very mysteriously couldn't open the Powtoon website, so she made her part on Animaker, another video creating program. We also prepared a quiz using Kahoot to help the students reinforce their learnings from the video.

All in all, this flipped classroom video was the hardest assignment I got on this course. However, we triumphed over the difficulties and made a good end product. 

Here is the video we created:

Here is the quiz: Kahoot quiz

Here is the ASSURE lesson plan

Must or Have to? My Experience on Designing Fun and Effective Corpus-Based Teaching Material to Nail Modal Verbs!

Hi everyone, it's me, your favorite ELT student here. It has been a while since i last posted. Thankfully, we were given a project to post here so I can share my experience here with you all.

We, a group of four people, were given a task to create a corpus-based teaching material for teaching English. I had no idea what a corpus was at first, however, the instructor kindly explained and guided us to explore various corpora. I thought it was wild that I hadn't seen this in my school life before. Anyway, as for the material, we chose to make it about the difference between 'must' and 'have to'. The initial process was hard, however, as I got more experience with Canva, it got exponentially easier. In addition, I had tons of fun preparing the worksheet. The worksheet has fun drills with engaging visuals with a corpus instruction to boot. 

Our instructor also tasked us with designing a lesson plan following the ASSURE model. The ASSURE model involves steps like analyzing learners, setting objectives, and choosing appropriate methods. This task was harder but less time consuming than designing the material. However, I believe that we've done an amazing work overall. This project really made me appreciate the power of corpora. It also invoked questions in my mind. How did Inever encounter this before? I think the power to introduce it to my students in the future lie in my hands now. I can't wait to bring what I've learned into my future classroom. Thank you all for reading this post.

See you on my next post! ❤️

Link to the teaching material: corpus based material

Link to the ASSURE lesson plan : ASSURE Lesson Plan