Somebody, Please, Stop the Time!

 Hello my Dearest Reader,

    This might be my last post forever, I am not exactly sure. It all depends on which selectives I will take next year (It will be my last year in ELT soon, can you believe that? It feels like I started yesterday and also ages ago at the same time.) and if the selective AI course requires keeping a blog or not. I am not sure, I need to ask my lecturers. 

    But, I have to start by saying this: I LOVED writing to you, my Dear Reader! I started this blog in March 2025 and now we only have two days left till 2026! I spent most of the year yapping to you and it became a therapeutic habit of mine. I know this is only a student blog and I know only a couple of friends and my lecturers read my posts but… I don’t know, I loved sharing my creations with you. It didn’t matter how much anxiety the tasks gave me, how many assignments or presentations I had, or how exhausted I was during the exam weeks, I always enjoyed finishing up a task and yapping about it to you. 

    This blog will always stay as a time capsule of my time in Marmara ELT and I will come back to read these posts even years later, I am sure of it. Gökçe Hocam and Mustafa Hocam, thank you for making us keep blogs! You touched at least one student’s heart with it, and that was me, haha! Seriously, I loved it. 

    Ahem, okay, I gotta follow some instructions for this post, I kinda forgot, opps. Let’s talk about the Current Issues in Teaching course a little. I can say that I enjoyed the course generally (as you can guess from how emotional writing this post is making me) but I must admit that having due dates all the time is a stressful thing. Especially when those due dates correspond with other important due dates… which happened all the time. But it is definitely better than my other courses where we just read and read and read coursebooks all the time. 

    This course will stay with me for a long time and I will use the tools I learnt in this course in the very near future (I can’t wait to have actual students! haha). 

    To improve the course, I would suggest slightly more flexible deadlines. We really struggled with creating corpus-based teaching material due to the midterms. 

    To students who will take this course next year, your groupmates will determine your success AND the enjoyment in this course. Find some friends you work well with, stick with them, and enjoy! We played R.E.P.O  when we were overwhelmed, haha. You gotta be on the same wavelength, otherwise this course can turn into a nightmare real quick. Good luck, babes! 

    And lastly, I want to link my last farewell post here. I don’t want to be redundant and go into “Awee, I was so depressed and now I am happy to be here!” talk again, but honestly, I am so happy that I am writing this post right now. (Just go and read, maybe it will make sense to you, maybe it won’t.)

Maybe for the last time, 

Take care of yourself! 

with love, Bea xx

via GIPHY

ChatGPT, MagicSchool, Tongue Twisters, and Phonemes

 Hello again, Dear Reader!

    I am very proud to announce that I have -somewhat- successfully reached the end of another term in Marmara ELT. I came here today to introduce you with our last task for the Current Issues in Teaching course. My usual groupmates Buse, Elena, and Melis prepared an AI-integrated digital worksheet and an ASSURE Model Lesson Plan. 

    We used Canva and GoogleDocs (like we always do) and everything went smoothly (like it always does with this group!) I love that we can all work together at the same time for different aspects of the task after we decide for an outline. One person started with the lesson plan and the rest organically divided pre-, target, and post tasks between all of us. Everything came together pretty quickly after that! It’s my besties, our old and slow laptops, unstable internet connections, and a collaborative Canva worksheet against the world! 

    For the target activity, we used MagicSchool (which we learnt about in the previous year) and ChatGPT as our AI tools. Our students generate tongue twisters that focus on differentiation of phonemes, record themselves saying their chosen tongue twisters, and get feedback from ChatGPT on their pronunciation! I don’t want to sound arrogant, (because it is our idea) but I think it’s a great idea, haha! AI can be a powerful tool when it is used for feedback, especially since it can give personalized feedback. I also think that our students would enjoy generating tongue twisters and choosing between them. It’s a quite engaging pronunciation lesson!

You know where to click after all this time!  

AI-integrated digital worksheet

ASSURE Model Lesson Plan

Thank you for reading, my Dear Reader!

with love, Bea xx

via GIPHY

You are going to love this one! We are going to Paris!

Bonjour, Dear Reader!

(or should I say Dear Traveller?) 

    Welcome for a virtual trip around Paris! I am really excited to introduce this week’s material!

    

    For this task, my lovely groupmates Buse, Elena, Melis and I prepared a digital worksheet that takes our students on a trip around Paris. We take them to the top of the Eiffel Tower, to the bell chamber of the Notre-Dame Cathadrel, to the Musee d’Orsay, and to a French restaurant to try whatever their young hearts desire. It’s as close as it gets to the real-life experience without actually leaving the classroom. “How?” you might ask. With the help of AR/VR technology, of course! 

    In short, Augmented Reality (AR) brings the digital world into our lives and adds another layer to our reality (like PokemonGo!) and Virtual Reality (VR) takes us to the digital world. Check a video by clicking here to learn more about AR/VR.

    AR and VR are technologies that have been developing in the last couple of decades but it’s still rare to see them integrated into the teaching materials. I think that’s a shame. AR/VR can be really helpful in teaching, especially in a foreign language classroom. They both can create immersive learning environments and create meaningful language use opportunities in the classroom. They increase learning motivation by breaking the monotony of textbook teaching. Moreover, they provide equal learning chances to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners in our classrooms! 

    Personally, I would love to use AR/VR with my future students. I was already wondering if we would be allowed to use these materials we prepared next year for our teaching practice, cause I think actually using these would feel amazing, haha. 

    However, Dear Reader, if we have to be realistic, AR/VR integration to teaching has many limitations, mainly caused by either the lack of access to the technological devices or lack of space and time. For a full immersive experience students need headsets and an environment where they can walk around and experience their virtual surroundings freely. That is really challenging to create in a 40+ students classroom where students aren’t even allowed to bring their smartphones into the classroom. 🙁

    Anyways, I want to thank all my groupmates again. I write the same thing over and over for each task but we really do work well together! We are like bumblebees in a hive, haha. We used Canva and Google Docs, and everyone contributed to each step. We were jumping around between Canva and Docs and helping each other. It all went well! 

Here’s our AR/VR integrated digital worksheet.

And here’s our ASSURE modeled lesson play. 

    I hope you like our material, Dear Reader!

    I have one more task left for this semester. See you soon!

with love, Bea xx

Story time: How I’m starting a career on YouTube

 Hello there, my Dear Reader!

    I am back with a new task and a new concept for you. Have you ever heard of the Flipped Classroom Approach? It’s a teaching method where we flip the traditional instruction-homework dynamic for our classroom. So, instead of presenting the topic in the classroom and assigning homework for practice, we assign the instruction as homework and spend our in-class time with practice! Interesting, right? 

    I think the flipped classroom approach can work wonders in an EFL classroom. One of the most challenging parts of learning a foreign language, in my opinion, is the lack of opportunities to actually use the language. In fact, I actually believe that I was able to learn English in high school purely because I was a fangirl and that gave me opportunities to practice outside of the classroom(perks of being a nerd). But what about other students who had only been presented with rules in the classroom without any chance to actually use those rules? Well, with the flipped classroom technique, we can assign the instruction part as home learning and use all of the precious in-class time for activities to USE the language!

 

    Sounds wonderful in theory, doesn’t it? I got a little taste of what a flipped classroom might mean for a teacher in practice, too, haha. And my verdict: Totally worth it! I can definitely try flipping my classrooms in the future. 

    My classmates and I were tasked to create an instructional video to be used for a flipped classroom. We chose a basic topic: Simple Present Tense. It turns out it wasn’t that basic or simple. I never realised how many rules there were for the Simple Present Tense! until I sat down and tried to write our script. 

    But overall, it was a really fun activity. I worked with Buse Beyaz, Cemile Elena Çetinkaya, and Melis Açıkkaya (aka my default group for projects like this, haha). We have worked together for so many group projects at this point, so we work like a well-oiled machine. We did everything together, I believe. A shout-out and thank you to all of them! Love you guys!

    Our one and only problem was editing the video. None of us knows any editing other than basically putting recordings together, so one can literally see and hear how amateur we all are. Regardless, I am really proud of our video! With its wonky audio and unsynchronised parts and all!

    We used Canva for the visuals, Vocaroo for audio recording, OBS Studio for screen recording, and Capcut for editing. We used Kahoot! for designing an accompanying practice to the video and again, Canva to design a worksheet.

You can watch our flipped classroom instruction video by clicking here.

Reach the Kahoot! the quiz we made for home practice here.

And the worksheet here.

And of course,

Our ASSURE modeled lesson plan can be reached by clicking here.

    This was definitely an experience I will remember and cherish for a long time! 

    Waiting for your comments here and on YouTube!

See you next time!

with love, Bea xx