How you end a semester determines how you begin the next one..

Hello Everyone!

Now it is finally June. I love summer so I am very excited for a full season to begin. New beginnings always happen when old ones ends, of course. In our situation this thing is the spring semester of our school. It is so strange that we are finishing our 2nd year in university and when I look back, I can realize how much we have grown and learned during this time. I am also very emotional as this post will be my last for this semester. I enjoyed every second of this writing experience and I will miss it with my whole heart. 

I think this lesson has given me so much during the semester. I really learned excited things like making videos with the help of artifical intelligence and even making a picture turn into a 3D version as if I see it in real life. It has been my most enjoyable lesson and I think it showed me lots of cool things that I can brag about when I am with my friends out of school. I have always thought that using technological tools is hard before I have taken this class as it was something ' out of my league'. As a language student I was never so much interested with technology because it always looked like something that a mathematics student can do, however, now I know that I can, everyone can do it as well as math students. 

Using technology in English learning has always been something I do. At the beginning of my own learning journey I used Youtube to watch videos and I dowloaded some applications to practice, however, probably because of my own school experiences, I never thought that I can also use it in teaching English. For example, my highschool teacher never used things like them. When we first started to take this lesson, I could not understand how writing a blog will help us to learn this teaching with technology concept. I ignored the fact that technology is in the core of our lives right now. How can we teach something without using such an important factor? This is the most important thing that this lesson has ever thought to me. When we started doing infographics as our first task other than the vlog, it made me realize that technology can be integrated in every aspect. When I searched for my topic of my infographic, when I used my creativity and when I search different ways to use my English, I tought if that comes helpfull to me, I cannot think what the little kids would think, and how much they can enjoy and so on. 

Creating that many tasks also made me understand that from the beginning, we have seen many different ways to integrate language in technology, and it can be applied to appeal every taste. For example, for the children who love colouring, we saw a wonderfull 3D creater or we saw one that includes speaking with AI's itself for children who love interacting with others. The most enjoyable task that I have done was writing this vlog. Sometimes my writing may not be thrilling, I can accept that, however, I believe that writing is a wonderfull way to express a person's self. This is also a kind of activity for children who love writing, just like me. The one that I love the least was probably podcasting as I got a little bit shy and even though it was short, there was a lot effort in it. Preparing it's script and trying to concentrate and be cautious about pronunciation... They were all so hard specifically when they were combined.

The only suggestion I can give for this lesson is that it would be amazing if we got feedbacks to understand what kind of mistakes we made. Yes, we did get our peers' comments but a professional's feedback's place cannot be filled. 

Our teacher told us that next year we will have a similar course and in that course we will be looking from teacher's perspective! Untill then, I will miss taking technology class, and writing here. 

Do you know what they say? How you end one season determines how you begin the next. Therefore I will be ending the post with energy and happiness, and with lots of love to you.

Hopefully, see you later.

xoxo, Melike.