For the last three years, I have been developing applications with my very young learners. And our third iPhone,iPad/Android application "Daisy, Drago, the Magic Wand" is now available on Appstores. It is the second part of the Daisy and Drago stories. The app is the story of the little girl Daisy and her friend Drago. In this edition of the story, as they play a game in the garden, they find a digital wand. Please read what happens next on your mobile devices. Again, just  like the other two stories, we have worked with our kindergarten students to create  this application.  The pictures were drawn,  colored and animated by 5 year old children. They have also recorded their  voices for the characters. Out IT teacher, Demet Küyük, put everything together  to create this cute story. You can  download it from AppStores searching "terakki". It is free  and fun to read. Yay! Read more: Daisy and Drago on Appstore! Bubble and Pebble" on AppStore!

It’s been nearly a year since I wrote this blog post about our first e- book, My First Digital Journey!  and today, I am really very happy to tell you that we will be out of the labs very soon! We are working on the final touches on the book and it will be online in a few weeks or maybe days. The-round has interviewed us about our experience of doing our first book with the round,and you can read it here.  Stay tuned for the last update.  This book is a part of theround that is founded by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings.

New year is on the way and here are some tools to enjoy the last days of this year with your students!   JibJab is an amazing site where you can place your face on different animated e-cards. Share this fun with Santa.   If you would like to chat with Santa, here he is the Santa bot, waiting for you to answer your questions.   If you are a gamer, here is an escape the room game. Help Santa escape from the room before someone sees him. Be quick!    ElfYourSelf  is a website that lets you create an elf of yourself. You upload your picture, create your mouth cut and choose your dance. When you finish it, you can download it or mail it to others. You can create up to five elves or you can get your Xmas elf name here.   Click on Santa’s advent calendar and find out new songs and activities to complete for each day.   You have got something to say to Santa? He has got an email adress here. Let’s write and wait for his reply.   Make Santa jump, hop, dance, sing!! Write whatever you want and Santa does it for you on SimonSezSanta.   Visit Santa’s secret village in NorthPole and play games.   What about creating animated and personalized e-cards for others? Nice!   You can create a personalized Santa story for your kids. Here it comes!   What about creating a custom letter for Santa! You can film yourself or upload a picture and it to Santa’s mail.   Make your carol with Zefrank and share the joy!   How about following Santa on Twitter? Learn what he is into these days.   You can play the songs with the Rain Deer Orchestra, squash their noses with your mouse or click the symbol on your keyboard.   Make your online snowflake and let it snow.   Are you on Santa’s good list?? If you want to learn, here you go!   Send an interactive ecard via OWorlds, decorate your gingerbread man,write your message and change your background.   Make your personalized Christmas card and share the joy with others.   What about making your own virtual snowman! You can try this one here.   This calendar has a new animation for each day until Christmas! You can also try this one and solve a puzzle each day.   Decorate your Christmas tree here or decorate a real one here.   and cheers to a happy New Year…  

"The Journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." Lao Tzu At last! The e-book that I have been working on so hard for the last one and a half year with theround team and my co-author, my friend Jennifer Verschoor has been published today on Amazon.  I am so happy and proud to be a "theround writer"! I would like to thank everyone that is involved, and my friends that have helped me to start my first digital journey!  Here is another step on my journey of a thousand miles!Can’t wait for the next steps! You can view and buy the book on Amazon. Here you go: My First Digital Journey on Amazon! Read more: http://the-round.com/2012/12/the-end-of-a-journey-or-the-beginning/

As the seconds tick away and time marches on; New Year is a reflection time for me as well as celebration. Here is a short list of my favorite posts this year: @ozge’s Favourite Tools of 2012 4 Web Based Tools to Record Your Voice A to Z Web Tools Welcome Back to School with Ice-Breaker WebTools 6 Ways to Clean YouTube Videos My First Digital Journey - Published Cool Tools of the Year Have a wondrous year everyone!

New Year is an exciting time for all us. Mobile applications are celebrating it as well. Here are my selections of some of the apps: Talking Santa is a fun app that can bring joy into your class or your home. Simple, talk into your microphone and listen to Santa repeating your holiday message for you. This app lets you create 3D video animation greeting and New Year card and share them on different social networks. Here comes Christmas!! app that includes Xmas day countdown, advent calender with surprises, games, festive jokes and songs. Also included is a gift list so you can keep track of all your present ideas. You can store the name of the person, and the gift idea, then tick it off the list when you’ve bought it. Christmas Tree app gives you a virtual chance to decorate your tree with a huge assortment of ornaments. You can even stage it in the perfect environment with your favorite photo. This app also includes animated effects such as lights and snowball, fun sound effects, songs. Download this app today, choose your tree among 4 different styles and export finished tree to phone album or email it to others. Chritmas Fun app is filled with 14 Christmas songs, games and exciting activities. You can sing along with the classic songs such as Jingle Bells and you can play games such as Santa and Christmas dress up, colouring game, Simon game and many more. Holly-A Christmas Tale is a Hidden Object game in which you help Santa to find the items he needs to complete his rounds on Christmas Eve, you`ll be asked to pick out toys on a shelf crammed with merchandise, spot the differences between two seemingly identical pictures and more! Santa Snoop is a fun way for kids to check what Santa is doing at the moment. This app lets you scan the horizon for Santa and lock onto him and you listen to what Santa is doing. This app lets you experience the augmented reality. This app is $0.99. Christmas Play is a cool app that gives you 5 illustrations to complete. You dress the snowman, decorate the Xmas tree, decorate the house and two more and then you watch the Santa coming to life, app allows you to watch each Santa animation as many times as you like. There is also a background music and sounds effects. This app is £0.69. Christmas Activity Book is a playground packed with matching games, classic Christmas tales, puızzles such as building a snowman, coloring and matching gifts, singing along to Jingle bells and many more. Where is Santa is an app where you can follow Santa and what he is doing there. Click and learn what Santa is into.  Letter to Santa Clasus is an app that lets you write a letter to Santa and get the response in an hour. Children can also send cookies, bells or mittens along with their letters. Remember that the free version includes ads.  Santa Fun Games app includes 6 exciting games that are specially designed for Christmas. Some of them are sending snowballs, catching Santa, matching the Santas and delivering presents.  Santa Dress Up is game app where you will dress up Santa, snowman, Christmas tree and a Christmas place. You can dress Santa into different costumes, even you can make him a Superman! Enjoy the holiday! You may also interested in reading: Celebrate New Year with Technology in Class

If you are a newbie in technology and want to start integrating a bit of tech into your lessons starting with the easiest tool with some practical ideas, you are very welcome to join online webinar series that I will be giving and will be hosted by JALT TCSIG and the International Teacher Development Institute (ITDi Pro).  The first one will be on Sunday, January 13, 2013. The webinar will begin at 9 pm in Japan (2 pm in Istanbul) and last for approximately 30 minutes. To be able to access the webinars, you need to be a member of JALT TCSIG or be a course participant on ITDi. The webinars will be completely free! To register, please complete this form.If you want to learn the details of the webinars, please follow this link. Looking forward to you all! 

This was where my digital journey had begun … This may be a beginning for you too! Electronic Village Online Sessions are five-week collaborative and hands on virtual courses & discussions that engage hundreds of educators every year. They are completely free and a great opportunity for professional development and connect with other teachers all over the world. This year, I will again be co-moderating an online session on EVO with other great educators that we all know and follow. Shelly Terrell,Esra Girgin, Jennifer Verschoor, David Dodgson, Michelle Worgan, Marisa Constantinides, Eva Buyuksimkesyan, Elizabeth Anne and Juan Uribe. So, if you are interested in digital storytelling and want to learn more about it, come and join our session on "Digital Storytelling for Young Learners" . The registration has already started and we start on Jan 14, 2013. Don’t miss the opportunity, and share the joy! We are looking forward to meeting you!!  

Stories has always been one of the most popular mediums in the classroom to stimulate creativity and thinking process, providing opportunities for reflection, enhancing the learning experience both for the teachers and the students … and storytelling has never been that much fun and easy with all the mobile applications that we can use today! SockPockets lets you record your own voice for 30 seconds to make sock puppets talk on your screen. You simply choose your sock puppet, the background and the props that you want to use. When you finish, you can save it or if you like you can directly upload it to YouTube to share the fun!  You can ask our students to explain a word, to retell a short story or introduce themselves. They can tell jokes, sing a song or chant a rhyme. They can make two puppets talk at the same time and practice questions/answers or they can create their own dialogues. This app is available on iPhone and iPad. StoryRobe is another mobile application that lets you add narration to your pictures. You choose your pictures and record your voice over it. The finished narration can be sent to YouTube or mailed to anyone. After downloading the app, you don’t need any connection unless you want to mail it or share on YouTube. Students can take a picture or choose a picture that they have taken previously and record their voices about it. It can be about their vacation, about their house, family or about their pets. This app is available on iPhone and iPad. PuppetPals is an app in which you can create a puppet show with your own voice and share it with others. You can create your own puppet using your own pictures and you can create your own backgrounds as well. Then, you can create puppet shows by moving the puppets around as you are recording your voice. When you finish, you can publish your show as a movie to iMovie or YouTube. This tool is great for creating stories on different topics. This app is available only on iPad. Fotobabble has always been one of my favourite web tools. It is great to have it as a mobile application as well. Fotobabble lets you record your voice over pictures. You choose your picture and speak into your microphone to record your voice. You can also enhance your photo with visual effects. When you finish, you can share your Fotobabble via Facebook, Twitter or email. Students can send real time talking postcards to each other; create birthday cards with your photo and picture. This app is available on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.  StoryKit is another app that lets you create storybooks. You can write your own text or draw on the screen. If you like, you can attach pictures, record your voice and add sound effects. With the drag and drop feature, you can arrange the layout of your story including text boxes, images, and sound clips. When you finish, you can email the link of your story. The app is specially great for teachers to create stories for students on any topics.  Enjoy and come back for more apps!

With new year, I am hoping to finish this series. Nut now, it’s ime for the next letter: S ShutterCal is a picture calendar where you can upload your pictures on a calendar for each day and write your text to share it with others. Storybird is a collaborative digital storytelling tool which lets you to become the writer and the publisher of your own books. SafeShareTv is a tool to eliminate the offensive materials in a video and lets you view videos in safe way and let you crop YouTube videos. SoundCloud lets you record your voice or upload a  recording and share it with others. Symface is a cute tool to express your emotions changing the face expression of an animated emoticon and writing why you feel like that. Speechable allows you to upload and add speech bubbles to your pictures and share them with others via mail or on social networking sites. SuperLame is a site to add captions or comic style word balloons to your pictures. SpeedyMarks is a tool to create visual bookmarks to view your favourite websites. Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as videos, pictures, tweets. SimpleDiagrams is a desktop application that helps you to express your ideas using library items and backgrounds. SayitRight is a text-to-speech software that assists you with English pronunciation of the words. Splotchy is a friendly and a funny bot and he can be amazingly intelligent. He may be cranky sometimes but if he is in a good mood he can be flirty too. SlideRocket is another tool to create and share stunning presentations using an integrated interface. SmileBox turns your photos into digital creations to share them with other people.  Simple VLE is a virtual learning environment that lets you create online tests, quizzes and exams. SlideRoll is a way to create slideshows from your own pictures using different transitions. You can also create slideshows in a documentary style. Storyjumper is a site that gives you different tools to write and illustrate stories. Sketchfu allows you to draw your own pictures and share it with others. Stiqr lets you to create and design your website with sticking pictures. Survs lets you create your online surveys collaborating with others in multi user accounts. Stintio allows you to create your own chat in seconds. You can invite people to join by simply sending a link. Start.io is a start page with your favourite links. You sign up and start adding your favourite links, web pages, blogs etc. that you go everyday. Stixy lets you create online bulletin board to collaborate with family, friends, colleagues. Spaaze is a visual way to organize your information in a virtual space. You can add bookmarks, notes, labels, youtube videos and keep them online. Also, read the other posts on this series here! 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.