Simple Prep iPad Activity: Creating iMovies in Class

“… ten years ago, not one student in a hundred, nay, one in a thousand, could have produced videos like this. It’s a whole new skill, a vital and important skill, and one utterly necessary not simply from the perspective of creating but also of comprehending video communication today.” (Stephen Downes)

Task design has a lot to do with choosing activities that will tap right into our student’s needs and interests. Teachers have known this simple fact for ages, but learners keep changing, evolving and developing, so teachers also change. I believe it`s safe to say that our learners nowadays love watching short movies on YouTube and vines, and if teachers are able to turn passive watching into a productive and creative learning process, students are likely to engage and experience deep learning.  iPads are truly an awesome step forward in technology because students can make movies easily and share their work with a broader audience.

So, if you like having a lively productive class in front of you that requires little preparation on your behalf, you might want to check some of the ideas below.

Make a commercial selling a product

Make a silent movie

Make  a personal narrative 

Tell a story - Use one of the texts in the book to make lexis come alive. My students drew target vocabulary and created a short video retelling the life lesson in the book in their own words.

Getting to know - make a short video with animoto or magisto (few clicks required) about yourself and let students make guesses about who you are. Ask students to make videos to introduce themselves too.

Have students create language tasks to practice language
1. Students can create a dialogue, but record only the answers so that the rest of the class has to write the questions.

2. Students make two short videos and the others have to spot the differences.
In the first video there is a students, and in the second there are two....
In the first video the boys are dancing, and in the second the boys are writing...

3.  Show and tell - share students work and practice language by playing a game - students have to recall from memory.

4. Ask students to make a video to teach the others how to make something. In this example, my son was teaching the other students how to draw a parrot fish as a follow up activity to a lesson about animal features.

5. Promote real communication among students by asking them to record questions to other students, teachers, or someone abroad.

Are you eager to try using imovie app with your students and see it for yourself? If you need some help to get started, watch this short tutorial and have fun in class!

Best,
Dani Lyra

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Simple Prep iPad Activities: DRAWP

My suggestion for a good application to be used in class is DRAWP. It is easy to use and, therefore, easy to teach students how to use it.  Some of the uses that can be applied to classes are for  making posters, flashcards, or even illustrations for their own stories.  Here is a tutorial video that will show you the ropes.  I am sure it will be fun!


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y2pC0mCvvAE 



Enjoy

Simple Prep iPad Activity - Creating Movie Trailers

Slide shows are definitely are good way to tell a story using pictures or videos. The web is populated by a vast amount of slide show services. As an educator, I am a subscriber to many of those services and have frequently used them whenever I want to display pictures in an animated fashion followed by music. However, many of the services available on the net require an internet connection and that might make it a bit challenging for creating such artifacts in class if you do not have a connection or the one you  have is too slow. 

One of the solutions to this problem is to use iMovie to create movie trailers. Such trailers look like slide shows and are quite easy to create. All you need to do is to open the iMovie app, click on the + sign and choose the trailer option. As I said previously, you can do it without internet connection, save and later export to YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, etc. It is very intuitive and your students can do it themselves. Another thing our teenage students can also do is to create movie trailers for the graded readers they read in class every semester.

Here is a short tutorial

Here is a movie trailer I created with our English Access students. Before creating it, I showed to them the theme we would work on. I divided the picture frames in terms of their experience as students so far asking what they had done, what they liked best. They wrote down their ideas and I gave them my iPad and my iPhone and told them to take shots. This is the final result.

Simple Prep iPad Activity: Creating Stories in Class

Stories help us organize and remember information and tie content together. I've already talked about the power of online storytelling and the myriad online resources available to experience such fantastic educational tool (click here to check this post).

With the advance of technology and the integration of iPads in the classroom, teachers are now able explore the power of storytelling in different ways. Some apps have been developed where students can imagine, create, and share what they make. Thus, students will be the ones creating content, putting their ideas together to tell a story using creative and engaging platforms.

Two of my favorite apps for creating stories are Scribble my Story and Creative Pad. These apps can be incorporated into your lesson plan with very simple previous preparation.

With Scribble my Story students can create their own story by picking a blank book, adding their own voice and illustrating in different ways.  There’s also the option of changing the background color, adding stickers and stamps. As a follow-up activity, students can read their stories to each other, or teachers can project students' stories and ask comprehension questions about them.

Creative Pad presents a more comprehensive platform. There are several different themes students can choose from, with different settings for every theme available.  Students can add characters, all sort of objects, animals, musical instruments, nature elements, etc. In order to create the story, students can add dialog boxes and also write captions in each of the slides. In the end, the story can be sent via email in a pdf version. I guess parents would love to receive their kids’ production. What do you think?

How would you include storytelling production in your class?

Simple Prep iPad Activity - Power up Motivation in the EFL Classroom

 

    Have you ever been surprised by how creative our students can be? This post is about a task I asked my Teen 3 students to do that required no prep and surprised me a lot because they came out with outcomes that were way more creative than what I had imagined.

    I was teaching vocabulary to describe feelings, and I gave groups slips with some vocabulary related to the lesson. I asked students to take pictures to illustrate the words with the iPads. .

Students then had to make a short video using Educreations asking the group to guess what feelings their photos related to. We had a lot of fun, and they wanted to play the game over and over, which I did not mind at all because they got lots of personalized input.

Simple Prep iPad Activity: TELLAGAMI - Giving Life to Students´ Avatar and their Language Production

Tellagami is one of those multi-purpose free apps that will give an extra boost to your classroom activity, with lots of student production in English.

Here´s an overview of the app:



In the classroom, use Tellagami to:

• let the avatar tell a story about a specific place (you can change the background there)
• review a concept. Students have to summarize what they´ve just learned
• do a follow-up activity in which students tell their own views on the topic
• drill basic structures in a young learners´ class ( I like; I don´t like; I have; I don´t have)
• practice physical descriptions when students are creating their avatar; then, they record about their best friend´s physical appearance
• work on clothing by changing the avatar´s outfits; the avatar can record why he chose that specific outfit

Students can record their own voices, or even use the text to speech feature (they write the text and choose the accent of their avatar. Warning: this feature only works when there´s Internet connection).

GOING THE EXTRA MILE: there´s an editing feature on YOUTUBE that you can put your students´ Tellagami videos altogether in one single Youtube video. Here´s an example from a training session we had about high performance class. First, we used this poster as a discussion springboard.

http://www.teachthought.com/ 

Then, the groups created their avatars and recorded their main ideas about highly performaning classes. Finally, I edited them, using Youtube editor, after having uploaded all the gamis.

Ready to begin? We´d love t know what you´ve been doing in class with Tellagami.