Animation making

       Look at the animation I made! Thanks for watching. Here are two interesting websites for animation making. Have fun and learn while play!

http://www.xtranormal.com/

Another site for Animation making: Zimmertwins

http://www.zimmertwins.com/

How could it be used in English class?

• Could be a task for students: focused on the process of creating and negotiating meaning 

• Great combination visual and audio  for teaching materials. Mixing sounds with voice is good for training students' listening L2.

Why is it good for English language learning?

• A perfect place for representing interaction and communication

• Opportunity to research and learn more about the characters

• It engages students' cognitive ability; It stimulates learners' artistic skills.

• The setting is very motivating

• After you finish the task, you can publish your product. Students be attracted by this. It makes the students feel successful.

• Great vocabulary on motions and facial expressions
• it is extremely motivating as the graphic environment and the characters are interesting.

• Students will be very interested in the way the characters speak. So they will perhaps do their best to imitate the native speaker
• Motivate students to do the collaborative task    

Limitations:

• Dialogues robot like
• Distraction on the animation making rather than English learning
• A little difficult for younger learners.

Wikis

What is it？

A wiki is a "website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki)

How to use it in ELT?

• Set up a task for students, group them, assign them to different pages of a wiki, let them cooperate and finish a whole series of pages. they need to peer revise and negotiate. The task could be information searching and organizing, or collection of students' writing work.

Why to use it in ELT?

• It fosters collaboration among students and helps the peer scaffolding
• It  is could be edited at different time by different users, so it could be a long term process for students to renew and revise.
• It could be edited by all the users, so self-revise among students and teachers is available. Each steps of editing is recorded in history and sent through email. Look backward, the learning progress is easy to be reviewed.
• videos, pictures are embeddable, the content is colorful.

Limitation:

• not very user-friendly, hard to learn at the beginning. A little demotivating.

Several free screen capture software and web tools

http://screencast.com/t/xJ37BsLvUt28

Advantages:

• video and audio recoading, easy to illustrate
• authentic listening material for English learning

Application

for teachers                

• assessment
• feed back both for individual and class
• teaching video making

for students:

• peer review to evaluate their own works
• pressentation (including  book or branch story reading together with mixbox, or draw and describe the picture or design through composition or oral language)
• exploration and evaluation of web tools
•  film dubbing
• students' feedback and expectation, or responses to the teacher's comment

Limitation:

• the size of the video may get too big and difficult to send; expression has to be done
• the teacher could give too much feed back and lost of control

Other similar tools:

Screencast-o-matic

• web tool, create a account
• size adjustable
• web camera can be used at the same time
• free 15 minutes time limit
• upload to YouTube, download, flash windows media player

Screen Jelly

• web tool
• 3 minutes limitation
• sign with face book account
• tweet it , embeddable, face book, but not downloadable
• only record whole screen

Screen Castle

• web tool
• no sign in, no account creating at all
• simple to use
• but not dnownloadable

Screenr

• web tool
• tweet, embedalbe
• 5 minutes limit
• sign in with tweeter account

Jing

• have to down load the software
• size adjustable
• format can be chosen
• mark can be made on the screen
• paste the address automatically after sending
• professional edition very cheap