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 11th Week - Almost There Shalom, Learnivores! How are you doing? Answer me in the comments section I wanna know :) So, as you know it was finals time the last time we met. They are over and this week we were are able to focus on our websites and entries as this is actually the last week, excited, and stressed-out, still. ANYWAYS Elifciğim may you please... OK! This week we worked quite hard as we had fallen behind our schedule a bit. So we needed to organize well. As the deadline was closer, I should honestly say that it was hard to communicate clearly and stay calm. I couldn't finish my entry on time, we have still 3 days until our presentation to prepare and organize the website. We finally decided on our name to be New Vision ELT. We thought that it represents that the website offers beneficial information and perspective on the future of ELT and also our personal views as prospective teachers.  The most productive moment I felt was that when we were discussing the possible dra

10th Week - Closer to the Product! Hola everyone! I hope you are feeling great, your mental and physical health is stable. Otherwise, nothing works. The last two weeks were so hard for me to focus and stay resilient. We also gave a break for the finals to focus easily on our projects. Our deadline is also getting closer. Let's check what we have done last two weeks. We started to collect information and share it with each other. We tried to keep our work as collaborative as possible. As we can't gather face-to-face, I believe the motivation level is also hard to keep. It is easier to feel demotivated or team members have more tendency to procrastinate. Mostly it is a result of miscommunication. I felt that a bit in our group since we couldn't meet very often and now we have little time to realize all the plans. I am so excited but I hope our group will refresh and finish all the entries on time. For next week we are planning to focus on possible drawbacks and solutions to t

9th Week - Working on the Website Entries Asalaam Alaikum dear Learnivores. The Arabic 'hello' means that 'may the peace be upon you', did you know that? Peaceful days, friends. It is finals week so I hope that peace will also be upon me. In this week's entry, I will keep you short as we as a group did not do much new.  Last week we started to search on our topics and we keep searching and writing some outlines. Our instructor let us give some break to focus on our finals and then do the remaining work more efficiently. Our group decided to keep doing some searches also in finals week as we didn't want to move away and prepare our website on time. I will be updating you later on.  This week, we have been given a few reflection questions about the validity of our searches and materials, and also some tools that may be helpful for our search. It was a bit hard to answer and it is slowly settling for me to act suspicious about the resource I found. It made me more

 8th Week - Organisation and Collecting Information for the Website Hi all! This week we focused on the organization and outline of the timeline. As we have limited time and a lot of work to do, it is crucial to design the path beforehand to have a realistic plan and outcome. I hope, we as a team are good at this, we'll see.  We discussed how to share the topics to be searched, written, and edited to be uploaded on the website. To share the topics properly and discuss what each of them is related to, we did some general research on our topic. This also helped each of us find which sub-topic of technology use in language learning we are most interested in. At the end of the week, we did a video call together and decided on how and when to take the next steps. Unexpectedly, we couldn't share some topics (possible drawbacks and issues; suggestions and solutions for them) easily, as they require more time and dedication. They are also the most important and the most intertwined top

7th Week - We will create a website! Bonjour Learnivores, hope you are okay! I am fine. This week has been busy as I had some final assignments already. That is also the reason why this blog post is late. Let's start! As I indicated before, the training part is over and this week we started planning our website outlines and discussing ideas. The first step was to decide on the topic of the website which was the hardest for me. We thought about it before but it was not that serious. In this week we did some research to find the most influential developments or factors that will shape the future of ELT as a group. After that, we had a meeting on Zoom to discuss and brainstorm the ideas that could be the main topic of our website. To be honest, not all of us were fully prepared, and also we were not sure if the topics we had considered were suitable for the aim. We were not sure if it was too comprehensive or too specific. So, we decided to consult our instructor. We had thought about

5 th Week 11.12.2020 Useful Multimedia Tools for Language Learning in the Classroom Bună Learnivores! I hope you are alright and healthy. I'm so busy but also excited and hopeful about the new year :) I am sure that no one would say 2020 was the best but I think it taught a lot and gave everyone a chance to listen and reflect on themselves. SO, let's get down to business! This week before the Zoom sessions, we reflected on some video interviews with David Crystal, individually. The main idea of the interviews was not new for us, they were sort of a follow-up for the topics we discussed earlier such as native-speakerism, dialects and accents, pedagogical implications of World Englishes, and challenges. Although I thought that the activities kind of repeating themselves, then I realized I haven't thought that deeply about what should change in the classroom. Also after watching the video 'The Myth of the Native Speaker' I learned that the native speaker doesn't e

  4th Week - 04.12.2020   The Impact of Technology in the Classroom Ciao!  This week, before the Zoom sessions we read Technology in the Classroom by Dudeney, & Hockley and The Impact of Technology on How Instructors Teach and How Students Learn by Sarah Elaine Eaton and reflected on them. This week was more fun and interactive for me, also the topic was also more appealing in the sense that we discussed with some realistic and practical perspective on technology use in the classroom and specifically language learning. Briefly, I learned new about, technophobia, how to overcome technophobia, why technology is transforming, how to use, and why to use it in the classroom, what are possible drawbacks. We, as always, started by discussing what we learned and our own thoughts about technology use in the classroom, my friends made some comments that I haven't thought of. After the group discussions, we shared our ideas together. I've come to realize that, it is crucial to be sur

Last week, my friends from the ELT department and I started taking online courses as part of a research study I mentioned earlier ( click here to see ).  We are supposed to write reflections every week after our sessions on our blogs. I also believe it makes the experience more permanent. 1 st Week - 07.11.2020 Critical Thinking and English as a Global Language Firstly, we defined critical thinking. I had basic prior knowledge about what critical thinking was related to. However, after I did the pre-readings and take the test sent, it became more concrete in my mind. Starting the session, the trainer directed some questions about critical thinking, we discussed the questions as groups of four and everyone had their own duty in the group. Then, we shared what we discussed. I’ve learned that critical thinking is an important skill for people to organize their thoughts in a systematic way, find reliable sources of information, express themselves better. We defined strong and wea

        Merhaba everyone, long time no see! After our courses on Materials Design and Educational Technologies, I couldn't have a chance, time, and motivation to come back here, even though I had a lot to share. I have learned so much at school, I started volunteering at TEGV again, and I traveled to Bucharest/Romania as a part of an international project with the AIESEC program last year. (I promise I will share the details on what I learned, such a rewarding experience it was), Covid-19, online classes, new job, applying for erasmus+ projects, etc. This was a very brief summary believe me :) Let's not wander off...        Now, I have a good reason to come back here. I participated in a research  study titled “Integrating 21 st  Century Skills  Training With Project-Based Learning to Cultivate EFL Pre-service Teachers’Professional Skills”, carried out by Melda Yılmaz as part of Bahçeşehir University English Language Education Ph.D. Program in Istanbul, Turkey. So basically it