Esma

Welcome to my page! I will be updating my journey in Newcastle and upload some pictures!

Get to know me

My Name is Esma and I'm 21 years old. I'm studying to become a secondary teacher with the subjects English and Arts at the University of Education in Karlsruhe.

In my freetime I love to sketch and on of my passions is photography.

Here you can see some of the Photographs I took.

The city of Edinburgh was so beautiful. There were so many impressive spots. What fascinates me the most is the architecture, as I love buildings which have a lot of history. No matter where we were, the buildings were old and had their own charm. Many streets reminded me of some scenes from Outlander, which is a famous TV show.

First Stop: Edinburgh!

Here, I am standing in front of the Greyfriar's Bobby.

We were waiting for the Harry Potter Tour to start, as the meeting point was there.

The city of Edinburgh was crowded. There were many tourists taking pictures and walking around. We visited some shops and bought some postcards for our families and friends.

Harry Potter Tour:

One of my favorite activity in Edinburgh was the Harry Potter Tour. The guide (who was extremely funny and witty) dressed up as a Hogwarts student and guided us through some places in Edinburgh, which inspired J.K. Rowling in many ways while writing the series of Harry Potter.

This castle inspired the Hogwarts castle, which is an elementary school. J.K. Rowling's kids attended this school.

This grave inspired the character 'Voldemort'. It has a lot of visitors since the establishment of Harry Potter.

On this picture you can see the street, which inspired J.K. Rowling to create the so called 'Diagon alley'.

Study Week in Newcastle

Day 1

On the first day we were able to explore Newcastle. Due to bank holidays the city of Newcastle was very busy. We decided to visit Durham with the other students. By doing that, we got to know each other and it was a great experience, as we all got along very well.

Trying traditional English food

Fish n' chips

For the ultimate England experience we ate proper fish and chips. It was delicious!

Pie

Of course, there is always room for pie. Our mentor Alison booked a table in a nice pub and we ate pie together. A perfect start !

Day 2

Alison took us on a campus tour and showed us the most remarkable places of Newcastle University. The most impressive spot for me was the place with the Martin Luther King Jr. statue and let's not forget the coffee shop at the campus.

Followed by that, we played a murderer game, which was very fun. It was also important to talk about the program which was going to expect us in the following next days. To round it all up, we skyped with the other students in Boras, Barcelona and Kiel. We laughed a lot, because it was very hard to get everyone into the picture, so we needed to cuddle for a few minutes. But it worked and that's all that matters, right?

Day 3

The third day was full of new experiences. We went to Ponteland Secondary School. It was very interesting to see how school works in a different country. I think it was very interesting, that the students actually wore a tie and a blazer to school. There was a very formal atmosphere compared to German schools. We got the permission to visit classes with the headmaster, who guided us. It was very interesting to actually see some lessons, but we were not able to watch it for more than 3 minutes, which was not ideal in my opinion.

Additionally, we were introduced to an app called VEO. It has a lot of functions. For instance, you can film a lesson and mark the timeline and put titles on them, to spot areas, which can be improved for example. By doing that, a teacher has the possibility to evaluate a lesson and reflect on his/her methods. In my opinion, VEO is a great app, which has a lot of effective uses. Nevertheless, it won't be easy to establish this app, because currently there is the problem with the data policy, as not every parent wants their children to get filmed. Also, I think there are some areas which can be improved, for example the fact that only Apple users can use this, because not everyone has an Apple product.

Other than that, it is a very innovative app and I am happy, that I got to know about it, even though I am not sure if I am going to use it in my future teaching.

Day 4

The Linguacuisine workshop was one of my favourite activities. It was very fun to follow the instructions in Italian. Also, the fact that there is food involved made it even more intreresting for all of us.

This method of learning a language is very effective in the area of learning vocabulary. On the other hand, I think that it not very useful for learning sentence structures, so it is limited in the area of learning new words.

Day 5

On the last day, we presented our projects and also talked about our E-Portfolios. We gave feedback to others and I think it was very interesting to see what others did and there were very creative outputs. It was good to see that everyone came up with something completely different. One of my favourites was a video the Swedish students created. It was very fun to watch!

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