Time to say your thoughts instead of writing them down. AudioBoo has been created for users to create short audioclips and publish them online… brief thoughts and ideas to share with the rest of the world, or the rest of our classmates! Our Batxillerat/K12 students can register with their Tweeter accounts, and share thoughts about what they see in a given outdoors route, or what they watch on the TV/Listen to on the radio regarding some specific event, conflict or any other piece of news.
This is good fun… and learn!!
Bombay TV is a nice and catchy website where we can add text to short Bollywood clips… amazing to foster oral and written skills, as well as vocabulary and accuracy.
Choose a clip containing different scenes, with typical bollywood actors and stories… traditional, religious, modern…
Add text into the clip: You can either write it down, record your voice or use the text to speech tool. All three ways incorporate your message into the clip, in text or soundtrack.
Have your students watch the clips, choose the most suitable one and then ask them to add a short story which matches the pictures… easy and engaging!
You can embed the clip or send it to others… share your work!
If you or your students are not Bollywood fans… try B Movie TV… the same interface, but related to those old movies from the 50’s… good fun as well!
Here’s a Prezi about 2.0 tools in ELT… just some thoughts and tips. Probably we’ll be posting more ellaborate ideas… hopefully 😕
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.
Geocube is a very interesting website for those who want to use English in Social Science secondary lessons or those who want to introduce concepts of Social Science in their English lessons (CLIL).
A cube you can turn with the mouse shows 6 different aspects concerning our world: Living Together, The Fascinating World, Exploring Our World, Shrinking Planet, Earth from all Angles and Useful Geographies. By clicking one of the sides, 9 different issues related to the title of the “side” appear. When you choose one of these issues, a screen appears with information related to the topic, together with illustrating images and videos.
A very engaging layout entices you quickly. The information is concise and clear. Very useful when you work with your students in cross-curricular projects… ideal for PDI’s!
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.
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… 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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