Digital Storytelling with Animoto

Hello everbody! Today I am going to mention about ANIMOTO, a digital storytelling application which can be installed on your phones!To get this app, firstly you must enter the animoto’s site and sign up with your e-mail or facebook.  Then you can download the application on your phone. When you open the app first,  the screen in the below appears

Actually, it is easy to follow the steps to make your own digital story, as you can see every step is clearly written. Therefore, you don't come across serious problems about what to do in the next steps.







 I click the options which I have showed above. Unfortunately the site cannot provide you any characters or settings. You have to create the materials you may need to by yourself. I have selected the comics which i have created on the Disney's web site. ( You can (>Click <- to accest the site)


 You can select the pictures and videos one and more than one. I have selected all of them by holding 
down the CTRL button as you can see.

Later you can add related texts the cartoon you have created. I made up such a nonsense sentence just to show you.

Unfortunately you cannot save your voice into the cartoons concurrently. You must save it before if you want to use your own voice. After you click on the "choose a song" button, several parts appears as you see in the below. I have chosen the "beauty of the earth" just to show you how it works. After you have selected your music, you can complete your video.

You must add a title to your video and it is done! Be ready to share it! Thank you very much. For more information watch this video!

Digital Story-telling Adventure!

Hello my dear followers! I hope you are all doing well. Today, I want to talk about our digital story, Three Girls in the Forest, which was done by me and my peers Armağan Dündar and Ecenur Güneş.

Like podcasting and Wiki Project, it has been the first time for me to do a digital story. It was rather challenging than other projects I have done. However, it is not just challenging and it is a lot of fun!

Storytelling is as old as human history. Now, with our age of technology, making up stories which is rich in sound effects, image and naration is a lot of easier and fun.In addition to them, digital storytelling process requires student engagement, technology integration and project-based learning so in this process students learn by doing and they can reflect on their own learning. Technology integration is wonderful because they can add whatever they want to their digital stories to make them appear more vivid and attractive. Besides it will help the students develop their technology literacy  because they also look into a lot of tool and website which can help them creating their own story.What i mean with reflection of their own learning: Making a digital story requires student writing, and mostly their own narration, so they have to fictionalise a story having “introduction, body and conclusion paragraphs”. While narrating it, they have to pay attention to how each word is correctly pronounced.

I cannot say its disadvantages clearly, but what we have found hard is that choosing the right tool is hard and a bit of time consuming. For example, the site we have chosen only allows its subscribers to embed or share the digital story. So we have to copy the URL of the site to show you. I cannot show video here. I am sorry about this technical problem.

 Here is the URL:

DIGITAL STORYTELLING - THREE GIRLS IN THE FOREST

I hope you will enjoy our story, take care!

Road to Grammar

Hi everyone!
I would like to introduce to you www.roadtogrammar.com which is an English grammar practising web site rather than a teaching web site. With your background information you can overlearn your knowledge about grammar. I guess, the founder of the website prefers to keep his/her name anonymous because I could not find the founder’s name even the site’s twitter account.The site can be thought as designed for young learners in quiz parts in general. Actually I cannot say this site for beginner level learners or advanced level of students. It is for wide range of variety people according to their learning needs.Since there are sections like Business English and Teacher Resources. Therefore, the teachers who are in need of English material and adults who are in search of content-based English knowledge can benefit from this site. There is no special home-page, when you open the page the first section which includes quizzes is opened.The  As you can see in the picture. Now, we will analyse them one by one.
 

Quizzes

The first section is quizzes  as I said which appears on the home-page. There a grammar topic list on this section. You can choose the topic you want from here and then the related quiz question appears.Quiz questions are not stable, they vary by topic to topic.There are 3 options for each questions . The difficulty level  is not challenging. A beginner or pre-intermediate student can benefit from it.  You need to click the answer to progress. If your answer is false, you will see it at once. As you can see, I have chosen “Am,Is, Are” topic just to show you how it looks and give a clue about quiz questions. Here:

Extended Practices

The next one is extended practices. It provides the learners more complex and challenging exercises as its name suggests. This part, again, is divided into different parts, as you can see in the picture. I have chosen the reading part. There are short stories from B2 to C2 level. It suggests that it is an ideal activity for improving ESL learners’ reading skills. I have chosen Snow White which is in C1 level. One part of the page is for story; the other part is for quiz questions.
 

Games

There are language games of course. The best part of learning for young learners. There are six games in total. You can see in the below. I have chosen the “Chopped” Game. When you open the game, you will come across 8 letters. The aim of the game is find a hidden word of three letters or more. You need to click on the letters to remove them from the board rapidly before the time is over. Look, I have gotten 36 points for chopping the irrelavent letters and finding the “full” word!
  

Downloads

In Downloads section appeals to both of the teachers and the learners. Teachers can download lesson handouts helping them with class activities, mostly in communicative interaction part. The students download self-study worksheets and self-guided learning tools.

Unit

There is a Unit Section in the site. As you can see in the screen-shot there are 4units (shopping, health, business English and holidays)and Video Worksheets. Each unit includes “Unit content, listening clips, transcripts, answer key, trainer’s notes, glossary and support activities. Video worksheets part say that the videos are suitable for Upper Intermediate to Advanced ESL Learners. (B2 and up).Each video lesson has an intro, a video, vocab, a quiz, a discussion and some learning points.

Kids

When you click on the Kids section, the page which is in below is opened. There are quizzes, explore, games and teacher parts on the page. I have chosen the “explore” as you can see there are basic vocabulary exercises for young learners such as fruits , household items etc. You can look at them in detail in the website.

Teacher Resources

Teachers find relevant teaching tools for their students and download them in free in this part. Of course, students can benefit from the materials not just teachers.

Business English

As I said this site appeals to wide-range of variety people. In this section you can find basic business activities and sources in English. Analyzing all of them is just one click away.

Blog

Also, you can reach the creator of the site’s blog. It is an up-to-date blog, you can easily follow the latest news and improvements in ELT area.

 In my opinion, it is a beneficial and innovative for English practising. It can be seen that the creator of the page has been making an effort to help both the learners and the teachers. I, myself, have came across a lot of material which I can use in my future teachings. What I don’t like about this site is that  firstly it is a little bit complex. I clearly don’t understand who the intended audience is. As I mentioned quiz questions are so simple in the first section, then you may come across even in advanced level subject matters. Also there are some parts which are repeated in different sections(For example Games section is repeated Road to Grammar Junior Games). There were my opinions about the site. I hope you have an idea about the website generally and you can use of it. Take cake!

Overview of My Favorite Book in Wiki

Hello everyone! I hope you are all fine. Well this week, I created a wiki page about my favorite book which is name is "Hunger" by Knut Hamsun. I summarized the plot using my own information and gathering information from other websites. I also explained why I recommend it to our followers in a few words, also i shared some videos about the book. Now, I want to mainly speak of advantages and disadvangates of wiki. Firstly it is good to enhance students' technological and reseach skills.Since creating a wiki requires blended information from other sources. It also improves writing skills in that you cannot just copy and paste from whatever website you gather information. There must be a consistency between the quoted passages and your own sentences. In addition to them, it is cut out for collaborative group works, students don't have to be in the same place to work in groups, they can chance and add something the whatever place they want. Final thing to say about advantages from my point of view is that students are going to proud of see what they have done and they are going to show it the other persons, such as family members and their friends. Even myself, seeing my own wiki completed, I showed it to my roommates, saying, "Look what I have done, Do you want to see my lovely wiki about my favorite book!!!"
Well, let's get to its disadvangages. Unfortunately, wikis can be changed by anyone. This "anyone" can be who has false and preconceived information about the subject and thus it results in information pollution in our students' minds which we never want as teachers. And its changeableness also delete our work we make effort for a long time for ever, if we have no copy of it.
Thoso were my thoughts about wikis. Now I will share my wiki page. I hope you all like it. Hope to see your comments also. Good bye!

Our Favorite Books/ Hunger by Knut Hamsun

First Experience with Podcast : Trapped in the Fiction

Here is our podcast "Trapped in a Fiction" by me and pair Kevser Çelik (by the way thank you for your partnership, i've really enjoyed a lot).

We created a sound rich story and vocalize it together. Sometimes we need sound effects and we found them on the internet. I hope you enjoy it!

I think the podcasting has both pros and cons. Firstly, it is easy to record it, it requires just a recording stuff (it can be a smart phone) and internet to upload it.Then it can be reached anyone who has an internet access. And it is beneficial for improving listening skills, because the learners can listen the podcast over and over again if they want. Lastly, it appeals to learners who are in search for variety for learning activities also the ones whose musical intelligence are predominant.

There are also some disadvantages of course. For example, the people who have no internet access could not access the podcast. Also recording a podcast requires quite silent environments, if a noise is make you will have to re record it, until it is done.

They were my thoughts about pros and cons of podcasting. What do you think? Please share with me!!!

Hello All

Hello, I am Merve. I study ELT at Marmara University. This is my first experience with this blog thing and i am looking forward to share my posts with you. They will be related to latest innovations, ideas, experiencea and anything which i find interesting and useful about English Language Teaching area. I would be grateful if you share your ideas with me as well. Take care. See you soon.