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Today we opened the door of PDC and entered a pleasant sharing environment. At the end of the day, I know who the facilitator is and what I can do as part of this useful project, and I'm excited about everything I can be a part of. Thanks all.

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The second day was again busy but enjoyable. We were able to be more motivated with the comfort of getting to know each other better.

As a teacher working in a public school, the inadequacy of the activities in the course books is one of the problems I have experienced. Listening activities are ones in which students participate less. First of all, I check whether the activities in the course book are suitable for the learning levels of the students. The reactions of the students while doing the activities and the feedback I get at the end of the activity guides me as to whether I need a new material. I think that participation is low because the topics of most of the listening activities in the course book do not attract the attention of the students. In addition, the speaker's speaking speed and accent in listening activities also show that the activities are boring for students because as they don’t understand the text, they are unsuccessful. Therefore, the listening activities in the course book can sometimes be insufficient or high in terms of learning level, so sometimes I need new and different materials.

More active listening skill is very important in terms of understanding the target language and using it effectively. But as a secondary school teacher, my primary goal is to ensure that my students get a good score in the exam they will take at the end of the year, and unfortunately there are no listening questions in this exam. If I think from this perspective, that is useless fort he moment, but if I evaluate in general, active listening skill is very necessary to learn the target language and use it effectively.

Thanks everybody.Looking forward to being part of tomorrow’s sessions. :)

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Today is the 3rd day and I really feel both tired and enjoying it. We are tired because every minute of PDC is full and useful; we enjoy it because our instructors and group mates are amazing.

Today's session was about speaking, the skill that I have the most difficulty with while guiding my students in language education as a teacher. One of the most common problems we face while doing Listening and Speaking activities is shyness. Students do not want to participate in the activities, especially while doing speaking activities, because they are afraid of making mistakes while speaking in the target language and that their classmates will laugh at them. At the same time, shyness can be a personal trait of the student. At this point, it becomes more difficult to involve the student in speaking activities.

In today's session, we have learned and evaluated many methods to solve such problems. We've seen that we can give post-speaking tasks where they can use apps like Flipgrid to encourage students who don't want to speak in front of a crowd. Even if they make mistakes, they feel safer and more confident because they know that only the teacher will see it. This method is a really effective and enjoyable solution for shy students.

I'm grateful for today and excited for tomorrow.

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Here is day 4. Everything started to become more comprehensive. Today we examined the reading skill in as much detail as possible and saw how we can modify the boring reading activities according to the class.

I understood that using techniques such as role plays, digitalisation, making a poster while doing reading activities in mixed ability classes would increase class performance and student participation. Now let's see how we can modify a reading activity :)

(shown on ph.)

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We started the day with a fun warm-up activity and saw how writing exercises can be made fun in an easy way. The most effective and useful thing for my students is snack writing. This method is a good practice point for students who are afraid or even bored with the writing activity. I think we can also easily modify the snack writing activity in crowded classrooms and make it very useful. PDC participants will also love this snack writing activity, as the classrooms are very crowded in the area where I teach.

Digitizing writing activities is also a great method. Since the new generation of young people love technology very much, if we adapt their writing activities to web tools such as padlet, they can find it interesting and become more interested in the lesson. Digitizing may not be fully effective just because of the technical inadequacies of the students.

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The grammar session was really productive. It is appropriate to teach grammar explicitly in the region where I teach and even in previous places. As a foreign language teacher, I tried many methods that could be both easy and fun for students, and in the end, I found it more appropriate to give the grammar explicitly, because students take the high school entrance exam. The cirriculum does not allow enough time to use the implicit method because students are not of the same speed or intelligence. Even when using the explicit method, it is difficult to maintain the classroom balance. Unfortunately, the exam-oriented teaching system can render current foreign language teaching methods useless. My colleagues in my region also agree with me because we discuss this issue in our meetings at school. In the grammar session, I realized that I could guide students in recognizing some simple grammar rules. I hope I can use the implicit method for all grammar teaching in time.