I have looked at MyStoryMaker. This website is designed for teaching children to develop writing skills. It is easy to use, the instructions are clear and straightforward. Children can create their own stories using the characters from the website. Moreover, the tool provides much help with choosing appropriate vocabulary during the process an even gives feedback. This tool can be used as a home task to practice grammar and words from the lesson or as a group work activity in class.
Thursday, 18 November 2010
MyStoryMaker
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
3D pop-up books:'Zooburst'
Thank you for the wonderful websites.
I have just signed up for a ‘Zooburst’ which shows a wide range of 3D pop-up books as well as creative personal books. ‘Zooburst’ is a website where one of the functions is called ‘My Books’ which allows users to manage their own personal library of 3D pop-up books. I am sure that it will be amazing to help my younger learners create their own story books using a program new to them. Since they can make up their own characters and stories for their books, not only can they improve their own creative writing skills (sequencing / coherence etc.), but they can also build portfolios of work to be assessed continuously, helping me to scaffold subsequent learning. In addition to this, it is free of charge, so anyone can easily sign up for it. Having said this, I expected it to have more audible functions to make users more attracted to it, a concern of mine given the usual need to motivate younger learners more. However, I might be nicely surprised soon and stumble across some hidden sounds. At least, I hope so!
I have just signed up for a ‘Zooburst’ which shows a wide range of 3D pop-up books as well as creative personal books. ‘Zooburst’ is a website where one of the functions is called ‘My Books’ which allows users to manage their own personal library of 3D pop-up books. I am sure that it will be amazing to help my younger learners create their own story books using a program new to them. Since they can make up their own characters and stories for their books, not only can they improve their own creative writing skills (sequencing / coherence etc.), but they can also build portfolios of work to be assessed continuously, helping me to scaffold subsequent learning. In addition to this, it is free of charge, so anyone can easily sign up for it. Having said this, I expected it to have more audible functions to make users more attracted to it, a concern of mine given the usual need to motivate younger learners more. However, I might be nicely surprised soon and stumble across some hidden sounds. At least, I hope so!
Storybird
Storybird provides a selection of great images to choose from and is very easy to use.
Sign in, choose an artist by taking a look at the styles available and write!
I had a go at making a short poem and found it great fun. It is a great finale for children's story or poetry writing and can be published online too.
I can see myself using this with my class back in Spain. Loved it!
Cool Tools for Schools - Comics
I had a look at a couple of the 'cartoon' sites - Toondoo and Pikistrips. They seem entertaining and quite useful. You can create your own cartoon strips using images from the internet or your own photos, add speech bubbles, and share them with other people.
At first glance, it might seem that these sites would be more useful for young children and teenagers, but they would probably appeal to adults, especially if you're looking for a bit of 'light relief' in a lesson. The cartoon strips lend themselves to writing short dialogues, so would be good for practising short transactional conversations, such as exchanges in a shop, bank or post office.
At first glance, it might seem that these sites would be more useful for young children and teenagers, but they would probably appeal to adults, especially if you're looking for a bit of 'light relief' in a lesson. The cartoon strips lend themselves to writing short dialogues, so would be good for practising short transactional conversations, such as exchanges in a shop, bank or post office.
Creative writing
Various of the tools we've been exploring take writing 'output'into more creative realms. What do we think about encouraging the creation of multimedia texts in our language classrooms? Is this a digital literacy that learners need to develop or is it simply another ploy to use technology to motivate? What about our concerns specifically as language teachers? What is the language learning link? We're going to very briefly look at Moviemaker as a tool to support text generation of a multimedia kind. To do this, I've loaded here some photos to save to your My Documents. You can use these to create a 'story' in MMaker. We'll then look at the 'language concerns' at each stage.
'Novlet' collaborative non-linear storywriting
I just had a go on one of the Web 2.0 tools called 'Novlet' which I think would appeal both young and adult learners. This website allows you to write your own story of any genre by writing a passage consisting of 2~3 paragraphs and anyone who is keen on keeping it going can simply add a bit of story to it. Also, you can just browse numerous stories written by other users.
I think this website can encourage a learner to try writing stories of different genres and moreover generate ideas to write about inspired by previous writers. In addition, the fact that anyone out there can be a potential audience will remind the learner to think about the accuracy of the writing.
I am not sure if this tool can be implemented directly in the classroom as it seems not possible to alow only a certain group of people to have an access to editing the story as co-authors. If not, it will be hard to have a complete piece of work done by learners only.
I think this website can encourage a learner to try writing stories of different genres and moreover generate ideas to write about inspired by previous writers. In addition, the fact that anyone out there can be a potential audience will remind the learner to think about the accuracy of the writing.
I am not sure if this tool can be implemented directly in the classroom as it seems not possible to alow only a certain group of people to have an access to editing the story as co-authors. If not, it will be hard to have a complete piece of work done by learners only.
Variation on Wordle: Wordsift
This also produces wordclouds but then check out the other associated visual tools. Just click on one of the sample texts and then SIFT. Note the visual thesaurus allows you to click on a word within the cloud and there is an immediate search on Google images too. Chunks of text where the KWIC occurs are displayed too.
What I realise though is this clearly explores single word units ie the notion of the lexical chunk is not accounted for. Very interesting, though, is they provide a note of the theory behind the tool! http://www.wordsift.com/site/theory
What I realise though is this clearly explores single word units ie the notion of the lexical chunk is not accounted for. Very interesting, though, is they provide a note of the theory behind the tool! http://www.wordsift.com/site/theory
Tools for reflection: blogs, penzu
Susan posted on Penzu and I have already added a comment to her post:-) However this made me also realise that I was suggesting a more global theme that I felt needed tagging - we can't tag comments. (Susan, there is an example here of tagging - if you wanted to tag your own post, you can edit as the author and do that).
This reflection on tagging also exemplifies how we need to think about the specific affordances of these tools. As we know, things can get difficult to find again and tagging helps us to locate.
Anyway, thanks to Susan for trying out Penzu - I hadn't had a look before. As Irene noted, there is a share function and this caused me to think more about the private/public dimensions of tools such as Penzu or the blog we're now reading. Social networking seems to encourage much more of the public, in fact.
However, Penzu starts in the personal domain and I think as a personal learning diary, could be a simple but effective tool; learners could choose to share the content they wish or use it for metacognitive reflection, prompted by the teacher, about learning. But the teacher may never see the original content.
Other diaries may be shared dfor specific reasons. That also reminded me that when you guys come to doing your Developing Researcher Competence course, you'll be encouraged to keep a researcher diary. I have a student who logged her whole dissertation journey in a blog which I as supervisor could see Clare's research diary (link here as I know Clare has given me permission to show you:-) but Penzu could also serve quite well as a more private researcher diary.
So these thoughts are really musing about diaries, blogs (any other tools) for personal v collaborative use. We tend to spend quite a bit of time exploring the 'social' 'collaborative' but mustn't neglect private reflection:-) By the way I tried the share function in Penzu - you can select a code to embed into a blog or wiki for example. This is the embedded public code Diane's diary
This reflection on tagging also exemplifies how we need to think about the specific affordances of these tools. As we know, things can get difficult to find again and tagging helps us to locate.
Anyway, thanks to Susan for trying out Penzu - I hadn't had a look before. As Irene noted, there is a share function and this caused me to think more about the private/public dimensions of tools such as Penzu or the blog we're now reading. Social networking seems to encourage much more of the public, in fact.
However, Penzu starts in the personal domain and I think as a personal learning diary, could be a simple but effective tool; learners could choose to share the content they wish or use it for metacognitive reflection, prompted by the teacher, about learning. But the teacher may never see the original content.
Other diaries may be shared dfor specific reasons. That also reminded me that when you guys come to doing your Developing Researcher Competence course, you'll be encouraged to keep a researcher diary. I have a student who logged her whole dissertation journey in a blog which I as supervisor could see Clare's research diary (link here as I know Clare has given me permission to show you:-) but Penzu could also serve quite well as a more private researcher diary.
So these thoughts are really musing about diaries, blogs (any other tools) for personal v collaborative use. We tend to spend quite a bit of time exploring the 'social' 'collaborative' but mustn't neglect private reflection:-) By the way I tried the share function in Penzu - you can select a code to embed into a blog or wiki for example. This is the embedded public code Diane's diary
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
Paper Rater
As we are all about to submit our first paper that will be marked and we are thinking of what we will do for our other courses I thought I'd investigate this useful tool. I copied and pasted my DAC paper into it and waited for the few seconds it took to get a rating. It was with some trepidation that I clicked on the plagiarism indicator and found that it was 100% original. Well I wouldn't go that far, but at least I hadn't unwittingly picked up a chunk of text that wasn't attributed. It came up with a few grammar and spelling alternatives and one suggestion for a phrase that it thought I should change. I don't know what Diane thinks of this tool - but I think this could be really useful for students preparing for university entrance even if we don't want to use this for school age students. I'd be interested to see what some of my classmates think of this. Sorry it's not a pretty tool like many of the others I've seen.
Friday, 12 November 2010
Penzu
Ok, this is the first time I have ever blogged and it's quite scary!
I have just been in and tried this site which allows you to keep a PRIVATE online journal. I have a student at present who wants to practise her writing and I have suggested she keeps a diary. I said she could do it in a notebook or on the class Wiki if she liked, but she didn't want the rest of the class reading it. I have just sent her this link so she has an online option and if she wants to share it with me or decides to open it up to more people in the future then she can.
It seems a great idea for all of us who don't like the idea of our every thought being available for the world to read but are happier typing away than writing by hand.
Not very collaborative or even cooperative, but might really motivate some students to get writing.
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