ICT into the class (part II)

Go!Animate

Apart from the programs

we can use just for the voice, we  can find others in which

you take story telling using online cartoon strip makers

that little bit further by allowing you to spark life into

your characters and create short animations.

This is Go!Animate. It’s useful for introducing stories,

to create different endings of a story or funny situations.

Glogster

The next one I am going

to explain is Glogster. It’s a web application that allows

students to create multimedia online posters or glogs.

Glogs can be made using images, sounds and video,

making Glogster therefore a wonderful, intuitive and

easy to use tool which encourages creativity and which

can be used to assess both writing and speaking. It can be

used as warm up activity, to emphazise items or even as

post-treatment activity. Students can also use it as an oral

presentation. For me, it is the most useful of the programs

that we have seen.

Voki

Of all the tools listed here, Voki is

perhaps the one I like most for animation. Voki is a type of

talking avatar and students create them (an imaginary,

online representation of themselves).

Once the students have had some fun creating their avatars,

they then record themselves speaking. I think students have

fun using Voki, because it’s very engaging and motivating.

It can be used for setting homework,  for short listening tasks

or to offer extra credits for students who listen to your Voki

and answer questions on what it says.

Wordle

 

This picture above is a word

cloud created with Wordle. Wordle picks out the most common

words and gives them prominence by increasing their size, making

it very easy to ascertain the essence of any text simply by looking

at the cloud.                                       

Behind this simple concept lie many possibilities for use in the

classroom. This tool, the blog and glogster are my favourite ones.

We can use them for different objectives and in different times

of the course. I really love them.

Edmodo

Edmodo is a micro-blogging 

platform based on a similar concept to Twitter; one short message 

is sent to all those who follow you (that’s happen in Twitter), 

or to all those in your group (in Edmodo).

Edmodo is used for education and is, in my view, a much better

alternative to Twitter because it provides extremely useful extra

functionality to both teacher and student, such as the ability to

set, collect and grade assignments, to keep a calendar  of event

and assignments.