SlidesMania!

 

   Helloo! Today, I’m going to introduce you to SlidesMania, which is an very useful platform for your presentations. SlidesMania offers you many types of free and creative Powerpoint templates and Google Slides themes which can make your presentations look more outstanding and aesthetic! All you need to do is to search by topics or types such as education, fun, formal, interactive, or based on their color etc. and the find the one which suits the best for your style. On the SlidesMania site you can also find some tutorial videos about how to change the theme colors, create digital stickers and many things more! In that way you can make your lessons visually more enjoyable and appealing!

    Here are some examples of templates that slidesMania offer:

 

They look very lovely aren’t they :)

Your students will definitely like them!

Moreover, SlidesMania has been selected as one of the 2022 Best Digital tools for Teaching and Learning by AASL, and it is well deserved in my opinion.

So this is all for SlidesMania for now, hope you enjoyed it!

Jamboard!

 

   Hii everyone! Today, my post will be about Jamboard! Jamboard is a digital whiteboard but it is actually much more than that because it allows you to do many things with its technology in a fun way! It is a nice platform for preparing posters, maps and projects about a specific topic. All you need to do is sign up and begin to create! You can use a variety of pencils and colors to bring your ideas to life, add sticky notes or drop some images to make brainstorm sessions together and highlight objects with the laser pointer tool! The one of best feature of Jamboard is that you can use it both synchronously and asynchronously. In that way students can work on their projects collaboratively, at the same time by logging in through their own devices. With that, there will be no limitation for students to use the whiteboard in the class since each student will have their own either with a group or individually.

   As a teacher, you can also prepare different tasks and posters on Jamboard and allow your students to do their projects on it or share their responses through the sticky notes!

a Jamboard activity 

You can download it on Google Play Store and Apple Store!

Here’s a link for you if you’d like to learn much more interesting features of Jamboard: https://youtu.be/C-watrdDybY

Online Courses: My New Certificates!

  Hi everyone! Today I'd like to show you three new certificates of mine which i have achieved by joining online courses on Bilgeiş and İsmek!

  Bilgeiş is an online platform which is developped by ODTU for people, especially students to have access to various online courses for free! All you need to do is to register, sign in and choose your course. The one i chose to join is "Teaching with Techonology (E-Teach)". I really liked it and learned new technological materials that i can use in my own lessons in the future. The online lessons have many interactive activities and quizzes so it is enjoyable! If you successfully complete the quizzes and the final test, you achieve your official certificate!

  Enstitü İstanbul (İSMEK) is also an beneficial site for all people who would like to join courses in various fields, and you have options for face to face and online education for free. After registiring and signing up, you will have option to join courses in specific periods of time, so you can choose the lesson term which suits you the best. And i decided to have the "Educational Technologies" and "How to Write a Formal E-mail" online courses!

You can go to these sites by clicking on these:

Bilgeiş

Enstitü İstanbul (İSMEK)

Thanks so much for reading! See ya 👋🏼

Mindmeister!

 

   

     Hi everybody! Today I’d like to introduce you to Mindmeister, a online tool where you can create your mindmaps! To use it, first you need to log in, for that you can use your Google Account. It is also a free tool if you choose your account to be a Basic one, which you will have right to create 3 free mindmaps. Now you are ready to create your first mindmap!

    At first there will be an bubble at the center and this will be the beginning of your mindmap. After clicking on the bublle you will see + sign and if you click on it you will have your branch! Let’s show it!

now we have our first mindmap

    It is a very beneficial tool for especially for students since it becomes much easier and fun to organize their work by using an online mindmap instead of kind of struggling with the paper. You can edit your mindmap whenever and however you want, you can change the size, order of branches and its all colours very easily. And with the sharing option, you can invite other participants to edit your mindmap, which will be a useful tool for group projects!

    If you would like to see the Learning Theories mindmap that I created by using Mindmeister, I had already shared it on my blog, just click here !

    Hope you liked Mindmeister, see you later!

Edpuzzle!

     Hello! My post today will be about Edpuzzle, another interesting online teaching and learning tool! Basically Edpuzzle is an platform which you can, as a teacher, turn normal videos from Youtube etc. into interactive ones with adding voice-overs, extra information boxes, assessment questions into the video, for students to engage with the video and answer. It is also an platform where you can practice Flipped teaching, as you can share the most of the content via the videos and the embedded questions. With that, students will be able to self-study and prepare on their own first for the upcoming lesson, ask the their questions if they are confused about the topic and there will be much more time for the activities to do in the actual lesson.

    You can whether sign up with a student or a teacher account. After signing up with a teacher account you can create your first class then you begin to search for a video to create your own lesson. (Edpuzzle can also show you the video lesson examples that the other teachers have made, if you’d like you can check their content out for more ideas.) After finding a suitable video on Edpuzzle that are presented to you by Youtube and other video platforms, choose and start editing on it! Edpuzzle allows you to cut and trim the video, so you can leave out the unnecessary parts. Then add the voice-overs, additional texts, voice notes to the video. To make it even more interactive and evaluative, during the video you can add open ended, close ended and multiple choiced questions at the related time stamp, so the video will be paused and the students can answer the questions. Besides, students are unable to skip the video so they will need to watch the video to understand and complete the questions. When you are done preparing you can assign the video to your students. So, Edpuzzle is an another technological way to track your students’ learning process, their focus on the lesson, keep notes on their correct or wrong answers.

    I’ve put a link of a helpful tutorial video for you, if you’d like to see what is Edpuzzle and how to use it: https://youtu.be/pS2zv-iNiSc

Thanks for reading. See you!

Pear Deck!

     Hi everyone! In this post I’d like to write about an interesting, different kind of tool: Pear Deck! It is an interactive presentation tool which is used to engage students in both individual and social learning. With Pear Deck, students become more active and have important contributions to the lesson instead of only listening to the teacher’ speech in a passive mode. The things you should do is that firstly activate the Pear Deck add-on on your Google Slides, then share the code with the students so that they can connect to Pear Deck through their own devices as well. Then yeah, you all are ready!

      Pear Deck actually has two lesson modes: Student-Paced Activity and Instructor-Paced Activity! If you are connected with your students in real time (virtually or face-to-face) choose Instructor-Paced Activity to guide them in the lesson and observe their responses synchronously.

      With the Instructor-Paced activity, Pear Deck helps students to integrate into the class by the activity types such as text responses, multiple choice questions, numerical responses, drawing an answer and dragging an icon. For instance, when the teacher has just finished talking about a subtopic and wants to know the students’ focus and knowledge so the teacher may activate the questions through the Pear Deck and get all the students’ answers . Or you might wonder if they are enjoying the lesson so far, so with this template of Pear Deck, students may drag their button to somewhere between how they are feeling. In that way, every student gets to give responses to questions. After the class is finished, you name the Session in order to review and examine the students answers later on.

By the way, you can always switch back to Student-Paced Activity, if you want to give these slides to your students in order for them to work through their lessons at their own pace, asynchronously.

Here’ s a link for you to find many more templates that you can use in Pear Deck: https://www.peardeck.com/templates

Here’s a tutorial for Pear Deck: https://youtu.be/9PJgsa-fnmA

Edmodo!

 

   Hi! In this post i’m going to introduce Edmodo, one of the most popular learning management systems. Edmodo is an online platform for managing your digital classroom and communicate with students, parents and collegues as Edmodo allows joining with whether a teacher account, student account or a parent account. So after signing up with a teacher account and creating your profile, you are now ready to create your first class! Then with the class code you have created, students can join the class. You can begin to share the various materials (videos, powerpoints, images, links, videos, PDFs etc.) with your students, you may organize the materials in different folders so it would be easier to find them when needed. 

   There are opportunities for making the student to teacher communication easier by sharing announcements, creating polls and asking for students’ opinions, you can send and receive private messages. Moreover, it becomes easier to assign homeworks, exams, quizzes for a specific of time and lock it as well, then you can make evaluations and give feedback. One of the best part of Edmodo is that it allows teachers to divide students into smaller groups and enable student to student communication with collaborations.

Here is a photo of my class that I created as a teacher:

Here you can see the Home page, where you can see your collegues’ and students’ and your own posts that are shared (kinda looks similar to Facebook, isn’t it :) :

Lastly, my advice is that you should keep the materials that you had uploaded even the class is finished. Don’t delete the classes so you can reach to the sources and the activities incase you need to check them out, make some adjustments and reuse!

You can access to Edmodo by clicking here, or you can download the app from Google Play Store and App Store.

If you are interested, here is a beneficial video about Edmodo: https://youtu.be/CSG5ha9DMIM

Thank you so much for reading, see you in my other posts!