Reviews of Zimmer Twins at School & Storybird

Blog #6: Digital Storytelling

▶ Zimmer Twins at School
Website: http://zimmertwinsatschool.com/

This is the tool that you can create cartoons & comics by clicking. You can also make a movie and a conversation clip through this tool.
One of the good thing about this tool is I personally think, you can have a male and a female looks that the students can substitute the roles through these clips.



▶ Storybird
Website: http://storybird.com

This tool provides you to be able to make a professional-looking digital storybook by just choosing the template and typing the story in the page that you want to have. Even if you make a such a short story with this, it can be still very powerful for the visual learners.

▶ How could these tools be used by teachers AND students?

Teachers and students can cooperate on making the story together. Thus, it can help to build up students' creativity by using English. It can also support the reluctant student who does not want to do the speaking class due to having all the attention. This is because the reluctant student who does not want to speak in front of other students is able to have a good idea about the story with a free conversation class which provides much more natural atmosphere to have the opinion in public.

▶ How could they be incorporated into a class?

This can be incorporated at the very last of the lesson such as a group project that the students can use their knowledge from the lesson. Thus, the teacher can also evaluate the students' understading by checking their performance, not by giving them a assessment test paper.

Reviews of sites_Compleat Lexical Tutor & The Corpus of Contemporary American English & Wordle

Blog #5: Corpora, Concordance, Collocations, Word Frequency

- Check out the following sites and report back on how they could be used to inform materials development and classroom instruction:


▶ Compleat Lexical Tutor
Website: http://www.lextutor.ca/

This site provides a variety of different skills to analyze the language. It seems it can be very useful for someone who is studying English for having a good score based on tests such as TOEIC, TOEFL and TEPS. Also it is a very strong stie for having numerous vocabulary.

▶ Corpus of Contemporary American English

Website: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

In my opinion, this site can be a best website for identifying the word which has many different meanings in a different sentence. One of the important characteristics in terms of learning English is to use the right word in a right position. It takes quite a long time to figure it out when the learner is just trying to memorize it. Because if the learner just tries to memorize the words but it has not been used before, it can cause a problem when it comes in real life. To avoid having this kind of problem, the learner or the teacher can use this website wisely.

▶ Wordle

Website: http://www.wordle.net/

 

We can use this site for presenting the keywords from the text easily. I mean as the keywords, it comes frequently in the text to say about the message.



ESLPod Review

Blog Post #4: Podcast Review

 ▶ Provide a link to the podcast on your blog

- ESLPod : http://www.eslpod.com/website/index_new.html

- ESL podcast English Café episode 393: http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=13343708

▶ General information about the content and quality

- Host: Dr. Jeff McQuillan From LA, California (Directed by Dr. Lucy Tse)

- Website adress: eslpod.com (to download the learning guide for this episode)

- Topic: Famous American Movies
 ; in 1962 film called "The Manchurian Candidate" the thriller with actions and suspense.
 ; In terms of the cold war
 ; Based on the book in 1959 by Richard Condon

- Provide vocaburary definations, general background information about movie such as actors, actresses, singers, director.

 - Q&A
; differences: expression & idiom & term
; The expression question: What name do you go by?
; He heard en masse

- Quality of the podcast
It has a very specific details about the movie. Thus, after I listened to this I felt I learnt many things about the movie. It was also very fun to listen.


▶ What do you think about the podcast? Which type of learners could benefit from the podcast?  

In my opinion, listening to podcast is a good way to improve your listening skills and also to build your background knowledge in western culture perspectives. When you listen to the podcast it is not only about listening activities but also widening your knowledge through it. If the podcast is a right level for the student and comprehensible it is beneficial to the listeners who are ready to learn. That is, the learner is the one who tries to find the content. Thus, that learner is ready to learn something from it already. And if the learner can try to do note-taking while listen to it, it is even more effective to improve its listening skills.

Synchronous(Scribblar) and Asynchronous(Video Dropbox) CMC Tools

Blog Post #3: Synchronous and Asynchronous CMC Tools

▶ Brief descriptions of the tools and links to their websites

- Scribblar (Synchronous CMC Tool): http://www.scribblar.com/
It is a tool for chatting and sharing ideas on the internet and it is actually very easy to create the room for your needs. You can have some interesting tools such as drawing and having a vote.

 <<--- Try it now!


- Video Dropbox(Asynchronous CMC Tool): http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/ria/videoDropbox/
It is a tool for collecting videos from yourself and others as well. You can easily access and record the video clips with typing your name in the blank and  pressing "Begin" button. Then, you can enter, record and submit the video clips.

 <<--- Try it now!

▶ My thoughts about how the Synchronous CMC tool and the Asynchronous CMC tool could support learning and the development of language skills. 

Are there any similarities and differences in how they could support language learning? 

In my opinion, they are very good tools for outside of class to practice that they learn from class of the day. To have improvement in learning language, it is essential to be consistent and repeated. Thus, if students can keep using this sort of tools after school, I am sure that they will improve a lot comparing before.

※Scribblar and Video Dropbox

-Similarities: You can use these tools through the internet which means you need to be more independent. Also you need to be aware of these tools before you actually use it.

-Differences: You can see the result straight away with Scribblar, but you need to wait until you get the result with Video Dropbox. Also Video Dropbox can be more private. Thus, people might feel more comfortable than Scribblar.

▶ Ideas of possible activities and ways that the tools could be used in a language class to supplement in-class content and instruction. 

※ Using Scribblar

- Following the instruction to teacher: Listening practice

e.g. Teacher can give students to draw a house with very specific details. 

※ Using Video Dropbox

- Reading a newspaper aloud: Fixing pronunciation and improving listening skills

e.g. In my personal experience, listening to the news and repeating after that helps to improve pronunciation and listening skills as well.