Digital Storytelling with Xtranormal.com

Check this out! If you want to encourage your learners to write and speak English this is a great tool to do it, especially with younger learners and teenagers. Xtranormal.com is a site where you can choose backgrounds, characters, sounds, actions etc and make a movie either by recording your voice or by typing in text that is then read back by an automatic voiceover (in a range of accents). It's like Voki, but you can get a lot more elaborate! When you have made one, you can e-mail it, embed it, download it (interestingly), share it on Twitter, Facebook etc etc....
Here's an example:
ICT Blog movie
by: JGakonga


It's free to play with and to make your first couple of videos (they give you 300 points to start with) but you do have to pay after that - I think it's quite cheap, though, and the three or four free ones that you are allowed on a free log in may well be enough for most learners.

Storybird

This is such a fantastic site - it is amazing what is available out there!  If you want to give your students motivation to write something, this is your site!  It makes it possible to produce really lovely looking, professional e-picture books that you can then tweet, facebook or embed, using professional illustrations from a really wide range of artists.  How can this be free? I don't know, but it is!

You can also go onto the site to read books that other people have written.  The nice thing about this is that they are short, and illustrated with beautiful pictures, so you can use them even at low levels.  Some are aimed at children, but others are definitely written for a more mature audience.  Here's an example:


Fight off the doubts! by laurig on StorybirdYou could just send one of these a week to your learners to give them some extensive reading practice, or you could use one in class on a IWB for language work based on the content or (most obviously) narrative tenses.  They're really inspiring! The only limitaton I can imagine is that they will appeal to younger learners and to a lot of adults, but teenagers may feel they're a bit patronising. You could get them to write books (maybe even bi-lingual ones) for younger kids in the school or siblings, perhaps?
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Tut Pup Spelling Site

This is a brilliant site for young learners who want to practice English spelling.  Basically, it's a fairly bog-standard spelling bee type programme.  You hear a word (at a level that you chooose, ranging from 'Easy Peasy' to 'Uh Oh') and you spell it. 

What makes it oh-so-much-more engaging is that you are in competition with a real person in real time somewhere across the globe.  You get to see their 'codename' eg Red Turtle 567 and where they are from (shown by a flag) and you have a limited time to spell the words that are said.  This is my game with Pink Cow from Belgium!

If you register, the site will record your victories and you can win 'medals' for various combinations of wins.  Clearly it's aimed at younger children and adults will probably feel patronised by it, but there is something incredibly motivating about knowing that you are competing against another real person somewhere out there.  My kids really love it!  You can practice maths on it, too.

Web Quests

WebQuests are interactive journeys that learners can make to find specific information using the internet and then report back on it in various ways.  They bring ICT to task based learning and can be very motivating for learners.

This is a link to a ready made WebQuest in which you plan for a trip to Australia.  The introduction states:

In this Webquest your objective is to find out about the culture and lifestyle in Australia. When you go there, what differences do you find? What do you like and dislike about it? What do you miss from your own country? What would you like to bring back from Australia?

and then there are five tasks to complete.  These practise all four skills and also include a lot of helpful functional language. The first task, for example, asks learners to use certain sites to find out specific information, giving them lots of practice in reading.

But it's not all about using the net to find information - the learners are also required to do something with it! 

So, after they have found out the information, there are speaking and writing exercises, including sentence stems to help with language activation (although there would probably need to be some teacher input on the 'I wonder (whether/ if)' structures, too).

There is a wide range of material here, covering grammatical areas such as comparatives and superlatives as well as the functional language. Plenty for several lessons.  In fact, that might be my only real criticism - by the time you get to the end of it, you might well be heartily sick of the subject!

There are lots of WebQuests ready made and available on the net.  The original idea was:

'developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University in February, 1995 with early input from SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellow Tom March, the Educational Technology staff at San Diego Unified School District, and waves of participants each summer at the Teach the Teachers Consortium.'

and their website has loads of resources, There is also a linked site - Quest Garden which has templates to make your own WebQuests. You can register for a free trial for 30 days, or sign up and pay for a member ship, but it's only $20 for a 2 year subscription, so it won't break the bank!  Making your own might be very helful if you were, for example, teaching CLIL and had specific content that you needed to cover. Other than that and if you are teaching general English, making your own is a lot of work and  there are many good WebQuests already out there so you could use 'off-the-peg' ones!

Twist Our Words

This is a really quirky little site - I'm going to send it to my students now and see what they come up with!   You can choose words from a list and make a video of celebrities saying your sentence.  The list is pretty limited, it has to be said – doesn’t even include ‘you’ – but maybe that’s part of the fun. 

It’s certainly a challenge and will make your students think….. if, of course, they don’t discover the ‘Lucky Dip’ button and get the site to create one for them!    Here's mine:

Lyrics Training

This is a really great site.  It has songs in a range of European languages - English, Itaian, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portugese and German, and you can choose from easy, medium or hard songs and also make the task easier or harder for yourself by choosing how much of the song you want blanked out.  You then play the video, listen to the song and fill in the gaps. What is particularly nice about this site is that it's very easy to take at your own pace.  If you miss a gap the song stops and you just press the backspace button to listen to that line again, or if you can't get it, press the tab key to get the answer.  You can register for free with the site and then it will record all of your scores, but you can use the site without registering, too.

I think it's a great site for all ages and all abilities, really, as there is a wide range of songs and this kind of material is often very motivating for people, especially if they know and like the songs anyway.  Probably more for homework, rather than in class.
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Learning Chocolate.

Great name for a site - not so sure that I love it as much as the other kind...
This site opens with the introduction:

Welcome to Learning Chocolate! This web site aims to help students to memorize vocabulary in an easy and efficient way, by using pictures, sounds and games. Try our games and enjoy learning, like eating chocolate.

.. and that's what it does - it's essentially a picture dictionary -

The great thing about this site is the range of activities that you can do with each picture – it gives you the pronunciation, the spelling and the meaning, and you can do different games to help you to remember.  These include listening to the words and matching them to the picture, a dictation exercise, and other matching exercises.  Here's a sample page:

This site will probably appeal to younger learners at lower levels, but here’s the rub – a lot of the vocabulary is REALLY obscure – I didn’t know a lot of the ‘cuts of meat’ words, and I’m an adult, educated native speaker of English!  The options don’t seem to have much focus – so we have (at one end of the spectrum) feelings – sad, surprised, happy – elementary level words –and then, at the other end, we’ve got the life cycle of an insect with words like ‘pupate, emerge and cocoon.’  There’s no indication of the frequency or usefulness of these words, (although I guess that some common sense in translation would tell most people that cuts of meat aren’t common conversation starters unless you’re a butcher!)  The other problem is that the vocabulary is obviously decontextualised, although, as a lot of it is concrete nouns or action verbs, perhaps this isn't so important.  It might be a nice site for younger learners to do  -maybe learn one selected section as a homework task. It could be useful for spelling.  Try it out.

Cambridge English On-Line Cartoon Maker

This site has got lots of nice things in it, but the best two (I think) are the Phontics Focus (see next blog entry)and the  Cartoon maker - Sorry it's the wrong way round, but check this out! (double click on it to get a bigger view)

It's really easy to use - you just select whether you want a single page cartoon or one with 2 or 4 pics, then you have a choice of characters (only 2 in each pic) and you can add speech bubbles and 'Kerpoww' signs, as well as add some narrative and props.  It's very easy to navigate - you just have to remember not to press the 'apply' button for each picture until you've finished it, as you don't seem to be able ot change it after that.

This would be great with teenage or younger learners - You could do some authentic reading of English langauge cartoons and I think they'd have a great time constructing their own cartoons.  The final effect is quite professional, too.  Downsides? Not many, really - you can save the final product as a jpeg, but I couldn't get mine the right way up!