CLICK ON A COMİX TEMPLATE: MAKE BELIEFS COMIX

  I will introduce a web site which is presented by my two classmates: Makebeliefscomix where children and adults can create their own comic strips.  They can select from 15 fun characters with different moods - happy, sad, angry, worried - and write words for  blank talk and thought balloons to make their characters talk and think.  There also are story ideas and prompts to help users create graphic stories.

To create your comic, firstly you click on ‘Enter Here’ from the homepage.

This is the main page in which you create your comic.

• Type a title for your comic strip and type your name next to “Author’s Name.”
• Choose whether you want 2, 3 or 4 panels.
• Click on the red dialogue Prompt at the bottom of Panel which is selected by default when you begin.

A text box like this will drop down with directions and information to help you get started and guide you. Very useful tool.

  

• Choose a character by clicking on their face.
• Notice how the character now shows up in the menu window.
• Use the red arrows below your character to choose an emotion such as happy, sad, angry or worried.The picture will change to match the mood

• Once you have chosen the emotion, click on the character.
• It will automatically move your character into the Comic Panel as shown to the left.
• Click on a bubble to select it. It will move it to the menu window. Use the arrows to choose the type and size.
• Now click on the bubble you want and it will place it up in panel.
• Click in the speech bubble to type text.

Using the Tools

• To use the editing tools, first click on a specific tool.
• Notice how the tool turns red (to show it’s selected.)
• Now click on the object in a panel that you want to edit.
• Example: If I click on the first tool which is move, it turns red. Now if I click on a character or speech bubble it will let me move it around.
• The secret is to select the tool first.

• You can also add a Panel prompt. Click on the prompt, and it will add it to the menu window.
• Click on the one you decide to use and it will show up in the selected panel as shown.
• Click on the Print/Email button in the tools menu

• It will take you to this screen.
• Click on the Print button to print.
• Make sure to do this first if you want a hard copy.

• Now click on the Go back and Edit link at the bottom
• It will take you back to the editing window. Click on Print/Email link again.
• To send your comic to someone, fill in the email information.
• Click on the email Comix link

• They give you one last chance to go back and edit.
• You can also take a screen shot of your picture since you can’t save it.

 Educational benefits: 

• Children of all ages can use Makebeliefscomix to improve their literacy skills  in the following ways:
• Reinforce sequencing skills as they “retelling a story” using characters and dialogue.
• Provides application for summarization skills by using only the most important details.
• Understand and apply characters feelings and emotions as an important role in any story.
• Understand and apply how the “mood” sets the background.
• Identify the main idea of the story.
• Provides students with an innovative and creative way to “show” what they know.
• Students can use to create stories they make up on their own.
• Provides an authentic audience and purpose for writing as they share their comic strips with others.
• Offers an avenue for collaboration with teachers and peers as a tool to enhance their writing. They become online authors. They have a real, live purpose for writing.
• Helps ESL students learn English.

These examples can be enhanced as long as you are determined to teach your students English in a way that they will enjoy and learn effectively, benefitting from technology. MakeBeliefsComix will definitely arouse interest among your students with its fun characters,objects and scenes.

Hope that this is useful, thank you :)

ONLINE BUSINESS PRESENTATION SOFTWARE: POWTOON

 
Hello everyone! Today I will introduce you a website that allows you to create animated cartoons: PowToon! In our class, my partner Şule Genç and we made a presentation about this digital tool.

Powtoon is a combination of presentation and animated cartoon.



And what is PowToon? As I said, It is an online tool that allows you to create free, cool, and awesome animated cartoons. It is simple to use and you can create animations which you want, according to your creativity and imagination.

It may be the right tool for you. You can use it for your works, your education or your any personal training.

Now, we are entering powtoon.com. We have created an easy and short text. We will demonstrate it step by step all together.  In home page we see that we can sign in with our google, facebook or linkedin accounts. Or we can join for free. When we join we can achieve all tools that premium members have for 2 days. You can both use readymade temples and your own scratch. Because of our limited time, today, we will start from scratch that we have created for our presentation.

On the right there are library, backgrounds, sounds, images, text etc. that you can add to your animation and can relocate and resize them. We will start with background. There are readymade backgrounds and also you can upload a photo from your library and a webpage. Then we wrote our title. Jenny and her mother. We can arrange our text’s time by clicking here. By clicking edit button next on the text we can add effect. We chose hand effect. And also we can add exit effect, too.  At the same time, you can add and remove seconds to timeline. The limit is 20 seconds. We choose characters from library part.  We can change our character’s poses. Our sentence is ‘Jenny’s mother was working very hard.’ So we chose this one.  We can add effects to transitions, too. There are many different things. We repeat the same steps for each scene. We can add our voice recordings and background music or we can use powtoon’s backgrounds. Also we can audio record our voice on website.
You cannot download it directly to your computer. So you can share it in youtube and then download it from youtube.

We want to show you our own digital story which was our weekly project.We made it with powtoon.

And when it comes to my opinions about that tool, I can say that if you
want to improve student's learning through multimedia in the modern classrooms, Powtoon will be a very effective and easy tool for you and your future students.
Almost all technological tools have
affordances and disadvantages. Besides all affordances that Powtoon has, it has disadvantages, too.



I think, the first one is that you have only 2 days of free version. And to download the animation you make, it forces you to get a premium account. But we gave the solution to you. You can share your animation on youtube and download from there.

And the second disadvantage is that the page sometimes can be very slow. You may have trouble with moving objects.

As powtoon is generally designed for creating stories, you can give tasks your students about digital storytelling, for example. And want them to create their own stories and animate it. It helps your students improve their writing skills, creativity, imagination and technological knowledge. I believe that it will be very fun both for us and our students. That's all, thank you :)

A MOBILE DEVICE FOR LANGUAGE TEACHİNG / LEARNING : FUN ENGLİSH

    Hello everyone! In my new project I will introduce a mobile app that can be used for educational purposes.

    My app's name is Fun English. This app is designed by teachers and designed to teach English to kids who are non-native English speakers, this app will also entertain preschool and kindergarten native speakers who are just learning these concepts for the first time. It is used by over 4,000,000 students worlwide. Fun English is an easy and fun tool for listening, speaking, singing, spelling, grammar and vocabulary skills in English. Every lesson uses unique games to teach different skills. 

Here is a video of Fun English : 

Fun English Course consists of twelve lessons, with five games or songs per lesson, covering the following themes:

• Colors - Say and spell major colors
• Animals - Meet many animals alone and in groups 

• Numbers - Learn how to count
• Food - Learn how to say the food you want
• Vehicles - Describe things, like cars and bicycles

• Body - Learn the major parts of the body
• Fruits -Talk about the fruits you like  
• Clothes - Describe the clothing people are wearing

• Actions - Learn how to use action verbs
• School Bag - Learn classroom objects and whose they are

• The House - Learn furniture, rooms and where they are
• Sea Animals - Compare things, like sharks and turtles

Fun English also helps with other areas of your child’s development. It’s extremely beneficial to young learners due to its simplicity and focus on playful repetition.

• Play is an important element of your child’s development
• Helps your child build motor skills and concentration
• Hand-eye coordination is reinforced during engaging play activities
• Instant feedback helps children understand how well tasks are being performed
• Helps your child to use technology in a beneficial and effective way

    Fun English language course is divided into lessons. Each English lesson teaches core vocabulary and presents words in several contexts to assist learning and retention. It uses male and female voices with both American and English accents. The voices use different tones and expressions so that learners can pick up on the subtleties of pronunciation.

    You can choose the topic you want to practice. For example ; if learners want to have a listening exercise, they can play games which consist of listening skills. In fruits section , there are smash game for practicing listening. The speaker say a fruit and the learner try to choose true fruit which was said. If the learner chooses false fruits a five times, she or he losts the game. If she or he chooses true fruits, she or he raises her / his level.   

This app is mostly useful for young learners. For adult learners, it may be a bit inadequate for their education level. But it can be beneficial for learning main purposes of the language. I recommend this app parent and teacher for their children or students. I can also use this app for my students in the future. 

Fun English is available for Android and Apple iOS devices. You can download it from Google Play and the Apple App Store.

A DIGITAL STORYTELLING : ANIMALS IN THE PARK

Technology have been continuing to develop day by day in every area. Thanks to the advanced technology, it is possible to listen and watch stories on your computer or another mobile devices via internet. This development can be used in education,too. One of these developing opportunities is what we call digital stories which can be defined as multimedia movies that combine music, photos, video, text and a narrative voice. Digital storytelling also allows you to share your life story, an incident, an episode or an event, through digital media production. 

        The task of this week was to create a digital story as you guessed it. We had three options which were as follows:

   1. What it means to be good friends?

   2. How to project

   3. Creating a fictional story

             In this project, i worked with my partner Şule and we choose creating a fictional story. Our story is called '' Animals In The Park '' and it is about a mother and her little daughter who start to learn animals. About the animation-making process, we used Powtoon which is an online tool for making animations. It is simple to use and you can create animations which you want according to your creativity and imagination. The website provides a short tutorial but to summarize; on the right there are library, backgrounds, sounds, images, text etc. that you can add to your animation and you can relocate and resize them. We made animations with this website, but we audio recorded our story with a mobile phone, we made the animation with Powtoon and we put them together with Windows Movie Maker. The website was free for only two days, so our time was limited. But we try to make our first animation with the best way in a short time. 

        Digital stories can be used to improve student's learning through multimedia in the modern classrooms. Thanks to these stories, an enjoyable way of learning and teaching can be created. Students can create their own stories, using the topics given by the teacher. I think it is really beneficial in terms of developing some certain skills in English as well as learning how to use technology as a means of learning English and  i think i can use this method in my class in the future.
  

                                   

 Our digital story is here. I hope you will spend funny time. Thank you for reading my post and watching our digital story . 

DUOLINGO

   

This week, i would like to introduce you Duolingo which is a free language learning platform that includes a language learning website and app, as well as a digital language proficiency assessment center. It offers fifty-four different courses across twenty three languages.

                Duolingo was created by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis Von Ahn and his graduated student Severin Hacker.  Now, all materials and activities are written and edited by expert team of teachers and authors and are organized into core subject areas such as Skills, Grammar and Vocabulary. Everybody can find whatever they are looking for language learning.

               

Duolingo helps you learn new vocabulary and grammar through interactive games and quizzes. There is a strong emphasis on pronunciation since you will listen to new vocabulary and then right away practise saying those words. It also shows your progress as you use the program.

                Duolingo is suitable for everyone who wants to learn a foreign language himself as a second language, especially in English and the other social languages such as French, Espanola etc. Thousands of teachers also use it to enhance their lessons. Duolingo lessons give each student personalized feedback and practise preparing them to get the most out of classroom instruction.

   The purpose of Duolingo is to provide extensive written lessons and dictation with speaking practice for more advanced used. It also helps you target your weakest words. It shows them while you work through module.  A lot of the learning that goes on in Duolingo is visual. There are pictures for learning vocabulary, colors that indicate whether you are right or wrong and highlighted tapable text for new words and grammar points. You also have to complete lesson to unlock new lessons. This is great for lazy language learners who need a little extra motivation.

               

    I recommend this website because it is really professionally prepared  and very dependable. It is easy to use for everyone.  It can be seen  that creator of the page has been making an effort to help both the learners and teachers.  You will spend funny time in Duolingo while you are working with it. I use it to learn in French now and I will use it to learn other languages such as Espanola. I can also say that when i start my career, I will use this site. If you want to learn a new language as professionally, this site is at your service!

FOLLOW BLOGS EASILY WITH RSS

This week's assignment is about RSS feed reader. I will introduce RSS.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.

There are many RSS Reader options available on the internet that you can either download or use online. I prefer using an online service which is called FeedReader. 

RSS feedreaders are very useful tools for following the content changes, updates, announcements etc from the blogs you follow. You can personalize your page adding categories  and placing the blogs you follow under these categories. You can also make a search by keywords and the feedreader will then list all the results from the blogs you follow.

As you can see above, I follow several blogs and FeedReader helps me a lot keeping up with the latest posts and it is really simple to use,too. Among these blogs, I have a favourite one that I recommend for EFL teachers to check : Özge KARAOĞLU

She is a English teacher, ELT author, freelance teacher trainer and educational consultant

in teaching young/very young learners, teaching with web based technologies; for international organizations, schools and institutes. The blogger posts about novel and innovative ways of teaching. She has many radical ideas which, I think, is what makes this blog interesting.  Teaching with the web-based technologies is the main concern of the blog so you can find many teaching tips whose aim is to combine tech and education and create effective ways for learners in the process of language learning.

I hope it will be useful for you, see you next week ! :)