A book on Bookr

As I said on the previous post, I love to take pictures!! But I don't like just to take them, I like to appreciate good pictures too. I think a picture can say more than a lot of words. That's why I want to share two things with you on this post.

The first thing is a video about how a musician composed a song based on a photo that he saw on a newspaper. You can watch the video below (the composer tells the song's story in Portuguese, but you can read about it HERE). The song is really perfect!!

The reason I'm posting this video and talking about photos is because I believe that a picture can awake some feelings on us and this feelings can make we produce and learn better.

After this brief explanation, here's the second thing I wanted to talk about. It's a book I've created using Bookr. Bookr allows you to create picture books using photos available at Flickr. I've heard about it some time ago, but I've never tried it, so this is my first one!

I think it's a good idea to use this tool with the students to make them see , literally, what they're learning. Sometimes we stay in front of them trying to make them understand the new words. Sometimes we just translate the words. But the worst of all is that, most of these times, the students forget those words as soon as they get home. By using pictures with subtitles created by them, the chances that they won't forget the new words' meanings are higher. The negative points that I see about using Bookr is that when the person deletes  the picture, it disappears from your book. And when you search for a picture about something, everything can appear! So, we have to be careful to use it with children!

Slideshow + quizz: is it possible??

I love to take pictures and recently I've discovered PhotoPeach, a tool to create slideshows. But what I didn't know is that I can create quizzes using the same tool. It's simple and quick.

After watching some quizzes, I've created my first one!! It's almost halloween and I'm teaching prepositions of place, so I decided to unite the two topics in one. Well, the idea is very good, but it's not quite my own. The pictures I've used in the slideshow I took from Lanternfish, a website with a lof of teacher resources. I think this quizz can be used in a class as a consolidation exercise, because it's very simple and quick. But the most important, kids will like to discover the monsters' positions while listening to a spooky song!!

It's easy to write movies.

Have you ever thought of being a movie director?? Well, at BombayTV you can at least be the story's writer. This is a website that offers you the opportunity to create subtitles and add them to the movies. It's very, very simple!! The bad news are that you can use just the videos the website offers, but the good news are that they are very "interesting" hehehehe. To understand what I'm talking about, you just have to watch the one I've subtitled here.

I think this tool can be used at shcool in a funny way. You can work with your students' imagination to create the story they want. And working like this you can motivate them to write in English, something they are not big fans of. I have not used it yet, but maybe I will give it a try next semester.

Video animations

After some time without posting anything, I'm here again to talk about animations!! These are things that I really like to work with! You can watch two video animations that I've created using different tools.
The two tools can be used the same way. I'm going to tell you what I did with my students: I proposed them a theme and they had to create an animation about this theme. They had to talk about feelings, but I think it can be used to talk about almost everything!! In my case, since I dind't have computer for every student, they created it at home on a coletive account I've created for their class. But if you have a lab or something like that it can be used at school. It would work even better.
The first animation I'm posting here was created using Xtranormal. This is the one I've used with my students. It's simple to use and the results are great! The bad things are that all the instructions are in English (it can be good if you're working with advanced students, but lower level students tend to have problems to understand them), and the voices the website offers are really mechanical, the characters end sounding like robbots. But children don't care about that at all!! :)

The second one was created using GoAnimate. This was my first trial using it and I loved it even more than Xtranormal! You can spend hours and hours playing with it!! You can choose different scenaries and characaters and effects and sounds and a lot of things!!! I think students would feel a lot more comfortable using GoAnimate than Xtranormal. Watch the result of my frist experience using it!!

GoAnimate.com: Where are you? by Cecília@fb

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!