Zimmertwins is a website that users can create their own short movies(which my friends Mehmet Yakala and Emre Varlık also gave a presentation about it). Zimmertwins actually takes the attention of young learners and let them create their own distinct, short animated films by using characters, backgrounds, expressions and actions totally based on their aptitudes and imagination. I think if we, as educators, assign a task like making short animated films which require using Zimmertwins as a tool with our young learners, they will do their task having fun because I really had fun while doing that, believe me, let alone them. Now I want to show you how it works:
Firstly when you enter the website, you will see two options "Kids&Families" and "Education& Schools" If you choose the second option, you will go to a different website of it called "zimmertwinsatschool" so make sure that you are in the correct one.
Then to sign up, click on "Join"
And fill in the required information about you(nickname, e-mail address, gender, birthday etc.)
After signing up, click on "make a movie" at the sidebar and you will see various clips which you can use as the prompt for yours. You can also choose the option "Make from scratch" Before you start to create a movie, you will see a movie-making screen at the left, timeline at bottom allowing you to modify. There are four categories of clips that you can choose: talk bubble clips which enables making the characters sing, talk, whisper, yell etc; action clips which enables making the characters play, sit, jump; close-up clips which enables making the characters act angry, bored etc and star clips which you can, for example, type a newspaper or make a clipboard etc.
And there is a strip between the timeline and other components that summarize your clip in text. The words which are underlined with green are the modifiable parts for example what the characters are holding, where they are etc. when it comes to modifying text, click the text field in the preview screen and just type. After you're done with your clip, you can preview it by pressing the play button and if you are good with that, save your clip by clicking the "Save movie" button; then give a title and you can also add a description for it.
How this tool can be used in language teaching?
Ts(teachers) can make the students create their own short animated movies providing them with a list of characters and features together with instructions.
Ts can develop an exciting openner to take the attention of the students and ask them to complete it.
Ts can ask the students create their animated movies telling about their best memories.
Ts can create a movie with some grammatical mistakes and can ask the students to correct them.
In conclusion, student don't want to do same typical homeworks actually everytime and Zimmertwins are a really good educational tool which they can have fun during the process. I recommend it to all. Here is an example of my Zimmertwins (but if you sign up, you can see it) and hope you like it. See you!
Hello, everyone! Today, I will introduce you with a very useful and funny educational tool, Pixton.
Pixton is a web-based tool where you can create comics online and users of it can create accounts via three options: for fun, for schools, for business but I want to talk about the second one,the option for schools because it is the one that concerns us as educators, I think. Pixton for schools allows for a private and secure space where teachers can moderate the creations of the students and publish them and it can be used through a school code in Premium version after 50 day-trial duration. Now let's have a look how it works step by step:
1) For example, you chose the option for schools as I did, you should click on the enter button and then;
2) Click on "Sign up"
3) After you create an account, log in as I demonstrated below:
4) And after clicking on my comics, you can start either by creating a comic or creating a character but I started with "create a new comic"
After you start creating a comic or a character , you have many options to choose layout again as you can see below (but I chose the comic strip):
5) Once you decide on the layout, firstly you can create your own character, choose any community one which other people created or add preset characters which require payment. And then, you can choose a background. After that you can see at the right, we have some buttons that enable us to make some changes if we wish. Let me talk about them. First one, move mode, enables you to move the characters, backgrounds, or props etc. and in the second one, green mode, you can change the expressions&poses of the characters and you can do that by dragging or clicking on the parts of the character ( head, body,hands etc.) also. In the third one, orange mode, you can edit appearances of the characters or props. The fourth one, pink mode, allows you to edit proportion of props or characters again. And the last one, color wheel mode, allows changing the colors on select items. And you can go on by adding new panels if you wish.
And there are some other things which make the creating process easier. There are some buttons in yellow mode as you see below. In this mode you can insert new items into your scene.( For example; characters, props, speech bubbles and text, backgrounds or images you uploaded. And at the right half side of the picture, you see some tabs, too; for example, view zoom which allows editing the panel at a larger size or you can use the camera zoom tab to adjust how far you want to zoom in or out of the scene and to enable panning( moving which part of the scene the camera "sees") by just clicking once or clicking again to disable. And also you have more option button which views options like flip, color etc. Once you are done enough or you are in creating process ( it doesn't matter actually), you can save your work in progress
by just clicking "Save for later" If you want any changes in your work, you can by clicking "edit settings"
After you're done with your work, you can embed it on your blog/website and share it on the social media or just email it which require no payment but you can download it, print it or just publish it, of course in premium version.
Pixton for schools is not actually just a web-based tool which enable students to create their own distinct comics; it is more than that because it not only makes students share their ideas but also boosts their imagination while making them have fun at the same time. But i must say that it is not for very young learners; it's just suitable for teens and adults only because young learners would be confused while creating comics.
How this tool can be used in language teaching?
You can ask students to make creating an autobiography(different scenes of their lives which maybe includes their own photos)
You can create a comic which has some empty bubbles and ask students to fill in them.
After you cover a literary text, you may assign students with a task where they will transform a short story or a play etc. into a comic.
Students can tell about their dreams or a day they want to live in one day.
There are many ways to use Pixton but it is of course based on you and your purposes, as well. This tool is a way of a medium which students express their ideas and can work collaboratively and I really recommend it to all educator as a pre-service teacher. I created an example of comic strip layout and prepared a video about how to use it briefly step by step below. Hope you like it. See you!
Hi, everyone ! In today's world, we can't live without technology because it's everywhere. We can see this from the fact that even very young children have their own lastest technology mobile phones let alone adults. Actually, it is a good thing if we can turn this condition into benefit. For example, applications for English learning that can be downloaded to mobile phones. And today I will introduce one of them which is called Learn English Grammar to you.
This application developed by British Council is for English learners. It has two parts: Practice and Test.
And in both part, you select one of the levels based on your English proficiency.
For example, when you choose "Practice" and the elementary level, you will see the topics.
And let's assume that you choose the Simple Past, you will have multiple choices or different kind of questions which will give you a chance to practice the rules of the past tenses.
And when we look at the "Tests" part, we see " arranging
the words" questions as we can see from the left picture or questions requiring
listening skills as in the right one
"fill in the blanks questions" as in below:
or the " finding the correct sentence" as in the left example and grouping the verbs according to whether its being regular or irregular form as in the right side.
As a result, I really recommend it to both English teachers and learners because I find this application very useful and enjoyable and I think your students won't be bored and will enjoy it,too. Actually, you can give some tasks from the app for example you can ask them to complete some parts of it according to the topic you covered and the language level of your students. See you !
Hello, everybody! Today, I'm here again with a new task, actually one of the technological tools: Digital Storytelling! It was the first time my partner Mehmet Yakala and I created this kind of task. Because of this, we were really anxious and also excited. Firstly we wrote the story and after that focusing on the characteristic features of the characters, we search on the net to find drawings of some cartoon characters and backgrounds that were sutiable for our story. After we found them, we used a copy paper, drew them on papers and it was time to colour them. Actually the most enjoyable part of the task was to colour; we felt like children. After finishing this part, we narrated and recorded it with our cellphone's voice recorder but the process was a little bit hard; we record it at least 5 times because we were very excited and made some mistakes. And the last part of it was to take video of the story. We made the pictures play with our hands in accordance with the narration and we join the video and the track by using Movie Maker.
Actually I was glad to do such kind of task because it requires collaborative working. Without my partner. Mehmet I wasn't be able to do it easily; we had some difficulties but we supported each other and cope with all of them. When I look from the view of teachers as a pre-service teacher, we should assign this kind of task requiring collaboration to our students so that they can learn from each other and can share their own ideas and also think creatively. I hope you will use this useful tool for your students. Here is ours named Lilly and Swan. Have fun; see you later!
Hi everyone! Today I will share a website named "easy world of English" which I find beneficial for learners of English. You can access it by clicking here. This website was created by a group of young experienced teachers who aims, by creating this, to provide students with flexible English program that facilitates the learning process of students.
The website includes multi-level reading, writing, listening, speaking exercises. It is suitable for all students of English actually. And the point that caught my attention is that each exercise has a "how to work with" and a welcoming part; for example, the exercise about pronunciation has a "how to work with pronunciation" part :
And in reading section for example, the text named Major languages in the world, there is vocabulary and expression part which makes the words that the students may not know more understandable and besides, you can listen the text if you wish.
As a result, I really liked this website and I recommend it to teachers. they can use it as a source for their students to improve language skills or they can simply suggest this to students who want to enchance their language skills after lessons. See you next time !
Hi, dear all ! Today I’m going to talk about
RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
RSS is a technology that we, (I mean,
web users) use to access the update posts of our favourite websites or blogs we
follow. With the help of this, you don’t have to check websites everytime to
see whether there is any update post or not. It’s just doing it for you. And by
using RSS, you can get and read other relevant information, too. If we talk about
how to use it, I should say, it’s quite simple actually. Firstly, you just
download any RSS reader or you can just use an online one. After, you just add links
of the websites or blogs to your RSS reader and you are ready to keep the track
of new posts, which I actually use an online one. You can take the advantage of it, if you use blogs. It really
saves time !
Here are blogs that I follow as you can see:
This blog is created by Burcu Akyol who is teaching for 14 years and sharing her ideas about teaching and education. Actually when I saw her last post, I was really impressed because the post contains some suggesstion not only for educators but also for parents. And she also recommends a relevant video to support her ideas in the post. When I look at the general of the blog page, I see that she address followers really well. And her posts are really beneficial for educators who want to be one of the "good teachers". I strongly recommend this blog page to you.
Hello, everyone ! This week, we created a wikipage with my dear friend Mehmet Yakala. In our wikipage, we reviewed a film which we both watched and liked. Actually, as anyone may have some difficulties in starting a new task, we did so, especially deciding on which points we will focuse on, as you know when you start talking about the thing you have already known every piece of it, you will be very indecisive and confused Our wikipage also includes the plot of the movie, and whether we recommend or if we do, why?. If we have to talk about wikipage, we must say that they are very useful because you can share your thoughts about anything and you can also have some ideas about the things which other people wrote. Creating the wikipage and reviewing the film we have chosen was very enjoyable although it was a little bit difficult to make due to our inexperiences in this kind of task. While reviewing the movie, we worked very collaboratively actually, we supported each other and evaluated our task in every step of it and decide what was to be the next one. Actually this kind of thing makes us collaborate with each other and gives a chance to know your collaborator and his ideas more closely and better. To sum up, using this and this kind of technological tools will be for the benefit of students and broaden their viewpoint and make them think in a way that actually they can't on theirselves. We really recommend wikis to be used in the classrooms. We hope you find this one that we did useful for yourself and enjoy it!
Here is our film review of the Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. You can simply read by clicking here.
Firstly when you enter the website, you will see two options "Kids&Families" and "Education& Schools" If you choose the second option, you will go to a different website of it called "zimmertwinsatschool" so make sure that you are in the correct one.
After signing up, click on "make a movie" at the sidebar and you will see various clips which you can use as the prompt for yours. You can also choose the option "Make from scratch" Before you start to create a movie, you will see a movie-making screen at the left, timeline at bottom allowing you to modify. There are four categories of clips that you can choose: talk bubble clips which enables making the characters sing, talk, whisper, yell etc; action clips which enables making the characters play, sit, jump; close-up clips which enables making the characters act angry, bored etc and star clips which you can, for example, type a newspaper or make a clipboard etc.
