Collaborating with friends for a movie review!

 Hi everyone, it's your favorite ELT student, and this time I am here with a collaborative writing task.

For this task, my group consisting of myself, Lara, and Evrim was assigned to collaboratively write a movie review. We chose to review Kill Bill by Quentin Tarantino. Our goal was to analyze the movie in terms of its plot, style, and cinematic elements while sharing our opinion. We worked together using Google Docs.

Writing the review went smoothly. We divided the work based on the review structure. Evrim focused on the introduction and plot summary, I analyzed the cinematography and music, and Lara wrote the final opinion and recommendations. Google Docs made it easy to see what everyone was working on, and we used the comment feature to suggest changes and improve each other's parts. 

Once we finished writing, we shared our document with another group and gave each other feedback. They commented that our review was well written and appreciated the specific examples we gave.

Overall, I think Google Docs is a great tool for group writing. It allows everyone to contribute equally and gives space for real-time feedback and editing. The comment feature is especially useful for peer review.

Evrim's blog link

Lara's blog link

Link to the review

Let's learn how to make a sandwich!

Hi everyone, it's your favorite ELT student here. As part of my English Course, it was obligatory for us to produce a short video on how to perform a simple task. I chose ‘How to Make a Sandwich' as the topic. The objective of the course was to learn how to provide basic instructions, as well as, improve our planning, filming, and educational speaking skills.

I captured the visuals and my partner did the recording, which were later produced into a video. The process was sliced in parts such as “first,” and “then,” further narration was done by my colleague. It was very critical to maintain a low vocabulary level and clear representation on the screen so that the general audience could understand it.

While the assignment seems straightforward on the surface, I now understand how instructional accuracy, timing, and your audience’s needs all play a massive role in the ease of completing an instructional video. It proved to be a useful experience, not in terms of enhancing one’s linguistic abilities but in improving cooperative and technological skills.

All in all, the assignment fostered my understanding on the combination between visual language and spoken language aimed towards teaching something. It was a pleasant educational endeavor that I would readily engage in for subsequent lessons. Here is the video.