Yacapaca is free Web 2.00 tool and a great web tool for both educators and students. It allows the teachers to access a lot of prepared quizes. In addition, teachers can create their own quizes. Quizes can be graded automatically by the program. They can also create surveys, tests,eporfolios, short-text tests. You can share assessment and create homework for your students.
2:Click on I'm a teacher and start by creating an account.
3:Then you should set up your class list and you should give a unique code to each student.
4: You will access to the process of creating new assignment.
5: You should select the course from different sources. After selecting the course, you should choose the assessment. Then, you select the students and click finish to create the activitivy for your students.
Here is my video about creating an assingment in Yacapaca:
Why to use Yacapaca?
The Yacapaca is used for motivating the students.
Students learn to set and manage their own targets.
Using instant, formative and feedback guides the students and make them to look deeper and learn more.
The teachers give the quizes time and this leads students to maintain concentration.
What can you do with Yacapaca ?
As teachers you can set the time for each question
You can personalize each quiz to secure your documents for no cheating
Select the accessibility of your material to others
Create tags so that other teachers can find your quiz
2. Enter your access key given by the teacher to this cite.
3. You will access to all the work your teacher has assigned for you.
4. When you sign in for the first time, you have to create an account for yourself.
5. Students have to-do lists where there are assignments assigned by the teachers. You should click to any assignment to see more information and start to do it. By clicking go button the students will start to do assignments. Finally, when you click the save button, your teacher will be able to see your work.
Using Yacapaca in EFL classrooms :
Teachers can give feedback to students and the tests become more fun.
Teachers should choose prepared materials by clicking English&Media and choosing TEFL.
There are spelling, grammar, punctuation ...etc. activities in that section. By clicking them the teachers will access to different assignments from the lits.
Usign online sources for students will be more enjoyable. They not only learn doing exercises but also they will be able to use some online tools. The exercise pages are colorful.
Here is an example for a spelling activity.
Sources:
For more detailed information you can read this sites.
By using wikis, we can create a web page that we can interact with our students and other people to help them learn something. We can create different sources for our students to help them find a lot of information. By using wikis we can help students to share their comments on different topics. We learn different ways to use wikis in classroom
English is the global language and plays a significant role in the world. It is used as the lingua franca for communication, education, business and media contexts like TV, newspaper and Internet. Having a common language with each others make both the people and the institutions to be more interested in English language learning or teaching. As it gained an incrediable role in the society, it became a popular content in education to satisfy people’s needs. Ministry of education accepts the English as a compulsory course to improve people’s knowledge skills and to contribute to their future profession. As it is a foreign language or second language for students, teachers have an important role for teaching it. Although students still don’t cope with their native language and don’t understand it’s rules effectively, they have to face with the new language in which there are grammar rules different from their native language rules. By learning the new language, they start to compare and contrast it with their native language and this leads teachers to have difficulties in classrooms.
There are many challenges high school teachers are faced with while they are teaching. In this blog, there will be some researches about different persons point of view in different levels. When we generally look at different levels, it seems that all levels nearly have same challenges. Ayşe Kızıldağ did a research about the challenges of English language teachers. The participants in this study are 20 English language teachers, including fourteen females and six males working at public primary schools in Turkey.
According to that research conducted by Ayşe Kızıldağ(2009) there are three categories for challenges of English language teachers. These categories are; institutional, instructional and socio-economic. Institutional category includes lack of institutional support and lack of understanding the nature of language teaching, heavy workload,crowded classrooms. Instructional one contains busy curriculum, inappropriate textbooks, lack of materials and unsatisfactory placement test. The last one, socio-economic refers to lack of support from the families.
If you need to read more here is the site: http://www.iejee.com/1_3_2009/kizildag.pdf
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In addition, Gandara, Maxwell-Jolly& Driscoll (2005) have found that the most important challenges of teaching English are teacher-parent communication and understanding of home-community issues, lack of time to teach English learners both English and academic subjects, lack of assistance at home, lack of tools like assesment materials and instruments to teach
In addition some challenges can be because of teachers ethnic. Chen & Cheng (2009) did a research on the challenges of three South African teachers in Taiwan and found that they have difficulties because of their South African accents, racism, crowded classrooms, teaching phonics, classroom management or having something to teach they were not familiar with. Similarly, Walia classified the challenges in two parts. Instructional challenges; lack of enthusiasm towards the subject, decision on suitable methodology, lack of curriculum based on language needs and overcrowded classrooms and Professional challenges; low salary, lack of financial support and lack of cooperation.
Moreover, when we look at the high schools in Cyprus we can find the same challenges, teachers have to work hard for effective teaching. Teachers complain about the lack of materials, heavy workload. I think as we will become an English language teacher , knowing the challenges we may face will help us in our future profession. I think a teacher can find teaching English difficult when he or she has some students that give no attention to learning the language. The teacher will need to motivate them for learning. Also, we will have crowded classrooms include different types of students. Some of them will be fast learners and others not. We need to have a balance in class for both types. We should choose a method that suitable for both levels. Teaching English to high schools students is completely difficult for us.
In this video you will hear about the pros and cons about the teaching English in high schools. I want you to focus only the cons of the teaching English to understand the challenges more.
What do you think about your future profession?
Do you think that you will have the same challenges?
What are the some challenges you are faced with when you become a teacher?
Kızıldağ, Ayşe.Teaching English in Turkey: Dialogues with teachers about the challenges in public primary schools.International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education.Vol.1(3).2009.
Gandara,
Patricia., Maxwell-Jolly, Julie & Driscol, Anne(2005). Listening to Teachers of English Language
Learners. A survey of California
Teachers’ Challenges, Experiences and Professional Development Needs.
Chen,
Cheryl Wer-yu & Cheng Yuh-show(2009).
A case study on foreign English teacher’s challenges in Taiwanese
elementary schools.
Walia,
Divya Nimit.Opportunities and
Challenges in ELT: A Teacher’s Pride vs. Plight.
In what parts of the teaching do you think you will have more challenges?
I think using audocity is very helpful for students. We can use it for students because they can improve their listening and speaking skills. They can practise pronunciation. Students can find TTS somehow strange for them, they cannot feel good for not speaking with a real person. Although it's very useful for them, they don't feel relaxed about an online woman/man.I think using text to speech will help both students and teachers. Students will pronounce the words better, they will make better conversation like in meaningful way.
I think with teachers pets we can create different types of exercises. In video I saw that we need just highlight the sentence and then we can find a lot of things. So it's very useful for teacher to design different activities to attract the students.
I think teacher's pet will be very helpful for creating new activities. It's very appropriate for teachers to lead students meaningful learning. I want to learn more about how can we create class activities effectively and help students learn better through activities.
I have learned creating synonym, anthonym and jumbled paragraph activities for students. I think these will help me in my teaching profession.
Interactive web pages help us to make higher grades. they give us feedback if we answer wrong. Also they give us some clues about the true answer. We can try it again and again. ;I want to learn more about how can I create exercises, quizes for my EFL student. Using these web pages helps us to save more times.
We learned about hot potatoes activities. I think they are very useful for teachers. We can create different exercise for students like Jquiz,Jmatch,Jmix. when we use these we use our time effectively.
I think if the text is with simple language and not complicated it will read more easily. I want to learn how can I read some text more easily with the help of computers
Task 3 light blue words are common ones and dark yellow ones are rare ones.
I choose also as an example, generally before also the text has verb and noun and after the also the text has noun or prepositions. I think it's very confused. With this we can make generalization about the usage of words, where they used mostly in what way.
I think these strategies will help me when I become a teacher. I will use all of them to analyze the students. At the end of the quiz types are very helpful to create test on the internet
Word cloud will help us to find frequent words!
Blogger will help students to discuss with their classmates, share their opinion.
They will learn to use technologic activities effectively.
I think computer is very helpful to learn the keywords because if we have a long text we have to look all the text but with computer we can easily find the keywords. Finding keywords from text is waste of time. Computer do it more quickly :) So computer is better in finding.[001] cker ... and you don't have any candy for SALE here anyhow". "We sure don't". The bart
[002] Ross so very soon now, rang up her first SALE of the day and counted back the change.
[003] advertising his ham-radio equipment for SALE this weekend? He hasn't used it now for s
[004] they arrange for an annual exhibit and SALE of paintings and sculpture at the Philmon
[005] ea will be included in the exhibition and SALE. Among them will be Marc Shoettle, Ben
[006] makes cleaning and drying equipment for SALE largely in Texas. They've been in Dallas
[007] last year so we can get more money on a SALE", says Jack Martin, who sells J. I. Case
This is the example from my multi concordenca. With this I can see the word sale's function in different sentences.
I can apply the vocabulary profiler to our text to make students understand what are the functional words, what are the content words, what are the frequent and less frequent words. In this way students will be able to explore the words in colour. It is possible to get students to use vocabulary profiler in their courses. This will help the students learn the word types. We can give them firstly a short text to make them understand basic things. We can make the students to guess the words without knowing what about the colour is. Both word cloud and vocabulary profile are the basic forms of finding frequent words. In wordle and lextutor we have more information about words. For example, in wordle we can see where the most frequent words were used, we can see the complete sentence of the word like we saw in the example of materials. In lextutor also we see detailed information about words. We can use word cloud to see most frequent and less frequent words. However, we can use vocabulary profiler to explore the words in colour, what are the types of words like they are function words or content word. So vocabulary profiler more detailed than word cloud.
I think vocabulary profiler includes words different characteristics. In the video it shows functional words, content words,more frequent and less frequent words. Vocabulary profiler is like the parts of the text. Prism shows us the most frequent words in English. I think the same words don't have the same colour in different genres. They can have different functions or they can be less frequent or more for other people.
I identified correctly all the words in my tree tries Lextutor's Frequency Trainer. I think non-native speakers score better results because when they learn that language, they start learning from most frequent words. For example, in high school our teacher gave us a list of first 1,000 words in English so we learned more frequent ones. I generally choose the right frequency for words so I didn't surprised too much. I think word frequency vary in different languages. Both American and British English have their own word.
Knowing the most commonly used words helps us to teach English more easily. Generally, in textbooks the language is simple, writers use most commonly used words to make the meaning clear. Learning common words helps students to communicate with others because everybody can understand most commonly used words. Students can learn most commonly used words in their daily lifes but teaching them for these words will help them. I think dictionaries are not enough sometimes. Suppose we have a context that include unknown words we want to look for meanings but when we look at dictionaries we can confused about in what content were thet used. So if teachers create students wordlist according to their text, it will be very educational. Students will learn more words.
When I read some books about literature like Oedipus the King etc., they are all in old English so I cannot understand the unknown words from content. However, if it is a normal book or an article sometimes I understand the word's meaning from content. Also, if there are any tips about unknown words like in the slides in which there was knife so we can predict stabbing. In our course books sometimes there are matching activities before reading the text. We try to predict the meaning of the words that are used in content.
Concordle helps me to see more information about the text. When I look at wordle I just see the most frequent words but in concordle I see where the most frequent words are used. It shows me different places where the material word was used. Generally material word is follewed by a preposition or verb and materials come after adjectives. Authentic is stronger collocate of materials in this text.
Three of the top five words match with my keyword summary. These are learning, language and teaching. This word cloud can help us to show the students most frequent words in some text. Also, we can show them which words they use mostly when they write something. They can learn just the main topic of a text, just keywords so they can understand the text completely, what about it is.
Data-driving learning is more suited to individuals. each individual has unique characteristics, they have unique knowledge. It's based on individuals experiences.
Yacapaca is free Web 2.00 tool and a great web tool for both educators and students. It allows the teachers to access a lot of prepared quizes. In addition, teachers can create their own quizes. Quizes can be graded automatically by the program. They can also create surveys, tests,eporfolios, short-text tests. You can share assessment and create homework for your students. 
