"Don’t get left behind …" I have trained my colleagues for the last three weeks about using technology. The last workshop was on QR codes and how to use them in ELT and we came up with quite good ideas so I thought it’s high time to write a post about it. We all know the barcodes at the back of chips, chocolate bars and nearly at the back of every product that we buy. They are the codes that include basic information about the product; and now we have QR codes.(See the picture above) They are Quick Response Codes or Mobile Codes that include more information than a barcode and can be read by smartphones using a QR code reader. See the video here. You take a picture of the QR code and scan the code using a QR Code Reader. Once you decode the QR code, it turns into a website, a text message, a video or any other data. In fact, they are not the new technology because we have them for a long time now and they are mostly used for advertisement, websites and on business cards. It is also very easy to generate a QR code for your data. Have a look at this tool. QR Codes look so cool and we can benefit from them in and out of the classroom. They can make our lessons fun, better and interesting. Here are some ideas for you: We all give homework to our kids. That would be nice to turn the answers of our homework into a QR code and put the code on the homework paper for kids to check the answers at home when they have finished their homework. This is also good for self-check and to support autonomous learning. In the near future, the course books will contain QR codes for extra materials and extended activities. We can do this before the publishers place the QR codes in our coursebooks. We can find extra information or prepare extra activities for each topic on our coursebooks. They can be a video, podcast or a website for extended reading activities. Children can stick them to their coursebooks and complete the activities when the time comes. You can place QR codes on the different parts of the class. Children can walk around the class scanning the codes and trying to put the pieces together. They can come up with a story, song or a text. When you do storytelling, you can turn the end of the story into a QR code and ask the children to scan it if they want to learn the end of it. You can add extra links to your presentation that includes videos with codes. If you are doing a podcast or a video as a post activity with your kids,ask children to turn them into QR codes and stick them to their notebooks. Parents may want to see what their children are doing at school. That would also be fun to place QR codes around the school or the classroom according to the themes that you teach. They can be videos, podcasts, links, text messages that are related to your themes. It can be a nice way to motivate children for extra work. You can turn videos or podcasts into QR codes, and children can scan the codes, do the listening activity and answer some questions, complete the missing parts in the text. You can even turn this into a competition. You divide the class into groups and the group who finishes the text or answers the questions first wins. You can prepare QR codes that include text and stick them around the class, divide the class into groups, ask them to walk around, scan the codes and put the text into correct order. This can also be done for storytelling. Children can put the story into the right order. For another activity, the QR codes can be the pictures of the story and children can be asked to look at the pictures and write a story. QR codes are another way of integrating technology into your classes, some may consider this as too much work, some useless and some as a brilliant idea. I think, they add a flavour to your lessons! They are something new, something different and just another way to motivate your children … Here are some more reading on QR codes: QR Codes in Education by Steven W. Anderson QR Codes in Education:A Burgeoning Narrative QR Codes and Education 40 Interesting Ways to Use QR Codes in the Classroom by Tom Barrett This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.

Another school year has started and we are back in the classrooms with brand new ideas. Here are mine if you are looking for a techie-start to the new year and some first day activities using technology in your lessons. Symface is a cute tool to express your emotions changing the face expression of an animated emoticon and writing why you feel like that. When you finish, you can tweet, get the link and share it with others. Children can create their own symfaces and talk about their feelings on coming back to school. We can also use Wordle and it’s alternatives for the first day activities. We can create a word cloud using the children’s name to welcome them in the classroom or we can create a word cloud of our classroom rules. Children can create their own wordles about themselves including their ages,  family, hobbies etc. and they can share and talk about them in the classroom. This can be a good icebreaker for the first days. Voki is another famous edtech tool that we can use in the classroom for the first days. We can create a voki avatar talking about herself and we can ask or assign kids to create their own vokis. If they can’t do it in the classroom, they write their text in the class and create their online avatars at home.  We can also create a classroom mascot/puppet,and children can ask it some questions. We can use text-to-speech application of voki and answer the questions of the kids. We can create a collaborative online board using Wallwisher or Linoit. Children can add their pictures and add their text about their summer holiday. They can also write about themselves and in the classroom we can read each note and try to guess who that person is. Tricider is a brainstorming tool. You create a topic or ask a question and ask kids to answer and brainstorm on the ideas. They can also vote for each other’s statements or they can go against them writing why. It can be a good tool to talk about the classroom rules. Penzu is a tool to keep an online diary. Children can start writing about their first school days and they can keep it until the last day.  Fotobabble is a tool to record your voices for your pictures. Children can draw a picture about their feelings of the school or about themselves, then upload it to Fotobable recording their voices. They can share them in the class and learn about each other. Photopeach is a tool that lets you make slideshow quiz  using your pictures, adding captions and music. We can create a slideshow quiz for our kids about school, rules, ourselves and lessons. AcapelaTv is a text-to-speech application where there are ready flash animations that you can customize. We can create an animation using this tool that is talking about what we will be doing on that day. Bubble.us is a collaborative brainstorming and a mind-mapping tool. We can brainstorm and create mind map of the classroom rules, our hobbies, the topics that we are going to cover this year. We can create different types of quizzes for our kids to see what they remember from last year.EasyTestMaker is a nice tool to create one. Online surveys or polls can be an interesting and a fun way to get to know our kids better, to learn their opinions about school,learning English or what activities they enjoy doing in class. SurveyMonkey and PollDaddy can be two good choices. Enjoy the new year … This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.

I’ve given a talk about technology and web tools recently. My talk turned into a debate … Teachers telling their reasons why not to use technology and me giving my reasons why to.  I am disappointed, not because of the discussions for and against technology… because we, bloggers are spending time online, writing, producing, doing workshops, using technology with our students  … but actually how many people are we? Let me tell you one thing .. We are few, very few …

"The Street finds its own uses for things   - uses the manufacturers never imagined!"William Gibson There are hundreds of web tools that have been developed educators in mind. Although it is not possible for us to know and use all of them, there are some tools  that we should all have in the bag. Youtube has always been a great resource for us to use with our students, but it has also many destructive features, ads and comments on one page if you want to share it with your students. Now we have SafeShareTv that can help us to remove inappropriate elements around the page and generate a safe link for our students. It also lets you crop youtube videos and get rid of the unwanted parts from a video. Adout is another tool that blocks all sort of ads and banners on a website so you can easily share the links with your kids and they can safely surf the net without clicking any inappropriate ads.  Vocaroo is a simple tool to record your voice and share it with others. You don’t need to download a software or sign in. You simply go to the website, record your voice with a microphone and create your podcast easily. MultiUrl is a tool to combine links into one short link and share it with others. All the links are editable so you can delete or add new links. You can also see how many times the links have been clicked. Jing is a tool to take a picture of your screen. It’s a good alternative to the print screen button on the keyboard. You can decide on the size of your screen shot, upload it to your computer as a jpg or get a link for your picture. You can also make a short video of your screen by recording your voices. Jing is a great tool for creating presentation with your own voice, to show how a website works. Look what we are doing with jing at school here. It is not always easy to find "easy to read" texts online. With Twurdy, you can now find texts that suit your students’ readability level. It looks for the number of words on the page, the average number of syllables in each word and the average sentence length. The lighter the colour is, the easier the text is. Also, Twurdy comes from "Too Wordy?".Isn’t it so cool?  Howjsay is a free online dictionary. The words are pre-recorded and it is not synthetic. You can also hear multiple entries by separating them with semi-colons. VideoDL lets you download videos from video sharing websites to your computer.Please be careful with Creative Common Works rights and make sure that you ask the owner and get permission to do that. You can spell check a text by simply copying it to the box on Orangoo. BatLyrics lets you search for song lyrics based on words and phrases with a video. You can watch and listen the video with a teleprompting screen with the lyrics of the song on it. It’s a great listening material in the classroom. Tinypic is a free image hosting site where you can upload your pictures and get a link for that to share it with others. If you want to learn if a text is copied from somewhere or not, here comes plagiarismchecker. Just copy and paste the text and see if the text is original or not. This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students. Cross posted on TechLearning. 

The next letter on the series is: I ImaginationCubed is a multi user drawing tool. You can use a pen, stamp,shapes, line or you can type. You can also change the color of the background. iSpeech is another text-to-speech application that will convert  your text (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, blogs, RSS feeds etc.) content into audio with minimal effort, no software installation and no technical expertise. You can download it, podcast it or embed it to your blog or your website. ImageLoop is a similar site. It also allows you to create an online version of any pdf and powerpoint presentation. You can also use both these sites as a free upload of your images. iCue is a fun, innovative learning environment built around video from NBC News Archives. It is designed to help students with access to thousands of current and historic videos and other resources such as fun games and activities.It also has pop quizzes, game challenges and interactive activities. Instapaper is a simple tool to bookmark the sites to read later. You can come back anytime to read it. Iclippy captures your work from screen, camera, or scanner to an online clipboard without having to save the pictures to the local computer first. Incredibox is a tool to discover the musical universe with "human beat box" sounds created by the artist. iWriteLike lets you find out which writer you write like analyzing your word choice and writing style. iCyte is a site to bookmark webpages and pdf’s exactly as you see them. It’sAlmost is a cool countimer. Just write the date and the time to count down! ILovePDF is a tool to merge different PDF Files or split one PDF into different documents. This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.

Halloween is just round the corner and the preparations are in full swing! If you want to do some online activities with your kids at school before the night, here are some spooky, scary, creepy web tools for you! Grababeast is a tool to create your own monster using different body parts and colouring them using a palette. You can save it to your computer or share your monster with a link. You can also try Goosebumps or this one here! Children can tell their spooky stories with Kerpoof, Storyjumper or a collaborative story using Storybird. Choose your storyline, write your text and boo others! Zimmertwins is also celebrating Halloween! Ask children to tell their supernatural animations with Zimmertwins characters and share the joy. Children can create their cute monsters on Moshimonsters. They can write or talk about their animals’ halloween plans. What about creating Halloween e-cards with your own pictures?  Choose your e-card, upload your pictures, add your message and scare others. You can give this one a try as well! You can carve your own pumpkin here or play some Halloween games here with your kids. Children can create their own Hallowen avatars using Voki, and record their voices telling their jokes or stories. You can attach different animal parts to a human body to build your wild safe and share it with others. Have a spooky time on Halloween. Don’t get too scared though… This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.  

Here is next letter on the alphabet: J Jing is a tool to take a picture of your screen. It’s a good alternative to the print screen button on the keyboard. You can decide on the size of your screen shot, upload it to your computer as a jpg or get a link for your picture. You can also make a short video of your screen by recording your voices. JustPasteit is a tool to share text or link with others in a very easy way. Do just as they say: Just paste it. JogtheWeb lets  you create, read and share websites with your own input like a web book. ImageSplitter is a tool to resize, convert, split and crop your images online. Join.me allows you to share your screen with others. Jabberwacky is an artificial intelligence that learns from every word you write. JayCut lets you edit your movies online. JamStudio is a tool to create and mix music.

The annual ESU English Language Teaching awards celebrate innovation and good practice in the field of English language and English Language Teaching.  In addition, this year the ESU awarded the first CUP-ESU New Writing Award and I am honored and proud to say that I am the winner of this award this year with Bubble and Pebble project. I was in Buckingham Palace last Thursday. The award was presented by the ESU President, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh Prince Philip. I would like to thank everyone for this award that can lead the way for me to become one of the writers for Cambridge University Press. I am really looking forward to the near future and the things that will bring to my professional life. My special thanks to Demet Küyük for developing the digital games and the websites (who I think I am sharing the award with) and Havva Kangal Erdoğan and my little students for inspiring me and helping me to become what I am today … I will cherish for today forever … Photograph by Gina Giannella. Note that the use of images of the Royal family are restricted to non-commercial contexts only.

Here are my nominations for the 2011 Edublog Awards: Best individual blog: A Journee in Language - Brad Patterson - a great blog that I do enjoy reading and looking forward to each new post! Best individual tweeter : @shellterrell - Who can be better than her? No one in this century!! Best group blog: Digital Play by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer - They bring so much new and exacting outlook  to ELT!! Best new blog: Box of Chocolates by Ceci - Not the newest blog as she has been blogging for more than a year, but she is a great treasure, check out her blog! Best ed tech/resource sharing blog: Nik’s Learning Technology Blog by Nik Peachey - A great trainer, blogger with ideas that amaze everyone! He leads the way for us! Best twitter hash tag: I love "edtech" hash tag!! Best free web tool: Very difficult as I have hundreds of favourites, but I would go for Vocaroo this year! Best open PD/ unconference/webinar series: Reform Symposium  - Getting better each year! Best educational use of audio / video / visual and podcast: Breaking News English - by Sean Banville - I have never seen/met a more productive and a hard working ELT person! He deserves to be here more than anyone!! Best educational wiki: Cool Tools for Teachers - The tools are cool and great to have them all together! Lifetime Achievement: This one certainly goes to the Super Guru of ELT, I can not think of a conference without him in it, to Ken Wilson ! Now it’s your time!Go to edublog awards, write your nominations. Let’s celebrate and show our thanks to everyone who are doing a great job without being paid! Everyone, good luck!

"Music is the universal language of mankind." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Music pumps our feelings, shakes our bones, makes us visualize, dream and conjures scenes. It doesn’t really matter where and which age group you are teaching, music is a universal resource and a tool in our EFL classes. It is a great way to improve concentration and memory, make learning natural and fun. There is great music out there that we can use in our classes, but we can actually create our own music and allow our students to compose their own copyright free masterpieces using a very user friendly interface. Meet with Musicshake Edu today. Musicshake is a simplified tool to create personalized and a very high quality of music without previous musical knowledge or any training. You can create your music immediately and use it wherever you want without concerning about the copyright. This is what makes this tool unique and innovative. How to use this tool is pretty simple.  You have a grid that shows your track and lets you to choose the instruments that you want to use with your music. You can choose to start from scratch, get a new song to play with the instruments or choose your favourite style to start your music. Download it on your computer and share it with the world and you have a two week trial!! Watch the video to get more out of it here! How can we use Musicshake Edu? Here are some of my ideas to integrate this tool in our classrooms: Children can create their own copyright free music masterpieces to use for presentations, the videos that they have created. They can create their own music that describes their feelings. Collect all the music, play them in the classroom and ask them to write down the feelings that they experience while listening. Use the music that the children have created as a background in the classroom. Ask them to listen to the music and write down the lines for their songs, make them sing in the class, make your own song contest and vote for the best song in the classroom. What about practising the newly learnt vocabulary with creating your own music? Put the words into a song and make the students learn and memorize the words easily. Ask children to compose a traditional song or a lullaby again and share it in the classroom. Let the children write some lyrics about  a topic and compose the music for it or give them the lyrics and ask them to make music for the lyrics using Musicshake. Children can create their music for the books that they have read or they can create their own advertisements as a video with their Musicshake music at the background. Have a Musicshake song, turn it into a routine. Play it to mingle students, make them sit down or clean up. Use your music as rituals to begin or end the day. Choose a class music with children. Divide them into groups, ask them to create their music with Musicshake and choose your class song. Move, dance, jump, run with the tempo of the music. Make them listen to your song and tell you the instruments that have played. Keep a steady beat with drums, string, keyboard etc. Play the song and use faces, fingers, legs and body parts to rhythm with the song. Create a song that fits the activity length. When the music  is over, time is up for what ever they are doing. Compose a song. With the rhythm of it,ask children to move fast or slow down. Once you start using this tool, you will come up with even more ideas. Musicshake provides enjoyable listening, speaking, vocabulary and language practice in and out of the classroom in a fun and a very engaging way without concerning about the copyright and it is even simple enough for young learners to make their own songs after a few minutes. So … Let the music play on and let the music shake your class today! Follow @musicshake on Twitter, like it on Facebook and use it as an app on your iPhone!