Pixton EDU - Virtual Avatars and Classrooms

Hello there, this is me, my avatar on Pixton, which is a website where you can create your avatar and join classrooms created by teachers from all around the world. You can join these classes and partake in various activities that are shared. If you want to join my class, you can do so by clicking HERE. I hope this website helps you with your future endeavors as either learners or teachers!

Quizlet - Farm Animals

Hey everyone! What I got for you today is a short, entertaining quiz from Quizlet, which is an online quiz platform where you can create and share quizzes as a teacher with your students. This is a short quiz on farm animals, which you can access from HERE, and I hope you enjoy it and maybe learn some new animals!

Voki - Introduction to my Blog

Voki - Abe Lincoln


Hello again, everyone! In this post, I have borrowed some help from a friend of mine called "Abraham Lincoln". As you may know, he is one of the former presidents of the United States of America, and he accepted to introduce my blog to you guys. I hope you enjoy listening to my friend Abe Lincoln!

Second Life: A Virtual World of Opportunities

Hello, everyone! In this article I will be briefly talking about Second Life, an online virtual world launched on 23rd of June, 2003. Second Life is a free-access client program that can be booted up by its producers', a San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab, own viewer or via alternative third party viewers.
Second Life users, also called residents, create virtual representations of themselves called avatars and are able to interact with places, objects and other avatars. They can explore the world (known as the grid) meet other residents, socialize, participate in both individual and group activities, build, create, shop, trade virtual property and services with ones another.
By 2013, Second Life had around one million regular users, and its immensely similar to multiplayer online role-playing games, although Linden Lab stresses that its creation was not a game.
In the screenshot above, we can see the Erasmus office for Istanbul University, where potential Erasmus students have the opportunity to visit and be informed about the procedures that they will be involved with. With the in-game "World" tab on the top left of the hotbar, you can search for landmarks and specific places you'd like to visit and simply teleport to your desired location. When you teleport to a certain landmark, there might be other types of maps or a main hub where you initially spawn, so you might have to run or fly around in order to find your desired destination. Flight controls are engaged with either the "E" or "Home" button, and the controls are W, A, S, D for directional movement and "Page Up / Page Down" for your altitude.
This map can be accessed via "Istanbul University Erasmus" on the Search tab of the World section. After you teleport to the location, start flying upwards for about 2 minutes, and you'll reach the bottom of the Erasmus map. You can fly over to the side and end up on a very user friendly map with quite nice textures. There are other buildings which highlight the specific procedures that you will be faced with before, during and after your Erasmus application.


Your imagination is limitless, and the program is very easy to get used to. Everything is in the main screen if you need extra help, and the button combinations are not too foreign for anyone who are used to MMO-RPG video games and such. I hope this bried article on Second Life has given you some inspiration to try it out, and maybe even help your Erasmus related endeavors.

Video Games and Education - "Are Video Games Really That Bad?" - BBC Horizon 2015

Hello again, everyone! What I have for you today is a very contemporary and ever-growing topic. Video games and how they are perceived in relation to education. In a lecture today, we have watched this very good document above which describes many situations and cases regarding this topic, and now in a couple of short paragraphs I will be summarizing it to you.
As we all know, video games are a huge part of today's world and its inhabitants. It's not just the younger generation who's involved in it, everyone from young adults to the elderly play video games. In certain cases, some even better than what popular belief is, that is, only young people can be good at video games. There is however, another side of this coin in terms of popular belief: violent video games make people violent. In this video and my brief summary, it will be demonstrated how that is not the case at all.
First of all, to be able to talk about the benefits of video games, and how they can actually be applied to education, we have to go a bit into detail about "Gamification".  Gamification is the process of taking something that already exists – a website, an enterprise application, an online community – and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation, engagement, and loyalty. This can also be applied to classroom environments. A primitive example of gamification in such a context would be rewarding students with a reward for a task that they wouldn’t necessarily partake in, such as a boring reading or matching activity. That activity can be "gamified" by giving objectives for the students to accomplish and after which they would be given a reward in the form of anything that may increase motivation for said activity.
That's exactly how almost all of the video games in this trillion-dollar industry work. You have an objective to complete, and in order to do so you must accomplish certain smaller tasks, play accordingly and when you succeed, you advance to the next level. Some games are single player while most of the others today are able to be played cooperatively with your friends in a multiplayer mode. Being able to use this in education would not only potentially increase student motivation and desire for participation, but also create beautiful and fun experiences for them to enjoy. School would not be the traditional, boring place where the teacher makes them read and repeat stuff anymore, it would be imaginative, limitless in creativity and most of all, collaborative in most cases.
To return to the misconception of violence being caused by playing video games, there are numerous researches that prove otherwise, with the fact that only 4% to 9% of all gamers have been observed to be violent in their daily lives. What happens to the rest of the 91% or so? Just because that 9% is determined to be violent because of video games does not mean everybody who plays violent, action-packed video games are actually violent. On the contrary, playing action, fast paced video games increases our eye-to-hand coordination, enhances our decision making capabilities, increases our situational and environmental awareness and so on... These advantages are often overlooked due to the aforementioned misconception, but students with such attributes may very much excel at their learning endeavors.

To finish, here are some examples of video games that have been mentioned above. I hope you've enjoyed reading these paragraphs, see you later!



"Grand Theft Auto V, PC, 2015"



"Borderlands 2, PC, 2012"

An Experience on Virtual Reality

Hello, everyone! Today I'm here to share with you a brief Virtual Reality experience provided to us by our Instructional Tech & Material Design lecturer, Mr. Tuncer Can.

We are no strangers to the development of video games and virtual reality thanks to the media, and what we have taken part in today is still the tip of the iceberg. Starting with a brief explanation on how this VR technology has come to be, Mr. Can distributed us various types of VR goggles, some of which were makeshift goggles out of cardboard boxes and were cheap enough for the general public to easily acquire. There was also a much higher-tech version made by Samsung. We had the opportunity to test both kinds of the goggles, and each of them were a unique experience on their own. They both worked by placing your smartphone in front of its lenses and then just looking through them:

The Samsung gear was much more immersive, with a dynamic field of view that stimulated natural vision as close as possible. The apps we tested included high paced action games and you had this constant feeling of movement all the time. One of the games were about flying in between long structures and collecting coins while trying to avoid hitting anything, another one was a slow paced, calm environmental game, and another one which involved a small scale flight simulation.

The entire class was mesmerized by this experience, after which we discussed on how it can be employed on an educational context. The low-end, cheap version is still very effective in demonstrating the VR's immersion capabilities, thus allowing for a cheap and easily accessible alternative for any student in any school. Traditional classroom environments and activities can be enrichened with the use of this technology, and all of us future teachers should be prepared to use it in our future classes.

I hope you've enjoyed reading my paragraphs on our brief VR experience, and below you can find a few pictures from that day:

Kahoot! - A Quick Quiz

Hey, everyone! I have created a quick little Kahoot game for you to enjoy. It consists of 7 questions in the form of a "finding the odd one out" exercise. I hope you have fun while playing, and make sure to challenge your friends while doing so! Take care!

https://create.kahoot.it/share/find-the-odd-one-out/3c2479be-b114-433a-85ea-b8c0e2cd3ecc