Who Said Puzzle?

      Hi again after so much time. This time I will introduce you a tool called "Puzzlemaker". It was my and Nazife's presentation topic for our technology course at school and I presented two types of puzzles, "criss-cross" and "hidden message". You can make any kind of puzzle with it. There are ten categories to make a puzzle. It is very easy to use. First of all, you do not have to sign in. There are instructions step by step for each kind of puzzle and there are ten different puzzle types available and all of them are free to use. It would be enjoying for students to learning vocabulary with such puzzles.

Criss-Cross Puzzle

      You have four steps to create a criss-cross puzzle.

      

1. Enter the title of your criss-cross puzzle
2. Enter the number of squares for your puzzle
3. Enter the size of the square
4. Enter the words and clues

   

Hidden Message Puzzle

      You have six steps to create a hidden message puzzle.

1. Enter the title for your word search
2. Enter the message to be hidden in your word search puzzle
3. Enter the size of your word search puzzle
4. Word search puzzle output type
5. Enter your words
6. Check your puzzles

PUBLISH(ER) Your Creation!

Hi my dear readers! Today, I will introduce you a Microsoft Office programm which is all you are familiar with: "Publisher". It was Oğuz's and Tayfun's presentation topic for our Technology Course. You can find "step-by-step guidence" if you visit their blogs.  It allows you to create your own brochures, newsletters, etc. It is very detailed tool as the other Office programms. Do not afraid! It is very user-friendly. It is very common tool in bussiness marketing field. But, I want you to imagine that the things we can do with Publisher in a language classroom. We can adapt it to almost all topics in the course books. For example; we can assign them to create an invitation card to a party or a trip to somewhere. They will also improve their creativity as well as their technological knowledge. Or, you can create a newsletter four the parents of your students. You can find many templates according to your purpose. I highly recommend you to use in your classrooms.

"Kolay İngilizce(Easy English)"

Hi everybody! Again, here I am. This week I will introduce you an app for English learning. "Kolay İngilizce" is a tool for teens and adults. You can learn grammar, idioms, phrases and jokes. You can also test yourself and make some reading activities with it. I know that this tool is too limited but it can be used for practicing English. And also this tool can be used by the students who are preparing for exams like "YDS". One affordance of the tool is lack of speaking practice.
I like the "learn words" part, beacuse there are so many options in it.

 You can read short stories and answer some reading comprehension questions.

 This tool is not only for a Turkish person, so there are many 1st language options.

 I did not like the grammar part because it is too literally and not attractive

Our First "How to" Project!

Hi my dear readers! This time, I will tell you how Tayfun and I prepared an "How to" project. This is our assignment for a course at school. First of all, the most difficult one was to choose a topic. We wanted it to be an orijinal one, but there are millions, maybe billions, of "How to" videos on the internet. Finally we found something on a website. But it was not a video, it was only a text and some images of the steps. We decided to narrate it and use the images for our video. Our topic is "How to Make a Bottle Cap Party Whistle". I hope it will be helpful for someone who needs it. I think this kind of assignments can be beneficial for English lessons. We used Movie Maker for this video but there are lots of programs for digital story telling. We also used "Audacity" for recordings. It is also an enjoying activity, so it enhaces the students' motivation and makes be interested in language learning. It also enhances their vocabulary knowledge. They learn lots of new words this way effectively. I can say that I learned some new words with this assignment. 

Here is our video

Talk ENGLISH!

Hi my dear readers! Today, I'm going to introduce you an ESL website.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the author and his/her qualifications despite the fact that how much I tried. Anyway, I will tell you how it works, because I really loved it. First of all, this website focuses on the pronunciation. So, you can improve your speaking skills with this website.

The target audience is adults and teenagers here as you understood. You can also download its contents and take them with you as a material. It teaches English in a simple and funny way which I really appriciate. It tells you every detail about the topic. You can click the "contact" button to report a problem. So, if you find some inappropriate information you can report it. You can also use this section when you need some help.

There is a section for meanings of idioms and another section for pronunciation of letters.

There are only two disadvantage of the website. The first one is that there is almost none image. And the second one is there are too mant advertisements around the screen. I can say that there are no broken links. 

In conclusion, Every ESL learner can use this website to practice pronunciation and learn some vocabulary. You can also improve your reading skills with articles.

A Useful Tool : RSS

Hi everyone! This week I'm going to give some information about RSS. It is an amazing tool to follow blogs easily. Subscribing to a website RSS removes the need for the user to manually check the website for new content. Instead, their browser constantly monitors the site and informs the user of any updates. The browser can also be commanded to automatically download the new data for the user.  So you wouldn't have to visit all blogs for checking out news.

I'm using FeedReader Online to follow some blogs. I've found it easy. You can use it. You can sign with your Facebook or Google+ account. You click the "add a new feed" button and write the url of the blog you want to follow

First Experience with WIKI : "Film Review"

Hi everyone! This week our task was writing a wiki page. We were supposed to write a film review. I worked with Tayfun Erdoğmuş on this task. After a big discussion, we chose our film. It was "Life of Pi". Before writing the review, we did a really detailed research about the film in order not to say something wrong. After the research, we started to write. It is not so long but it should be around 200 words long.

Writing on a wiki page is really useful to improve learners' writing skills and develop critical thinking. It also encaourages them. It can be used in any classroom, if the subjects match with it. It is also good for learning how to collaborate. I recommend it to all teachers.

You can access the wiki page by clicking here.