A Bunch of Tools | 21st Century Skills Training

 Hey friends! 

How are you? How was your week? I hope you did fine and ready to learn more about 21^st Century Skills. This week’s training was all about tools that we can use in our teaching process and work life. I’ve found some of them really interesting and helpful, and I will share them with you further in this post. Embed from Getty Images  

 

At the beginning of the session, our teacher Melda Yılmaz presented us with 6 different tools and showed how to use them properly. The first tool was Edpuzzle, which is a website that allows you to add questions and notes to a video and make it interactive. I think that this tool is very useful in teaching, especially with asynchronous learning. Also, this website gives you a chance to mark your students’ work. What we all wish for! 

 

The second tool we’ve talked about was Animoto. Animoto is an online tool that helps you to create different and interesting videos without putting too much effort in professional editing programs. It has readily made templates and themes that you can choose for and make your own video. While teaching having a tool like Animoto is crucial because as teachers, we’d like to create authentic input for our lessons and Animoto is one way of doing it. 

 

Another tool is Weebly! Weebly is a website creator. It has so many different themes, layouts, options while creating your own website and it’s easy. I do not need to talk about it more but be sure that it is perfect. 

 

The last tool I want to mention from what our teacher has shown us is Tiki-Toki. This is a perfect tool, trust me! When I saw it in our class I loved it. Basically, Tiki-Toko is a timeline maker, however, it looks so professional and eye-catching and this is what we want in our classes, drawing attention. Additionally, you can create 3D timelines and they look absolutely perfect. They can be used in different ways such as grammar teaching, storytelling, journaling and more. Please take a look!

 

Then, we, as students, started to present our tools that we think is helpful. I’d like to talk about the first one because it is made by Turkish people and it is Voscreen. This tool is similar to Edpuzzle but it is completely on language learning with pre-made videos, functions and levels of learning. I think that it can be useful for every level but for upper intermediate and advanced learners. 

 

The second tool is Venngage. This tool is similar to Canva -I’ve talked about it in my previous posts- but it has more templates and choices. You may also find it useful; I do! 

 

The last tool I wanna talk about is iSpring. As a group, we presented this tool and we found it very useful. It has different features such as LMS, cloud storage and iSpring Suite. The most interesting part of it is iSpring suit which is a toolkit that you download to your computer and create interactive talk simulations. If you are a teacher, you know how much it means having an interactive tool. The only thing that is sad about it is its being paid but I think it would worth every Lira you gave. 

 

For this week, I need to say goodbye. Please, take of yourselves and enjoy your week. See you!