My Entertaining Material Design Course Blog

Hello again! How are you? I hope you are all fine! As our last assignment in the course, we were supposed to have either a voice-chat with an AI or have a chat with one of the characters of Magic School based on the given instructions by our instructor. Among these options, I chose to have a voice-chat with ChatGPT based on the question of "If you designed a day in an English classroom in 2040, what would it be like?" and it gave me really comprehensible answers. In this respect, it was really good to have a conversation with it. However there was also a strange point about it, too. It created the transcript of one of my utterances in Turkish and I couldn't understand why. Anyway, I found the voice-chat experience with ChatGPT quite engaging. While talking to it, it really tries to give you ideas about the topic and it explains them respectively and in a clear way. It was great because even when you talk with a real person, the conversation may get complicated and at the ...

Hello again everyone! Again, we had a very engaging assignment to do: A film review! But... what is a film review? In a film review, you write about your opinions about a film to provide an overall opinion about it to other people; so that they can decide if they want to watch the movie or not. You also write about the components of the film like cinematography, plot, theme, acting, direction; were they well or were there points that should be improved? For this assignment, we were supposed to write a collaborative film review using Google Docs (a collaborative writing tool). Our audience was other university students. So, as Arda, Ozan and I, we watched the film, exchanged our ideas and wrote these on Google Docs. It was a very good experience to write my opinions using this kind of tool because it also enables me to notice the points I missed in the film, or something else; it doesn't matter. Moreover, as your intention in this activity is to provide an opinion to people about th...

Hello everyone! I hope you are all good! Our fourth assignment was creating a digital story and we were given 3 options  for that task.  (creating a public service announcement, a "how to project" or a fictional story). As Arda, Ozan and I, we decided to create a fictional story. For the story, we were supposed to create a video in which there are sequencing images and for the video, we were supposed to develop 2 or 3 characters, write a script, add the narrative sounds and also add the other sound effects necessary for the events taking place in the story. The story is about an Italian crime family making a deal with an illegal distillery owner named David McArthur for the purpose of broadening its network in the booze trade. The story takes place in 30s NYC, USA and there are 3 main characters who are associates of this Italian family: Tonny, Alberto and Ciano (Cio). In the story, some undesirable incidents occur. Now, let's talk about the whole process of creating the ...

Hello everyone, our third task in the ICT course was creating a podcast, and as Arda and I, we chose to create a sound-rich story among the other options given. (Other options were creating a vox-pop or a podcast about improving the world.) We were given totally 15 words that could be used for the podcast and asked to use at least five of them. So, we used the 5 words we determined and wrote a story about a genius who witnesses a murder and goes crazy consequently. Through the editing process, we actually had fun but of course we experienced some stress, too. One of the factors in which we had difficulty was converting the file format from wpf to mp4. It was stressful for us to make the file type suitable for listening because we had to look back on the file type several times even when we thought we were sure that the file type was ok. Also, we had difficulty when we were trying to find the proper sound effects for our podcast. It was required to pay money for some of the sounds we pu...

Hi everyone, our second task in the course was creating an infographic and I used Piktochart for that task and I chose the topic of "safety and privacy in technology use" among the other topics that were given by our instructor to us. At the beginning, I was a little bit anxious about how to use the website, for example; which icons to use, how to edit the template and things like that. However, after I started to do the infographic; I did not have much difficulty in understanding the interface of it so I was relaxed about the editing process of it. By the way, I want to talk about the potential benefits of creating an infographic for students, too. Think that you are going to teach a gram mar topic to your students and the topic is a little bit complicated. If you try to teach it only by writing the rules on the board, tricky points may not be well understood by the students but if you teach it with the help of an infographic, it will be easier for these tricky points to bec...

Hi everyone! In this blog, I am going to share different posts about technologies related to language learning and teaching. So, who are interested in these technologies, don't miss new posts!  

21st Century Learning and English Classrooms 21st century is a century that requires many skills to be acquired to be able to keep up with the advancements in various fields in our lives and one of the most prominent of these fields is technology, but what is technology? With a simple definition, it can be said that technology is the implementation of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, but especially in a reproducible way according to Wikipedia. We use technology for many purposes in our lives, but what about education? In education, both teachers and students benefit from technology extensively. Now,  let's look at the relationship between these two fields in terms of students and teachers respectively. When we look from the students' perspective, we can see that students use technology for the opportunity of learning irrespective of the place they are in. Thanks to that, students can learn new things even if they are not in the school. Then, when we look a...