Conversations with the Cloud: Practicing Speaking with Artificial Intelligence

 Well, look how much difference a year can make.

I named this assignment my least favorite last year. One important factor in that was due to the painful moments of me any my friends sitting down, thinking to yourselves "How can we reasonably make students use AI for this assignment?". With only a year of progress in AI technology, the challenge this time was deciding between the myriad of ways we could've effectively used AI. While I wouldn't call last year's assignment my best work, this time it's truly something special.

Welcome back dear reader! Here I am, with my final assignment of the semester. Once again, I worked with my friends Bilge, Nisa, and Yağmur for this task. Make sure to check their blogs out as well! 

We decided to create a speaking activity about planning a vacation abroad. Using Google's AI assistant Gemini, more specifically its "live" mode which allows you to directly have a one-on-one audio conversation with it. We wanted the students to use Gemini in a variety of ways; to gain information, to practice a one-on-one conversation, and to receive feedback on their own speech. 

So the structure of the activities go like this: firstly the students describes the kind of vacation they'd like to have, for which they will receive suggestions for different countries from Gemini. Then, they will decide on one country and use Gemini once again to learn about that country, especially how it is like to have a vacation in that country. Once they've gathered the information, they will prepare a speech as if they've visited the country, describe to Gemini their imaginary vacation, and ask for feedback on their about their speech. That ends their work with the AI, as the last portion of the activity is to reflect on the feedback they receive and recording their experience and thoughts about the whole exercise. 

As we do most times, we used Canva to design the material itself. You can take a look at it here.
You can also check out our ASSURE plan here.

Thanks for keeping up with me for another semester. Right after this one goes up, I'll post my (for the time being) goodbye post, so make sure to check that out as well!

See you.