Sharing the EVO experience - Week 2

Week 2 at Digital Storytelling for kids

This week was all about Sharing Stories through Comics. I loved the idea! Comics are a simple and fun way of telling stories, even for beginner students, as the language used may range from very very simple to very specific and advanced (phrasal verbs, idioms and the like).

The first great material shared by the moderators was a presentation by Janet Bianchini at RSCON3. Her slideshare contains many examples of how to use comics in the ESL classroom. Have a look!

Fun with Comics and Cartoons

View more presentations from Janet Bianchini

After having a look at how other teachers used comics in their classes, participants were expected to explore different comic-creation tools and reflect on their uses, advantages and disadvantages. The tools proposed were Make Beliefs, ToonDoo, Garfield and Cartoon Studio por Iphone and Ipad. I wrote a post on comics a while ago, so you can find my opinion on most of these tools and a few more here.

Some of the participants created very funny and reflective comics! They are all compiled in a Posterous group. You can spend hours browsing around, there are so many great strips to read!

Week 2 at Digital Tools in the Classroom

Wow! Week 2 was intense! It was creative writing time! We had to write the beginning of a story in the tool of our choice, based on some pictures that served as prompts. Then, we were asked to share our review of these tools with the other participants. These are the tools I explored; I chose the ones I didn't know or I wasn't too familiar with.

Story Starters

A Scholastics website. Just great! You can choose the level and then spin a wheel and get your writing prompt. I got "List the five characteristics of a a thousand-year-old game host that only speaks in rhyme". Super cool, isn't it?

The Story Kitchen

You choose from a list of heroes, villains and places and you get the beginning of the story.I liked the idea, as writing the beginning of a story is a tough job for students (the blank page effect!). The problem I found was that the language is quite advanced and therefore over the heads of many of my students.

FutureMe

What do you want to say to your future self? This would be great to set objectives and evaluate your results at the end of the year!

Dreamdoze

Social dream interpretations. You share a dream you had and someone else writes an interpretation. It's fun! But you have to be careful because some of the dreams or interpretations include inappropriate language.

Oh life

Oh life is basically a way to keep an online journal.

After this first activity, we all collaborated to finish the stories, which turned up to be fantastic! We used Entri, Mixed Ink, Writeboard and TypeWithMe, which are all free and very easy to use. This is a post I wrote on collaboration some time ago, where you can find some more information about some of these tools and a few others.

As I said, it was an intense week! Full of new resources and great contributions!




Looking forward to week 3!

Collaboration, that good old friend

One key word of the web 2.0 era is collaboration. The term relates to a new way of using the web, with applications that facilitate the sharing of information and building of common spaces by people who work together, are fellow students or haven’t met at all! The social component of web 2.0 is so important that we often refer to it as Internet’s social revolution.

As I was browsing through a couple of blogs and webpages, trying to learn some more about collaboration tools and how to use them in the classroom, I realized that we teachers intuitively know the meaning and acknowledge the value of collaboration in our everyday practice, when we:

• Encourage participation
• Create favourable conditions for knowledge and content sharing
• Propose activities in which interaction is crucial
• Ask our students to work in pairs or in groups
• Emphasize the importance of listening and accepting the opinion of others
• Step back and watch how our students learn from peers in a non-hierarchical structure
• Offer them tools to negotiate and come to an agreement with their mates
• Organize projects for them to work together with a common aim

Sooo, good to know this is not new! As with many other things, it’s a matter of applying new tools to our pedagogy (I always favour a pedagogy-first, tool-second approach) and having our eyes and minds open because we might come across some refreshing, challenging  ideas as well!

There’s loads of collaboration tools on the web! I selected a few, which I found interesting and potentially useful to work with in the EFL class (I’ve included others in my Resources section).

Writing, editing, revising

Titanpad

Different people can work on one document simultaneously. Everyone gets their own colour so changes and comments are easy to track.

Type with me

Several people can work on one document at the same time and the text is synchronized as they type so that everyone sees the same text. You can save revisions and share the document at any stage of the process.

Scribblar

It works as an online multi-user whiteboard that allows audio, chat and file sharing.

Notaland

It’s a free, open canvas where you can collaborately create presentations and scrapbooks by using videos and other web content. It also allows interactive chat.

Dabbleboard

Online application centered around the whiteboard. You can draw as you would on a real whiteboard to visualize and share ideas and text.

Storytelling

Storybird

Create short, beautifully illustrated stories, share and/or print them. 

Tikatok

Intended for children to create, illustrate and publish their own books.

Our story

Create stories on a collaborately timeline. You can also add photos and videos.

Xtimeline

Web-based tool to easily create and share timelines with pictures and videos.

Tabblo

Use styled templeates to create stories with photos and text.

Wallwisher

A digital wall where you can stick and rearrange notes, photos and videos.

Social networking in the classroom

Edmodo

Safe microblogging platform that imitates the way social networking is carried out outside the classroom.

Todays Meet

Create and name a chatting room of your own, use live stream to make comments, ask questions and get or provide feedback.

Chatzy

Create a chatting room for you and your students only. Very easy to use.

Class projects

Weebly

Create a free class website. You can manage different accounts, work on homework and provide feedback online.

Working with words

Lexipedia

Your students submit a word and Lexipedia identifies their part of speech, provides definitions and word families.

Crappy Graphs

Web-based tool to create beautifully coloured graphs and Venn diagrams. Once you finish you can save your graph and you are sent a link to see it whenever you like on the site.

Nice tools! Any ideas of specific activities to put them to use?

Cheers!