Our Journey into Data-Driven Learning

 Hi there, brilliant people!💖

 

    What’s new?👀 I hope you’re doing amazing because I… am absolutely NOT. Midterms completely wiped me out. They came, destroyed me, and left like nothing happened. I’m still recovering.😪

    I was so overwhelmed that I had to finish this assignment , the one I’m sharing today, super fast 🔥with my teammates (Melis, Buse, and Berfin). And honestly, I still don’t know how our friendship survived this process. As I’ve said before in the previous posts last semester, I really don’t vibe with group assignments that involve too many people. Plus, I get very angry super fast. It’s chaos. Pure chaos. But it was mostly because of the timing of the assignment and the stress caused, not my friends. 

    For this project, our first assignment was to design a material for our learners using a data-driven learning strategy. So basically, we had to prepare a worksheet (which followed the CBLP framework of Ma et al., 2018) that included activities supported by a corpus and AI to help students learn through real data. And of course, we also created a lesson plan that follows the ASSURE model. (Smaldino, Lowther, & Russell, 2012)

     Our aim was to teach mustn’t and do not have to. In the material, we started with a small background knowledge activity, let the students use the SKELL corpus to explore the difference between mustn’t and don’t have to, let the students create their own rules, and finally had them check those rules through ChatGPT. Then we wrapped it all up with a short practice task and an infographic assignment. 

Here is a sneak peak of our material

(Don't forget to check the links at the end of the post)

    Was it easy? Absolutely not.

    Deciding on the topic and the first activity (using a corpus to teach the difference) made us struggle the most — we discussed, argued a bit, and tried different ideas. But after that, everything flowed smoothly. Plus, Thanks to Canva there are a lot of visual engaging items so we  managed to make the layout of the paper really nice. It was fun, but also super tiring, especially because we were doing this in a very short time while drowning in other assignments too. But in the end… we actually created something pretty great!  YAAAY. 💃 I’m really proud of how it turned out.

     When it comes to the problems that might occur if your material is implemented in a real classroom, here’s what I think. Yes, there could be some challenges because classrooms are usually very crowded. Especially in Türkiye we often have large classes, and besides that, teachers have to follow a strict curriculum, so finding the time to use extra materials is not always easy. Of course, I still think these activities can be really helpful because using a corpus lets students see real language. On the other hand, since phones are usually not allowed in schools, doing everything only on a smartboard can be a bit tricky. In a freer environment, where technology can be used more for learning than restricted by rules, these activities could be integrated really well. If enough time is given and students are already competent with technology and AI , what we could call proper AI literacy, then they’ll know how to use it correctly and ethically. Otherwise, there’s a risk that they’ll just let AI fill in the worksheet for them. But if taught properly and ethically, this kind of activity can be really effective and enjoyable for students.

 

Click here for the worksheet. 

And here for the lesson plan. 

That’s it for now! Don’t forget to explore the corpora yourself and see what real language can teach you. Stay tuned for more classroom adventures! ✨