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 .