Be crazy with Zimmer Twins

Anyone fancy creating a movie?

You should try this!

Introducing Zimmer Twins.

You may act like a director and create your own movie. This tool allows you to create your own endings to one of the story starters. You may also create your stories from scratch.

So put on your director's hat and reveal your creativity.

How to use it in the classroom?

We can organise a small movie-making competition in the classroom. Ask students to work in pairs and let them compete. You may reward the best pair.

This is a great tool to practice communicative activity in the classroom.

Good things about ZimmerTwins:

1) It encourages students to talk and discuss with their partner

2) Encourage creativity.

3) The activity is fun and very engaging for young learners.

4) The combination of three main learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic (VAK)

5) Learn the sentence structure.

BUT

It's not-so-good because:

1) It has word limit for the conversation they can create

2) The movie cannot be shared with other people. Seems like we can only view our own movie.

3) The final product cannot be embedded. (That's why I cannnot share the movie I've made)

4) The 'post new comment' part seem to be useless if other people cannot view the movie and post the comments.

To sum up, I think this tool is an absolutely brilliant but the fact that it cannot be shared disappoint me.... =(

:: PIMPAMPUM :: Bubblr! .:.

:: PIMPAMPUM :: Bubblr! .:.

Check it out this amazing website where you can find a lot of pictures!
Only start with simple steps. Type in anything you want to see and Bubblr will search it for you!
The pictures will come out in group of seventeen and simply click on next to see more pictures.

In English classroom, this tool will be great for presentation session. They can select any suitable pictures depends on the topic of the topic they need to present and slowly build up the presentation.

This tool will be great as speaking activity.
You can ask students to form a group and make a presentation. Of course they need to talk about the pictures they choose. Or you can narrow down the topic. For example, "places you want to visit or you have visited".

Another way to make use of this tool.
Make it as a writing activity!
In the pictures they need to write in or make a caption about the pictures.

Or you can make it as 'correct the errors activity' where you create the bubbles with a lot of mistakes and ask your students to correct them.

The things I like about this tool are:
1) Free
2) Easy!
3) Pictures with a lot of choice.
4) Encourage personalisation. Let your mind wander!
5) Good collaboration - mash-up the pictures in a good way.

However, there are several downside I would like to share about this tool:
1) Quite boring for the advance learners.

2) Don't actually use the language

3) the bubbles distract the images.

Alternative way!

You can choose Bookr instead of Bubblr. Bookr work exactly the same as Bubblr.

http://www.pimpampum.net/bookr/

Make lessons fun with Dvolver

My lecturer, Russel introduced us to a website that can be very helpful for teaching and learning; Dvolver Digital Movie. Check it out!!!

http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/index.html

This will be my fundamental teaching tool one day. It allows me to create an interesting environment for English lesson. Perhaps it is suitable for all level of secondary school students because this tool is flexible and compromising, depends on how we use it in our classroom.

No worries. Everything is on us! We choose the tool and we decide on what we want to do with it....=)

Let me illustrate briefly about this tool;

Firsly, we need to choose the setting for our movie:

Then, we need to select the characters, there are two characters they need to decide; Character 1 and Character 2:

After that, we need to decide the plot for the movie:

This is the most crucial part in this type of activity where we need to type in the characters' lines. This is where the language is being tested:

After we done with the conversation between the two characters, we can select the background music for the movie, this is quite enjoyable:

The final step, of course we need to decide on the title and the title design for the movie we made:

Then we can click on the 'preview and send button' to finish up the process and email it to our friends or teacher:

This activity would be great if we can do it as a pair work so that they can discuss and gather some interesting ideas together.

The good things about this website are:

1) It creates a context for a language to be used.

2) Most importantly, this tool will make your lesson FUN!

3) It is very engaging for students.

4) It allows them to use their creativity! You will be surprised on how creative your students are.

5) In fact, this types of activity is very authentic in both language and productivity.

6) Dvolver maybe can help you make variety for your lesson. As a teacher, we always want our lesson to be motivating for students and not dull...

However, there are some limitations that we need to consider:

1) It may be inappropriate for young learners for example for primary school students. It may be way too hard for them to handle on their own.

2) May not be really helpful for more capable students who have higher proficiency in the language because the sentence they can create is limited.

3) ICT facilities? Is your school has assess to computer and internet? Rural area schools in Malaysia may likely face this kind of problem.

4) The use of inappropriate words or language by students. Be aware of that!

That's all for my first post for this blog. I'll write more next time.

Happy teaching!