Zimmertwins for young learners...

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!

http://zimmertwins.com/node/1614836



Picture Source:
http://www.wikihow.com/