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

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

Your Favourite Blogger is Back!

Hello again, my Dear Reader!

    If you’ve read my last post, you may remember how I talked about the passage of time. It’s fast, isn’t it? Can you believe it’s been four months since the last time I shared a task with you? The summer (and half of the autumn) slipped away from me in a blink. Maybe because I wasn’t counting the days for assignment due dates all the time. But don’t you worry, I am back with all my due dates, anxieties, and several exciting new tasks! 

    This semester, I am taking Current Issues in ELT from dear Assist. Prof. Mustafa Polat and it’s basically the continuation of last semester’s course Instructional Technologies and Material Design in ELT, with a little twist. As you may remember, I prepared all my tasks last spring through the eyes of a language learner, but this semester, we have upgraded to being actual pre-service teachers, haha. Obviously I am joking, but there is a true element to it. Year 3 in Marmara University ELT is the year we start to gain a teacher’s perspective in every course and this one is no different. From now on, my tasks will be from a teacher’s point of view. 

    Once again, I am asking you to stick around for some exciting tasks, Dear Reader. I will prepare technology-based teaching materials using emerging technologies like AI and AR/VR, and an instructional video for flipped classroom teaching. 

    If you are new and this is your first post, you can learn more about me from my About Me page and you can reach all my previous tasks from the Task Index. 

    If you were here from the beginning, thank you! I’ve missed you! This year is going to be exhausting, chaotic, anxiety-inducing, and probably difficult… but at least I have you to share my feelings with, my Dear Reader. 

Here’s to the passing time, and here’s to learning! Cheers. 

with love, Bea xx

 

via GIPHY

I did something I thought I could never do: I published a podcast! 🥳

 Hello again, my Dear Reader!

    

    It’s been a while. I was busy with my midterms (and essays, presentations, a couple of tasks… 😫), but I am back now with a much-anticipated project: the podcast I was telling you about! 

    My good friend Elena Çetinkaya (Click here to visit her blog. She is so cool, I love her!! 💙) and I wrote, narrated, and edited a short story for our podcast. The Melody of the Forest is a one-episode short story about three friends, a peculiar cat, and a special melody - with sound effects! You can click HERE or scroll down to the end of this post to listen.

    We had so much fun -and a few difficulties- while creating our podcast. For example, did you know the university buildings were locked on Sundays? We didn’t. 🙃 So we met on Göztepe Campus to record our podcast, but every faculty building was locked except the library. After a “What are we supposed to do now?” crisis, we recorded our podcast in the library BATHROOM, haha. 

    Standing in a bathroom with a laptop and a microphone felt so silly, we had to make a few takes until we could narrate the story without laughing. I was extremely anxious about recording myself !!for publication!! but this project turned into a fun activity with a dear friend really fast. Adding the sound effects was slightly harder since we weren’t familiar with editing but we still had so much fun with it, and everything came together beautifully. We felt like producers, haha!

    We used Vocaroo for recording, Pixabay for getting copyright-free sound effects, Audacity for editing, and Podbean for publishing. I can recommend all of these websites and apps if you want to create a podcast yourself.

    As it is the custom with these tasks, I thought about my future students and how a task like this might help them. One major advantage that I came up with is the creativity! This task forced us to be creative in every step (even figuring out we could use the bathroom to record was creative in its own way) and we ended up with a product that is completely ours. 

    Another advantage of a podcast task is, of course, the fact that our students are SPEAKING English! Which is the whole point! 

    I would love to try this task with my students one day. I think high schoolers would have so much fun with it.

with love, Bea x

I made an infographic on netiquette! (Then I had a mental health crisis at 1 AM over it.)

Hello, Dear Reader!

    Do you know what an infographic is? If you don’t, that’s okay. I didn’t know until this week, either!

    In short, an infographic is a visual document in which information or data is presented using images, icons, charts, graphics, and minimal text. I bet you've seen one before; they're very popular! They make information or data simpler and more engaging for the consumer and are used everywhere from education to business. 

    (If you want to learn more about infographics, click HERE.)

    I was assigned to prepare an infographic for my Instructional Technologies and Material Design in ELT course, and I chose to prepare an infographic on netiquette. I chose this topic because I have been on online spaces from a very early age (my parents were a little bit TOO trusting), and I learnt the do’s and don’ts of the internet by trial and error. I wish someone would have explained them to me when I was younger and inexperienced online. 

    Therefore, I think it’s important to talk about netiquette with our students and an English classroom is ideal for that. We can integrate the topic into our classroom discourse, OR we can assign them a task where they need to create an infographic on netiquette haha. 

    Creating an infographic was an emotional roller coaster for me. I had so much FUN with the process. I loved choosing icons, playing with the colours, and creating something visually appealing. THEN, I finished it and had a mental health crisis at 1 AM over the fact that Venngage doesn’t share the embed code with non-premium users! Unbelievable!

    (If you want to try creating an infographic (and experiencing an emotional roller coaster yourself), you can click HERE.)

    You can see my rather genius (!) solution to the problem below. I learnt how to embed a WEBSITE from a YouTube video and used it to cheat the system, haha! 

    I am sorry that you have to zoom out and scroll a little bit, Dear Reader, but this is the best I could do without the embed code. 🙁

    You can also,  

CLICK HERE FOR MY INFOGRAPHIC ON NETIQUETTE 

    Lastly, I would love to use infographics in the future, both as teaching material and as a creative task for my students. I think they would benefit from both but especially from tasks they would create. Creating an infographic would help them learn the topic since they would spend time with it and help to improve their creativity and critical thinking skills! 

    I learnt so much from this assignment! I hope you learnt from my experience too, Dear Reader!

Take care of yourself until next time.

With love, Bea x

EDITED on 10/04/2025

Hello again, Dear Reader! 

    It's been more than a week since I posted my infographic and since then I got some peer feedback! I was so proud of my infographic, I even volunteered and showed it to the whole class and got my instructor's feedback as well! 

    Based on the feedback, I deleted the links in the boxes (since I already have a reference part) to remove the word cluster and added a slogan at the end to imply a conclusion and provide a smooth ending. 

You can CLICK HERE FOR MY UPDATED INFOGRAPHIC. 

    I also updated the embedded version, which you can check below. (The link on the post above is the original version.)