We created material for Flipped Classroom Teaching, it was TOO fun.

 Hello again!

My friends Bora Sarakurt, Salih Karakaş and I were tasked with creating a short flipped classroom video. I will tell you all about what the entire process was like, but let me quickly explain what flipped classroom means.

Flipped classroom is a unique way of teaching that's become more popular in the last couple of years. It's mainly designed to allow for more efficient use of class time, while also aiming to get higher performance from students in class. What makes it "flipped" is that the homework or handouts are given before the class, so the students have to indulge in self-learning and research prior to class. The initial learning process being done out-of-class allows more time to be given to different areas. This can mean that students don't have access to teacher feedback, however. It's important for a teacher to carefully consider if teacher help will be necessary for the topic, otherwise students could have even bigger difficulties learning the subject.

The moment I learnt about this method, I was interested in thinking of ways I could implement it in my teaching in the future, so I knew this assignment would be a ton of fun for me. We decided to make our video about teaching vocabulary to 5th grade students, related to "Games and Hobbies". We knew we wanted to teach vocabulary from the get-go but it took us a while to settle on a subject. After we finally decided what our topic would be, we began looking at all the different options we had for creating a video. After trying out several programs and websites, we decided to go with a website called animaker. Even on a free version, where some features and graphics are locked behind a paywall, we had a lot of options while creating the video. Salih, being the mastermind behind the creative process, did a lot of the visual work. We created scenes and small animations tied to the word we were teaching and began writing our script. After the script was done, we began the voice-over process. Admittedly, our mic quality isn't the greatest, but I'm pretty proud of what we ended up with regardless. We also created a short quiz on the website Wordwall for the students to solve after watching to video, to reinforce the learning process. You can find links to both the video and the quiz below. 

Hope you enjoy our work, see you next time!

Video

Quiz 

We designed a corpus-based material and found out that it's way harder then we thought.

 Hello! 

Welcome to my first educational post on this blog! This was the first assignment for our Current Issues in Teaching course, creating a corpus-based material for high-school level. Working with me on this was my friend, and flatmate, Salih. Make sure to check his post and rest of his blog here!

The material we made had to be built around the core of text corpus or "real world" text. For a corpus database and research tool, we decided to go with SKEll by Sketch Engine. We used it for our own purposes in addition to providing it as a resource in our material, for the students.

If you want to take a look before I dive into more detail about or work, you can see it here.

 The objective of the material is to make the students be able to differentiate the use cases of "who", "whom" and "whose", specifically as relative pronouns in a relative clause. We decided to go with this for several reasons, first being that they are easy to confuse, "who" and "whom" especially, with how close both their spelling and meanings are. These words also serve a lot of purpose outside of relative clauses, mostly as question words, so we thought it was important to really make sure the students can separate in their minds that all these words can be used in completely different contexts.

The hardest part of the process was actually coming up with the topic. There are so many great things we thought we could teach with a corpus-based material that it made it really difficult to decide on one. After we finally decided our topic though, the rest kind of flew by. 

The whole project really helped us understand and appreciate the finer details that go into designing materials like this. I also think that working on this as we did, analyzing our own work down to the smallest cracks, gave us a new perspective to be able to review class materials much better. Which is of course a fantastic ability for any teacher candidates. 

I hope you also like our work too, I genuinely feel proud of what we managed to make here. Again, you can check the material here.

Thank you for reading what is hopefully first of many more posts to come! See you again!

Welcome All!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Hello!

Welcome to my blog! I'm Polat, or Pol as I often refer to myself online, here I'll be sharing my journey in education, and you can come along with me by following my posts!

Most of my peers have created their blog for the Educational Technologies course, from a year earlier, but as I didn't take that course I got into blogging comparatively late, for my Current Issues in Teaching course.

If you are interested, make sure the check out my profile for more info.

See you around!