I have been blogging for more than four years today! and I was thinking about blogging in Turkish on educational technologies for a long time! Today, I have taken the first steps! Here is my Turkish blog where I will be blogging about technology, apps and education in Turkish!  Yay!

"We all love stories no matter how old we are…Telling them, reading them, sharing them. Not only are we readers of stories but we are also experienced and very skillful tellers of stories…And it is these stories which are the raw materials which keep our imaginations burning." British Council Turkey will be holding their first 2-day web conference on Saturday 9th - Sunday 10th February 2013! I will also be there doing a session on digital storytelling named "Once Upon a Tool". There will be limited spaces so  register not to miss this event. Here is the website and the registration page.  Please be there to share, connect and collaborate!!Looking forward to you all!  

EduCreations is an app that lets you turn your iPad screen into a whiteboard while capturing everything that you do on your iPad screen and recording your voice at the moment. Simply, this app lets you create video lesson and share them on the web with others.  You can add your handwriting and drawings, add text and photos from your albums, animate images by dragging them around while recording your screen. You can pause your recording and resume anytime. You can undo and redo your actions. When you finish, you can share your lessons via mail, Facebook or Twitter. You can also embed them on your blog or website. This app is free and available on iPad. There are two different accounts; Teacher and Student. Teacher accounts can create, view and share lessons, send lessons via email to a selected group whereas student accounts can view the lessons in their subscribed courses. This app is just amazing to use in so many different ways. Here are some of them: You can explain any topic that you like by using this app to your students. This tool is great for listening activities; teachers can take screencaptures of the new vocabulary that they are going to cover that week. Teachers can create the summary of their lessons and share their lesson notes with the students. Teachers can record themselves while telling a story and ask questions to the students to answer. You can even collaborate with your students in the classroom. You can ask your students to comment on the pictures that you are going to show them by recording themselves. Prepare the story pictures before and ask your students to record their voices for the pictures as you show them. This way, this app can be a storytelling app as well! This is a cool app for listening activities as well creating creativity of the teacher and the students. Stay tuned for more apps for screencasting!  

Technology is developing more than we can keep up! It seems as if we just get used to one innovation, the next one comes through. We can’t deny the big influence of the devices and the multimedia in our daily lives as they are becoming more and more important and dominant nearly for everyone today!  Many companies have already presented their products, their services as they are getting more flexible, faster and better each day! If you are looking for a variety of packages for phone, TV and specially on internet; today I would like to introduce you as many of us know and use: BT; which gives you many, flexible and affordable prices with their packages on fibre internet. While we are spending most of our time online using internet, internet speed becomes a very important issue in our lives. We most of the time complain saying; "Internet is so slow!" because we used to use internet only for surfing and checking emails; whereas today we are doing many more things such as downloading films, playing online multiplayer games, using internet for webinars, writing blogs and watching high quality films or TV series online. And BT offers you the latest in fibre optic broadband technology to deliver the internet at speeds that are eight times faster than the UK average. Instead of sending electric signals through copper wires, BT Infinity sends information down a fibre optic network, giving you a faster, smoother online experience. This makes you surf smoothly, watch HD quality films online without any problems, speeding up the downloading speed, making you watch the videos faster and download them in seconds, playing online games in a better quality and connect with others without any bandwidth problems. These small tasks can add up to significant part of our daily lives giving us more time to spend on! Since our time is our most valuable resource, we should certainly make the most of it! So your internet should give you what you want without wasting your time waiting for it! BT is investing in the future of the internet by rolling out BT Infinity across the UK. Different locations will be enabled to support BT Infinity at different stages so you can use the availability checker on the side to see what BT Broadband products are available in your location and what speed you can expect. You can check the BT packages here. Our world isn’t going to slow down for sure. Technology and the devices will develop more and more making high speed internet more and more important and necessary in every bit of our lives!  

Here comes the second part of the series with letter S. SketchSwap lets you draw a picture and when you finish, you can see somebody else’s drawing. SuperHerosSquad lets you to create a comic book using heroes. With SuperActionComicMaker, you can create your own super comic hero and tell your story with him. SlideStory lets you share your photos with your narrated voice. SlideShare lets you upload your powerpoint presentations and share it with others. SpokenText is a text to speech, audio converter. You can record PDFs, plain texts, ppts, web pages and convert them to speech automatically and listen to them anywhere you want! ScoopIt lets you create online magazine where you can share links, websites, blogs and web tools with it. Smore is a tool to create online flyers for anything and share them instantly. Shidonni is a virtual place for kids where they draw their own characters and watch them come to life and play games. Solvr is a tool that lets you work collaboratively and online to solve a problem. SpellingCity is a website offering a database of more than 42,000 spelling words and sentences. SurveyMonkey is a tool to create surveys and polls to share it with others. StoryMaps lets you create your stories with text, multimedia, and interactive functions. SynonymsFinder is a tool to find synonyms. SimpleMeet.me enables you to chat instantly with everyone from your favorite web browser, without any account or software to install. SpeakingImage is an application for creating interactive images and share them with others. ScreenCast-o-matic lets you capture your screen activity instantly. StoryTimeforme is a website full of stories for children. SpiderScribe is an online mind mapping and brainstorming tool. Smories are original stories that are read by children to others. Come back often for the next letter on the alphabet!

Mobile phones are everywhere! They are in our pockets, in our bags and for the last a few years; they are in our schools and classrooms. Although so many schools ban mobile phones in the classroom, there are many different activities that we can turn them into effective learning tools. Today, I would like to mention some fun and easy mobile phone activities that all teachers can apply in their lessons. Nearly all mobile phones come with a camera to take pictures or film, a place to take notes, and a tool to record your voice. By using these features, here are some of the activities that you can create: Simply, ask your students to choose a picture from their mobile phones, put them in groups and ask them to show their pictures to each other and talk about it. This is a great icebreaker activity. You can also ask your students to find a picture of two girls. So, everyone check their picture gallery. The first student that finds it wins. You can ask them to find a picture of a TV, a birthday party and many other things. They can talk about those pictures. Using only one smart phone in the class, create a chain story. Record you voice by saying "and you thought dragons didn’t exist  …" or " There are three children sitting on a log near a stream. One of them looks up the sky and says …" and give the phone to the next student in the chain. He/she says the next sentence in the story and passes the phone to the next student. Before coming to the classroom, ask students to take a picture of different part of the school. It can be a picture of a tree, the door of the lab, the principal’s table. Collect the pictures, show them on the projector or they can show their pictures from their phones to each other. Everyone try to guess where the place is in school. Students take pictures of each other. It can be the eyes, nose, hair, hands etc. Students try to guess who that person can be. According to your topic, ask your students to take a picture of their house/bedroom and talk about it in class, or take a picture of their families and talk about it. They can take pictures of their summer holidays and show them in class. Show students a starting picture and ask them to work in groups and take pictures to finish the story. Each group presents their story. Students work in groups. They show a picture to each other. The members of the group try to remember what each other’s picture is. Ask students to take two pictures. The rest of the class tries to spot the similarities and differences. Each students record their voices while describing someone in the classroom. They listen and try to find who that person is. They can mingle around the class, find a pair and they can make each other listen to their recording. They can also describe an object, a country or a famous person depending on your topic. You give some questions to the students and they walk around the class and interview each other and record their voices at the same time. You listen to the recording at the end. The interview can be with story characters. Students can film or record their voices of their first week of school. This will be like a video or audio diary. They listen/watch it at the end of the year. This can be a summer project homework too. Ask students to film themselves a minute for 7 days and share this when they come back from school. Students can take the pictures of things that start with A, B … and share them in class. And many more activities … the world is ours and more to come soon!

Today the world is undergoing a digital change that cannot be dragged back, changing our newest generation of digital users as well. If we look around, we can easily see the effects and the radical impact of the latest technologies on our learners that are growing up in this digital wave. As well as changing our learners, the new technologies have had an impact on our teaching methodologies. The innovative and creative ways of using the new technologies help us to engage our learners in their own learning using different materials and activities in ways in which traditional education doesn’t seem capable of. While technology tools are offering many different ways of creating new materials for our learners, this may be scary at the same time as there are thousands of web tools and apps that are waiting to be discovered by teachers. And today, I have a solution for you! If you or your institution are looking for online tools that can be used in different levels, can be integrated nearly in all subjects, and which let even the least tech savvy teachers easily create online learning activities without any pop up pages or unwanted ads/banners; meet Raptivity today. Raptivity is a package of more than 180 learning interactions which let you create professional looking interactive learning activities such as games, simulations, brainteasers, interactive diagrams, virtual worlds and many more. After choosing the best package for you, you can easily download it to your computer and start exploring the interactions that you can customize to fit into your content. Raptivity has an extensive in-built library of surveys, simulations, 3D objects and games. You can create flip books, picture shows, drag and drop activities, classification exercises, simulations, surveys, video streaming where you can add questions or write captions, flashcards, diagrams, online glossary, 3D e-books and many more. Here are some of the examples of the interactions you can create using Raptivity.  The best part is that you do not need to know any computer programming to create them. When you choose the activity that you want to create, the pop up page shows the summary of what you need to do and then you can built on the activity and change the wording and the pictures easily; or, you can use the same template to create your own unique activity. Each tool has an extensive screen that explains what the interaction is about and tells you what to do in order just like it is on the summary. You can simply change the fonts, words, sentences, upload your own pictures, add your own videos and record your voice for your activities. In short, everything is customizable according to your needs! It also includes a spell check which makes this tool more powerful. Click on the pictures to view. When you finish, you can save your activity to "your examples" page and come back any time to do changes on the activity. You can save your finished activity to your computer as a flash or HTML 5 which lets you share your activities on mobile devices or other online platforms that you are using such as websites, blogs or Moodle. You can also use your final products offline. All activities include immediate feedback to the learners which make learning process fast and accurate. These interactions are also mapped to different learning styles and models such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, Gagne’s Nine Events, Keller’s ARCS Model and Experiential learning. Although Raptivity seems like providing interactions that can be used in upper level of learners, most of the activities can be used for young learners as well. One of my favourite activities has been the 3D e-book. You can flip the pages as if you are reading a real book; you can add your text and pictures as well as recording your voice for it. You can create a 3D book for all level of students on all subjects. You can ask your students to read it and answer the questions about the story. You can create a collaborative story with your students. Students can draw the pictures for the story and provide the text for it. There is also the 3D Question Book in which students can read the book that you have created and then answer multiple answer questions. This activity is great for checking understanding in any text that the students have read. Another one is the "Museum", where you go into a big door, and click on the doors to read, listen or watch the surprises behind it. This is another way to create interactive reading or listening activities for students. Next one is the "Car Driving" activity in which you drive a car and answer the questions that pop up on the screen.  The questions can be related to anything; they can be about the story that you have just read, a mathematics problem that students can practice, or a question about the last topic in your history lesson. This is sure to be a favourite activity for boys! You can also use "Flashcards" or "Classification Exercise" where children have to drag the right pieces under the right categories. You can also set a time limit to use this activity. Learners can categorize the adjectives, nouns and adverbs; or they can categorize the V1-2-3. My another favourite one is the "Wild Cards" where learners try to find the missing words by writing letters into the right spaces. You can give them a hint to make the activity less challenging. You can play this game in the classroom as a whole class game where you practice the newly learnt vocabulary. You can divide the class into two where students compete with each other to find the words. If you like this, you will also like the "Escape the Hangman" where students try to find the answer of the questions and save the man! I also loved all the activities in Games Turbo Pack.  You can create a "Million Dollar Quiz" with your own questions that target your learners. That is so much fun to play in class. I also liked the "Bet, Answer and Win" activity where students try to raise their money by answering the questions true. Teaching vocabulary can be amused as well by using different interactive activities such as crosswords, connect the words or swap the letters. If you are working with videos, Raptivity has many features that let you boost the effectiveness of them. You can add captions or insert questions in videos to create interesting and motivating materials for our students. In short, Raptivity can be a whole package for your school to standardize the use of technology in all levels, boosting your students’ reading, speaking, writing, listening and critical thinking skills; engaging them in their own learning and bringing interactivity and creativity in your teaching. The more you explore this software, the more features you discover. If you would like to try Raptivity, you contact for a demo. Enjoy the limitless activities and the benefits!

At last! Our latest app "Dictionary by Kids" is on AppStore today! In this app, we have again worked with kindergarten children who are only 5 years old. They have drawn, coloured and recorded their voices for the pictures. Our IT teacher, Demet Küyük, put everything together  to create this cute app. This is the forth application of the series. You can  download it from AppStore searching "terakki". It is free  and fun to practice vocabulary. Yay! Read more:  Daisy and Drago on Appstore!  Bubble and Pebble" on AppStore! Daisy, Drago, the Magic Wand on AppStore!  

I am a gamer! I have always been and being a teacher didn’t change this too. On this post, you will read my favourite games on my mobile devices.  TempleRun is one of the games that I have been playing for the last two months whenever I get bored. The game’s logic is very simple. You are continuously running in a temple where there are some traps. You can’t slow down, you only run and jump, and hope and slide. The challenge is to tilt your device wherever the road is getting narrower. Be careful not to fall down as the monkeys are following to catch you. Don’t forget to collect the coin to upgrade your avatar! If you like this, you will like TempleRun2 as it is 3D and it offers more variety. You may also like to play Jetpack Joyride where you run away on railways and you jump up and down on the trains and collect the coins. Just like the TempleRun, you run and run …  TapTheFrog is one of the cutest apps on the market! You have a cute frog character with whom you play a variety of mini games. As the name suggests, you tap on the frog to beat the challenges. Such as, you need to touch all the frogs in a certain time, or you need to wait to touch until a frog turns to pink. You are competing against time with your fingers. There are many levels that you can play without getting bored and you get a little bit sad when you finish all the mini games and have to wait until they release the newer version. As they say, once you hop, you can’t stop. The Creeps is another addictive game that is both on my phone and ipad. It is like a tower defence game where you have to kill all the creatures before they scare the little kid on the bed. There are many levels that you can play without getting bored though the very last episodes are far way difficult. If this game cannot make you scare enough, you can try Plants and Zombies where you have to protect your house from Zombies by planting flowers. I am also a big fan of Hidden Object games where you need to click on the picture to find the objects to complete the level. Most of these games come with a story which makes these games more fun to play with. There are many games of this kind, but favourites will always be Nick Chase, all episodes of Treasure Seekers, Mushroom Age and Weird Park.  Geveze Sınıf is another favourite of mine. Though the name of the app is Turkish, you don’t need to know any. You make two students in a class talk to each other by tapping on them without being caught by the teacher. It is fun to play with and takes you to your old school days. If you are a fan of Machinarium, you will love to have it on your iPhone or iPad. This is an adventure game which has a hand drawn style.You control your small robot in different levels and solve the puzzles. It also comes with many language options. Sneezies are super cute and furry head who are trapped in floating bubbles. You only need to touch their bubbles and make them sneeze. As you touch one of them, it spreads a burst of sneezing powder and this causes a chain reaction. Though it gets more difficult in upper levels, this is still an old favourite of mine.  The hero of Where is My Water game is a cute swampy crocodile. It wants to take a shower and you need to get the water into his shower by placing a pool, pipe or a tap. It’s addictive at the beginning but then it gets very difficult and bore you a little bit. Still, it’s on my favourite list! Tetris was a phenomenon when I was a child. Spell Tower is a similar game that you string letters together by drawing lines until you form a complete word at least three letters long. You can draw it to any direction, even backwards. It is challenging and fun! I like racing games as long as you have missions to complete. Here is an old favourite of mine, Crazy Taxi which I used to play on Sega. Your goal is to drive your taxi, pick up passengers and drop them off at their destination. You need to drive very very fast and it is legal to exceed the speed limit. Fun to have an old favourite of mine on my phone.  I used to play Monkey Island on my computer; it is good to have it on my phone too. The character is Guybrush who wishes to be a pirate. Your goal is to solve the puzzles by clicking, answering the right question in the dialogues and completing your objectives.  The last but certainly not least will be Sally’s Spa on my list. This is kind a time management based beauty spa game. You guide your customers to different station throughout their spa. Every level, you upgrade your spa and your staff.  This is a game that I do not want it to finish. That’s all for now and more to come later …

While technology is helping us to improve the four skills of our students, there are many other tools that help us to improve our vocabulary. Here are some of the tools that can help us and our learner to boost the level of their vocabulary knowledge. Lingro is a web tool where you can turn any website into a clickable dictionary. Just copy and paste your link and go to the page, read your text and click on the words that you think you don’t know and Lingro will give the definition for you.  Lexipedia lets you with the definitions of words in a webbed diagram with related words and their definition. You can also listen to the audio pronunciations. Shai is a visual dictionary that gives you the definition of the word that you enter and the related pictures from Flickr, Google or Yahoo. VocabGrabber is another tool that analyses any text you have provided, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. WordHippo is a multitasker tool for finding the opposite or similar words, translate it to another language, find a sentence with your word or to find words that rhymes. SnappyWords is an online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and draw connections to associated words. Just place your cursor over the words to see the meaning. JustTheWord is tool to find the combinations or the alternatives for a word. EasyDefine is my favourite tool on this list. Write a list of words and you can get the definitions and print it out, or find the synonyms, generate flashcards/worksheets or quiz yourself. The tool does everything for you, you only list the words. More to come soon …