If you are looking for new ideas to make your students enjoy writing activities, here is an excellent tool and a very clever idea: TelescopicText. Click on the greyed words and you see that it will unfold new words and sentences. In the end, you realize that a simple sentence becomes a reading text with full of descriptive words. If you like it and would like to give it a try, click here. Think of  a very short sentence such as "I did" or "I studied." Then click on the words that you would like to insert every time before or after the words that you have chosen. Click "Fold" often to see how your text is going to be seen. You can read a very detailed description on how to use this tool here. Here are some ideas to use this tool in the lesson: Group your students and give each group the same sentence and ask them to come up with the longest sentence. Ask students to make a sentence longer by adding only adjectives or adverbs. Create a telescopictext and ask children to answer questions as they expand and read it.  Give each group a sentence and ask them to modify the text with a noun, or with an adjective or using only an adverb. Give them a sentence such as "He lives" then ask questons to give some ideas to children to expand their texts such as "Where does he live?" "What kind of a place is it?" "What is his name?" "Who is he?" . Hope you enjoy this tool as much as I do!! Any more ideas, please share  below. p.s This tool won’t work with Internet explorer, get Chrome or Firefox.

Bookr  is wonderful tool for creating online books using Flickr pictures. Go to the tool, and search for photos by writing tags. Drag and drop the pictures on the empty page and write your text underneath the pictures.  Whenever you need to find a new picture, look for different tags. If you like, you can add more pages by clicking on the + button or make less clicking on the - button. When you finish,publish and get a link to share it with others. Here are some ides to use this tool in our lessons: Ask children to create a brochure for a holiday resort, a house or a country. They can print them out and vote in the class for the best one. If they have their own Flickr accounts, they can create their own photobooks. They can write about their families, pets, summer holiday etc. Create a book without the text and ask you students to write the text for you. Create a book with pictures and texts, read it and ask questions about them. Students can summarize a story using Flickr pictures and with their own text. If you read a story, ask your students to create a photobook that tells and shows what happens next. Students can create a photobook of the characters that they have just read in a story. If you like this tool, try these tools as well: Flickr Poet StoryBird

Have you ever wondered how the world looked like the day you were born? I did! and here is my answer: 01.10.81 Take Me Back.to is a time machine web tool that will take you to the past and tell you what happened on that day. The tool comes up with the popular songs list, books, movies, fashion style, important news of the day and advertisement.  Go to the website, write the date and learn what happened on that day and you can share this fun using Facebook o the link! Here are some ideas to use this tool with our students: This tool is great for practising past tense in the classroom. Students can write what happened on the they they were born or they can talk/write about a specific date in the past. Students can compare two different dates and they can write about the differences and similarities. You can show the details and ask students to make guesses about the year. Create a worksheet using the information on this tool about different dates and ask them to match the dates with the information. Enjoy exploring the past!

Would you like send an e-mail to a certain date in the future to be read by yourself or someone else? If you want,here is the service for you: EmailFuture Email future is a tool to send emails to be read in the future. Write the email addresses of the people (up to four) that you want to send the email. Write the subject, write your message, decide on the day that you want to send and here it goes. Don’t forget to click on the activation link. Here are some ideas to use this in class: Students can send an e-mail to themselves at the beginning of the term and they can write about what they want to accomplish that year and they set the date to the last week of school. Students send a message to their future selves about the goals that they would like to achieve that year. Ask students to write their expectations from a course or the lesson. Read it at the last day to see if they are fulfilled. Send email reminders of the exams, important dates, birthdays …E-mail them for important events in the future. Students write about their plans next week and send it to you. or simply send an email to yourself  so that you never forget anniversaries, birthdays important dates …

Symface is a tool that lets you play with an emoticon to find how you feel today. Just move the cursor from - to + and find the right feeling to describe your feelings today. You can change the colour of the emoticon. When you have found the right expression that describes your day, write why you feel that way and share the fun with others via email or social networking sites. Here are some ideas to use this tool in the classroom: It can be great to use this tool at the beginning of the term to talk about how the students feel coming back to school. We can also use this tool when it is the last day of school. Sure, there will be many happy faces. If you are teaching feelings, this tool can be a great one to present in the classroom. Ask students to use this tool and post in on your class’s Facebook page (if you have), if you don’t have ask them to mail it to you. Enjoy! You may also be interested: DrawaStickMan

As we are approaching the New Year, I thought it would be great to look back to catch with some of my favourite web tools that I have featured this year. BuildYourWildSelf is a tool that you can use to attach different animal parts to a human body and share it as a link or as a print out with others. 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. You can search from professional artists’ artwork to start building up your story and you can set up a class account, work and moderate your students’ works easily. Lyrics Training is a tool that lets you watch and listen to music videos from YouTube. As you watch and listen to the songs, you fill in the missing words that appear underneath the video. Popplet is a great tool for collaborative mind mapping where you can add pictures, videos, text and even drawings. It is fully customizable and you can collaborate on a popplet with your students to brainstorm. PhotoPeach lets you create slideshows with your pictures, text and music. Moreover, it gives you the chance to add a quiz on your slideshow.  Vocaroo is a tool to record your voice without downloading a software and share it with others. This tool is great for speaking and listening activities! HowJsay is an online speaking dictionary of English word. The words are pre-recorded individually and this is not in a form of synthetic speech. You can hear the American and the British accent of the words with a clear voice. 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.  TodaysMeet is a back-channel room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions and share ideas. If you are using mobile technologies in your classroom, this tool is the best!  Textivate allows you to automatically generate multiple different exercises using the text that you have provided, ranging from fill in the blanks, missing words to scrambled sentences. They have twenty seven variations that you can try. OneWord is a tool that gives you one word and sixty seconds to write about it. This tool is great for writing exercises.  MailVu is a tool to create and send instant video emails. You can record yourself or upload a video. This tool also lets you to set a self-destruct time. LearnClick lets you create cloze tests, multiple choice quizzes or matching exercises from the text that you have provided.  Pixton is a tool to easily create, share, remix and publish your comic strip stories with others.   Enjoy these web tools before the year ends.

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.

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!