Category Archives: Primary

A Good Suggestion for a Start

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Here’s a nice strip from Educacontic with a good suggestion for those who would like to know how to put some things together in ICT and ESL:

1- Search the Net
2- Create a Podcast channel
3- Digital narration / Storytelling
4- Create a classroom blog
5- Put all these things together

These are probably some of the most popular ICT tasks and projects that teachers do with their students… it’s really important to consider 5 as a step forward towards a deeper involvement with ICT… this will surely rise as a richer and more engaging project for students… and teachers!

Bullying: Let’s get something out of it!

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Ed Tech Ideas has published a very interesting post which we could easily turn into a very good activity for the English classroom.

bullying

Starting out with a very nice poster on student bullying in the U.S., some questions are placed, as well as some advice to students… very clear statements that can be easily discussed in class. Try to elicit other ideas and opinions out of the data which appear in the graphic poster. Data are shown really clear and can be easily understood.

Text into beauty

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Here are two examples of how we can work with short silent clips in the classroom: Vimeo has many high-quality video-clips which can be used in many different ways.

The first one we are showing here is a nice short clip of 2 minutes about the story of a seed. It is called “Seedling”:

Seedling from Lee Tao on Vimeo.

It would be nice to have our students describing what is happening, and predicting what will happen next… or, describing the characters appearing in the clip. I’m sure you can think of other possibilities!

The second one is “Paraphernalia”… a story of a girl and a boy… and a plane:

Paraphernalia from Sabrina Cotugno on Vimeo.

Why don’t you put text into pictures? The story is really easy to follow and there’s silent dialogue which can be easily completed… students can create a written dialogue or they can put voice to the clip! It is a very engaging activity which students will love.

Bubblr

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Bubblr lets you use Flickr images to create stories. Type tags and select pictures into your storyboard. Add as many frames as you need and place bubbles showing the story and the dialogue between the characters appearing in the pictures.

Once the story is finished… publish it! Share it through facebook, send it by email or paste it in your blog or website! It is a good tool to work on given situations appointed by the teacher… for example: “Create a Bubblr with a story related to a situation at an airport”. Type the tag “airport”, or “airport lounge”, or “passengers” and use the pictures you have in the appearing library

Domo Animate

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

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

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

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

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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!!

Tales of 20th Century London

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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.


londontales2You 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 londontales3finally 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!

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Whats Your News?

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whatsthenews

Do you want to catch your students’ interest as reporters? Have them shoot their own videos with their news and their experiences and upload them into this nice website, What’s Your News.

Some friendly ants will welcome you. You can register really easily, customize your ant-avatar and watch and upload videos, pictures, audios and texts, and also download freebies.

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Your students can even upload videos where they tell how to do things, and post documents telling how to do that activity in class.

xtranormal

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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.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/FXPyCgOQkI0" width="282" height="232" wmode="transparent" /]