Blog & Teach

Time for the youngest! Domo animate is a very beautiful site where kids can create their own animated stories, a bit like ZimmerTwins.

A very intuitive interface lets you choose characters, background, messages, music and effects. just click and place the item in the scene.

Once the item/character is in the scene, it can acquire movement, expression, it can perform actions… just click and choose!

Keep adding scenes until the story is finished, and then publish it!

It’s really easy… make sure kids think of the story before they start editing, once they are familiar with the application. You can embed it in your website, your blog, or you can email it to people… parents?

Enjoy it!!

Incredible website to enrich writing skills, even for those who want to go further into writing full length stories. Protagonize is meant for those who want to write a story and want to share it with the rest of the world, or just with a tiny bunch.

Collaborative stories have room here… start with an introduction and a first chapter, decide if this chapter can also be modified, invite people to a private writing party or just leave it open to everyone. people participating in the creative process can add their own chapters and maybe edit and modify the others… give instructions on what you want the other people (your pupils?) to do, or let their imagination wander free.

A  very clear interface, maybe not very catchy for primary education, where you choose the kind of text you want to write. You can add an introduction where you can let out an idea of the story you are writing, or maybe the instructions for participants.

Decide wheter the story you are about to start is going to be your own individual work (students could create their own accounts and therefore work on their stories on their own), or you want to start a collaborative story, whereby a group of people/pupils will collaborate in the creative process chapter after chapter.

If you prefer to play as you write, if you want to create an adventure, click on Addventure and start a story which will branch out into different plots which will take the reader into different developments of the story…  probably extra work,  but extremely catchy and motivating!! Your pupils can make groups and each of these groups can create a development of the story you create, or each student of the group can develop the story they have begun cooperatively in a different way.

What are you waiting for? Sign up and start writing!!!

For students who only need simple texts, with brief (sometimes scarce) information and simple language, here’s a useful Wikipedia version: Simple English Wikipedia

The very same interface as an ordinary Wikipedia, but with simpler language. Short articles which can be easily read by ESO students. Not much to comment, just browse through the site. Maybe a good idea would be to ask students to enrich articles with more complex sentences or descriptions.

Sit down and relax… this webpage is a gift for all English teachers!

Tales of 20th Century London puts right in front of you 100 years of London history.  You can travel back to four different periods of 20th century London and learn how young people lived.

First of all, once you have selected the period you want to travel to, you will learn about life, leisure, food, clothes and history.

You will experience what life was like…

and questions will be asked where you will have to make choices related to that kind of life in thet period.

Learn about life in the period of WWI and WWII, life in the 50′s and the crazy 60′s and finally life in the last 20 years of the century.

Another nice activity you can do with students: Have a look at some districts in London… you will be shown a picture of that area in the past… go to the WWW and find a picture of that same area now, and post it!! Good for describing and comparing.

A very catchy website, colourful and easy to follow. Be sure your students will love it!

xtranormal… xtracatchy!!! Your students will be able to create movies in 10 minutes… their imagination is the limit… and the number of characters and backgrounds of the free version, of course! But it’s really enough to create interesting stories with your pupils.

Text-to-Movie is the 2D online version which lets you embed your creations in blogs or send the url to friends (or teachers ). The downloadable version is called State. The free version of State lets you create 3D stories with the same limitations of the free online version Movie-to-Text. Movies created with State can be exported to mp4 or also uploaded into youtube.

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Have a look at this site… CREA is a section of edu365.cat. It offers reference of different collaborative and innovative tools, most of which can be successfully used in our English classrooms.

I’ll be posting articles about these so called 2.0 tools. Let’s create cartoons, movies, stories, posters, polls… let’s create real time collaborative writing, timelines, and many other things… let’s make things catchier in our lessons!

Let’s forget this is an ELT blog for a while. This video from Matt Harding shows us the plain truth: The world is full of good people who are always ready to start dancing when they hear the simple beating of a rythm. Dance is in our souls, and when we take out our inner child and start moving, jumping and swinging to the rythm of music, we take the best of ourselves. This is just a tribute from a simple language teacher, to all those teachers of the most important language across boundaries: Dance

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Still, there’s room for ELT, as usual!

Visit Matt’s webpage Where the hell is Matt? This website offers different possibilities for us teachers. It is worth reading the section “About Matt” after you have watched the video with your students. It tells Matt’s story… really interesting, and easy to read. In the section “Journal”, a blog shows different articles concerning Matt’s project… his travels, his meetings…

Use this website to talk about values, about friendship, peace, music, dance, life… I knew we would end up saying we could use it in our lessons!

People from Amanita Design have produced a beautiful online videogame for the BBC educational website: Questionaut

Travel with a friendly voyager in pursuit of his friend’s windswept hat, and answer multiple questions from different fields in a dream-like world, flying with your balloon and winning oxygen by answering correctly. There’s fun and learning, and it’s in English! Worth a visit!

The British Council’s site Learningenglish brings us Wordshake, a nice online word game for students of all levels. With a very good interface, its easy rules will quickly motivate students in your class.

Have your students glued to their chairs in front of the screens as they practise their typing skills and subsequently learn a lot of vocabulary. Typeracer is a free Internet application where students test their typing speed and challenge their colleagues to see who’s the fastest in the group. It’s online, it’s easy and catchy. Have a look!