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

Wait, we CAN let students use ChatGPT in the classroom???

 Hello, my Dear Reader!

    I am really excited to share my first task for Current Issues in Teaching course with you. Like I explained in my previous post, this year our tasks are based on preparing lesson plans and teaching materials. The first task was something I was really interested in since the moment I saw it on the syllabus: an AI-enhanced corpus-based teaching material. You know from last term’s posts that I have a love&hate kind of relationship with AI. I wish we never had AI. I don’t think humanity needed it, per se. On the other hand, we are where we are and since we can never go back, what else I can do other than making sure both my students and I are using it for improving ourselves?

    I am yapping about AI again (the concept of AI turns me into a 19th-century pensive man) but our focus was mostly on Corpora. We were tasked to create a lesson plan using the ASSURE model and a teaching material using the Corpus-based language pedagogy. Our students are expected to engage with corpora and AI tools to deduce meanings or rules from the concordance data. 

    My lovely groupmates Buse Beyaz, Elena Çetinkaya, Melis Açıkkaya, and I chose to focus on the difference between mustn’t and don’t have to since it is a subject that usually causes confusion in learners and is suitable for inductive learning. We used Canva to prepare a digital worksheet and chose SKELL and ChatGPT for corpora and GenAI tools. Our worksheet tests students’ background knowledge, gives them a hands-on SKELL task for inductive learning and an AI task for getting feedback, and provides practice and production exercises. 

You can access our ASSURE modeled lesson plan here.

 

And our AI-enhanced corpus-based teaching material here. 

    Creating this task was an enjoyable experience overall. No, maybe I should have said it could have been an enjoyable experience. The timing of this task was… terrible. We had midterms and two different rapport submissions the same week. We all were sleep-deprived, exhausted, and were having mental fog due to overload. Nevertheless, my groupmates and I worked well together and managed to find joy in it. We improved ourselves on corpora use and GenAI prompting. (ChatGPT helped us with the latter. It turns out it IS a skill to write good prompts). Also, this was a great experience for us to think out of the box. It was quite challenging to think in reverse and create something for inductive learning. 

    Lastly, I believe this activity would cause problems in real-life classrooms due to the time limitations and student behaviours. Unfortunately, in our country we have to follow a strict curriculum and we only have limited time to teach certain subjects. While I believe this activity would be helpful for learning, I am not sure it is realistically applicable. Also, students should be familiar with technology-based education and AI usage prior to this activity. Otherwise, they might take advantage of the teacher’s goodwill and not complete the worksheet themselves.

    I think this was it! Thank you for reading. I am waiting for your comments on our worksheet.

with love, Bea xx

via GIPHY

Some thoughts on language learning and the ever-changing 21st century

Hello again, Dear Reader!

Do you remember how you learnt English? Did you learn it in a traditional classroom setting, or did you learn it online? 

With all due respect to all my English teachers, I have to admit that they only managed to give me crumbs. I learnt English by being a fangirl online. (Shout out to Louis Tomlinson’s Doncaster accent.) I wanted to consume but more importantly, CREATE fan content so I had to teach myself how to use various tools on the internet AND English. (If you checked my About Me page, you know I am a nerd.)

Time is moving constantly and changing us along with it. So, why are we not changing how we teach when the way we learn has already changed? In a language classroom, our aim should be guiding our students into using the language as much as possible and integration of technology and activities that prompt our students to create is the most effective way.

To me, Dear Reader, 21st-century learning is learning how to learn, how to take our learning into our own hands and seeking knowledge outside of the classroom. As teachers, we need to be conscious of this and adjust our teaching according to it. We need to equip ourselves with the tools and skills that are needed for this fast century, so we can equip our students with them as well.

Most importantly, we need to teach our students how to keep up with this ever-changing world. It is the skill we all need.

That’s what the 21st century is all about: trying to keep up. 

With love, Bea. x