SEESAW

Hellooo! I missed this platfrom so much that I am sharing my second post today!!! I hope you are all feeling good and safe!
   I am here again and again with another creative app: SEESAW! I am really, really and really shocked with this app! This is verily like a real class. You can do almost everything from here! You can teach a lesson, assign your students, prepare exercises for them or share other teachers' exercises with them, furthermore you are in communication with your students' parents in this app! These are only some of the things that you can do with this app lets look at all the characteristics of it!

   

   Firstly, when you Sign in, the app asks you whether you are signing in as a teacher or student. You know, I look that kind of educational apps from a teachers perspective. So, I signed in as a teacher. Then I wanted to add my first exercise or assignment here. Here is the options. It offers 3 options as you see. I wanted to assign an activity. As a new member, I bravely tried to make my own assignment!! :))

    In the first stage, it asks you to choose grade level. Then topic etc. Now I want to describe the app through my experince. My assignments grade was 4th. So I chose that one.

 
   Then I named my activity. My assignment is about clothes and theit colors. I want them to take a photo of themselves and describe them with their colors! The app allows you to explain the way you want your students follow while doing this assignment.

   You can add a teacher note here. This note can be seen only by parents. So, if you have a message for parents you can send by this way. Apart from this you can also be in communication with parents by adding them into your family list in the app and make announcement to them, what a creativity!

 
   In addition to your own assignments, videos etc., there are many of them prepared by other teachers, they are  available as well. You can share them with your students.



       Here is my assignment's link: Click here

     

           Take care and see you soon!!!

PADLET

  Hello everyone!!!
  I've missed typing for you! To be honest, I got used to being here for you :)) Because thanks to this platform, I encourage myself to be more and more engaged in technology and to be more creative about its possible relationships with education! So , I am here for you with an app that is totally perfect! Its PADLET. I do not know whether you are familiar with it, but I am sure that you should be! I strongly recommend this app especially to the teachers and for some groupworks, to the students. Why? Lets see!

  

    Today I want to describe the app through my own experience. The photo you see above is my padlet. Firstly, this app is kind of a platform that you can make works with others. It provides you with a wall and you fill this wall with whatever informations, images you want. It can not just be used by students to do groupworks, but it can be used teachers to do fun exercises or assign their students. Now, as a teacher candidate, I want to mention this app from a teachers perspective. As a teacher, I can use this app for various aims. For example, especially todays, when we can not go to our real classes, we can not see who studies or does homework. However, by this app, I can form a fun assignment which is full of images and colors and my students can edit this assignment. Thus I can see who does what. In other words, this app provides a "top view of students" for me as a teacher. Apart from this, i can just make some notes for my class and share with them through this app. By the way, How this app works? Let's see!

   At the beginning of a podcast preperation, the app provides us with a wall. As stated above, we can fill it however we want. Then it comes to sharing this padlet. At that point the app offers you several options. You can make it accessible by everyone or private.

   




   
    Apart from privacy, there is one more optional stage. You may choose that everyone can edit your padlet or you allow them only for displaying and commending or as a last option, you can just choose that they only be able to display your padlet. In my classes, if it is a homework or an assignment I will allow my students to edit my padlet. However, if it is only a note, I will just allow them to display my padlet.

 




 In contrast to the most of the apps that are available for us, this app is totally shareable! It gives you many options to share your padlet. Further, you can save your padlet as various forms, such as pdf, jpg etc.




   I also want to share my Padlet link with you, may be you want to do my exercise!!! Here is the link:
           https://padlet.com/merveedmar/Jobs

EDMODO

  Hi friends! I hope you are all doing fine :).

After a couple of days I'm here today for you with another excellent app. EDMODO! I met with Edmodo as soon as my university life started. Because nearly all of my professors use this app. It have been making our works much easier than they are. I think they use it because it is really helpful. One can do many of the school stuffs by this app. Let me describe it for you.

When you just begin to use the app you can be sign in as student or teacher. I enrolled as student for my university classes. Here are some of my classes. When enrolling in a class you should have an entry code which is given by teachers. Then you start the journey!

 

     The app allows to do many things. You can assign your students, you can share your documents and even you can grade them. For each assignment, teacher adds due time. After this due time, students can not add their homeworks. Thus, teachers can see who is studying well :)

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   Apart from assignments or documents, teacher can also share anything they want. For example, one of my professors advices some readings or she recommends us things about her lesson. Students can commend to the assignments or documents that teachers share.

                                                                                                                  

     All I have mentioned were about the lessons. However, this app has some fun as well! There are some games available! 

   I think this app will be a part of my lessons, too. Why do I lose time with papers while I can just do almost everything I can do in the class with only one app! Thank you Edmodo :)

MY FIRST ANIMATION EXPERIENCE

   Hi everybody ! I am here today with something that I have experienced first time! It feel excellent to try something new! ! As you all know, I am studying ELT and I will be interacting with many kinds of students. Throughout this teaching journey, I ,like all the teachers, will need some materials that I can use in my class. As it is not enough that you just get in the class tell things and go out. We should do some more things to make  our lessons efficient and to draw our students' attention. At this point, the one coming out for help is : Animation! It undoubtedly helps memory to grasp the topic easier. So guys, I have just prepared an animation example and I am adding the video below. 

   Before you watch it, I want to mention the preperation stages and my experiences. Firstly I used "Toontastic" app to design my own animation. In this app there are numerous existing settings and characters that you can use to make a story. However, I prefered drawing my own setting and my own 3D character. It also allows you to do this. After I saw that it took an hour to make only one of my  characters , I made the role "teacher" by myself, and I chose the other four "student" characters from existing characters. I added background musics for each setting. Dubbings are by me and my niece, Gizem. We tried to imitate more than one vioce. Apart from these, all settings are belong to me. I have to say that preparing an animation is never laborless , it requires much patience!

   My animation is about "Seasons". It can be used to teach seasons and their characteristics to children or to some  English language learners that are in the beginner level. Actually, animations can be used for all levels and for all the lessons. However, especially for children, this opportunity is a key. 

Here is my first animation guys! I hope you will like it. See you soon!

    MY ANIMATION IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE! 

https://youtu.be/DILpbH2opS0

ONLINE COURSE EXPERIENCES

   Hello guys again! 

   Here are my online course experiences! 

   UDEMY

   Firstly, I want to show my Udemy experience. In this app, there are lots of categories that you may want to take a course on. Some of these categories are photography, music, psychology, software, language and more. Actually "Discover Your Energy Body" attracted me most. When I saw the name, I immediately enrolled in it.

    The course was actually too easy to finish. This is not just because it is short-time but it is pretty much entertaining for me.  I wish I could learn more about this topic. The presenter talks about seven chakras that we have and how to improve this chakras.

     Apart from this course, I also took a "Photography Course". When you finish watching videos, they send your certificate of completion to your e-mail. Here are my Certificates:

     edX

     My second online course experience is on "Public Speaking" For this course, I used edX. Actually this app/site is my favourite one because of variety of the Universities which courses are given by and the variety of free courses. If you do not pay a charge, most of the time you can not get a certificate. You are directed to a page of "Thank you for completing the course"  

 
   The presenter speaks so fluently that I did not even once have difficulty to understand his words. But the app offers subtitles for users as well. This helped me taking notes while listening the presenter ,watching the videos.



   I could not get a certificate unfortunately, but here is a completion page which I was directed to when I completed the course.

   I hope you all  a life-long education and grit no matter it is online or reel!

ONLINE COURSES

      HI EVERYBODY! 
     Today, I want to mention you some excellent apps. As you know, we are all indoors todays, because of COVID-19 virus. Life is actually going slowly. Actually, I believe that we can find  or we can create something good in every situation. We may not be going our schools, works but this does not mean that we can not learn or we can not improve ourselves. As typed in my main page, "Classrooms are not the only way" to teach or learn things. There are hunderds of sites and apps that offer us thousands of free / paid  and Certificated courses. What makes those online course apps that I will mention excellent is the  courses and certificates are given by the top-quality Universities.  Here are three examples of these apps, sites.

   I will share my own experiences with two of these courses and my certificates with you in my next blog!