My Entertaining Material Design Course Blog

Hello everyone, I hope you are all good! In this post, I am going to talk to you about our last assignment of this course. For the assignment, we were supposed to work in groups and create an AI integrated teaching material for EFL high school prep students. (A2 level) As Halil, İren, Sude and me; we prepared a digital worksheet. As the content of the material, we were supposed to choose a focus (reading, listening, speaking or writing) from the UPTONE students' book volume 1. We chose our focus as writing and decided to focus on Simple Present Tense from the "School Life" unit. On the first page of our worksheet, the students watch a video about Simple Present Tense embedded in a QR code, and then they complete four fill in the blanks questions regarding Simple Present Tense. On the next page, there is a text in which there are mistakes concerning the usage of the tense, and the students are asked to underline these. On the next page, students are supposed to ask ChatGPT...

Hello everyone! I hope you are all good! In this post, I am going to talk to you about our 3rd assignment of the course, which is about AR/VR integration into ELT. But, what is AR and VR? AR is a technology that enables you to see the digital content in the real world. So you see the digital content as if it's in your real environment. For example, you can go to IKEA app, and see how a chair looks like in your living room by allowing the app to use your device's camera. However, VR is a slightly different technology from AR, it is 3D environments that enable you to "interact with your surroundings and other users." (Kurt, 2025, p.14) Games like Minecraft or Roblox (Kurt, 2025, p.14) can be given as the examples of it. Now, let's talk about the assignment. For the assignment, we were supposed to create an augmented/virtual reality integrated teaching material for high school English prep. class students (A2 level). We prepared digital handouts in which they explore...

Hi everyone! I hope you are all good! In this post, I am going to tell you the flipped classroom approach and our assignment related to it. So, let's start with the approach. In this approach, the teacher provides the students a digital video that introduces the content to them before the class. After they watched the video, there are some exercises for the learners to practice the content. And when they come to class, they again do another activity related to the content they learned; and of course, like everything, this approach has advantages and disadvantages. It provides the students advantages like learning the content in their own pace, rewinding the video when they cannot understand something, or providing the teachers the chance to provide individual support to students. However, there are also challenges. The teacher may not be sure if the students watched the video or not, or, there may be problems about some students' access to technology. Now, let's talk about ...

Hello everyone, I hope you are all good! In this post, I am going to talk to you about the first assignment of the course: Creating an AI-enhanced corpus-based teaching material. C orpus means " a large and systematically organized collection of  texts or language samples that are digitally stored and  exploited using specialized software" (Kurt, 2025, p.5).  For the assignment, we were expected to create a teaching material that I mentioned in the first sentence and a lesson plan based on the ASSURE model. We were expected to prepare these two for the target group of EFL learners in a high school in Türkiye. As Arda, Ozan and I, we chose the School Life theme from the preparatory year students' book called "Uptone" and chose to prepare the worksheet based on the topic of "must" and "have to". In the designing process of the worksheet, we followed Ma et al.'s principles for corpus-based learning and teaching materials. Firstly, the studen...

Hello again everyone, It's good to see you again! Hello, I am Mert and I have been studying ELT at Marmara University for 3 years now. Welcome to my first blog post for the Current Issues class. Actually, I already have a blog for the Instructional Technologies and Material Design in English Language Teaching class, which we took last year. However, there is no different assignments in this year's class apart from the last year's class, I guess. Nevertheless, if there is, then some of the assignments may be a little bit different from the last year, but anyway; almost the same. So, you as the readers, will see almost the same things in this year's blog. So, I am sharing this blog post to share the activities we do in our class so that you can also learn new things. But, what kind of activities? Like creating a podcast, creating a digital story and so on! For the new posts, follow me!     

So, the material design course finishes with AI homework but I want to reflect on my opinions about the course here, like what I have learned from that course or how it can be improved, etc. Firstly, before I took this course, I used to think that you can integrate videos, some applications like Kahoot, in which you can compete with your friends in an engaging way in order to learn the lesson better, or some other technologies into my teaching practice and there weren't any other options in my mind. However, after taking this course, I learned that I have many other tools to integrate into my teaching practice. For example, visuals like infographics. With infographics, the learners can learn the important points of the lesson in a shorter time and in a more practical way. Moreover, now, I have some knowledge about online collaborative writing tools like Google Docs, which we used for the film review task, for example. Now, I know how to integrate these kinds of tools into my teachi...