Vokis, Voicethreads and Blogs
Welcome to my edublogs blog. As part of a training session that we are running at the city learning centre for MFL advisor, Bernadette Clinton, I have embedded some examples of the ICT tools that we have been discussing for people to have a look at. Hopefully they will give the inspiration for you to go and create your own with students!
Blogs A blog or a weblog is usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. This is an ideal way to create a running commentary of the learning journey that you and your pupils undertake throughout the year. Some teachers are using them with their classes to keep parents, governors etc of what is going on in their classroom, while some older students use them as a way of reflecting on their personal learning journey. However you use them with your students, they give a purpose for writing, and provide students with an audience. Students can be encouraged to post comments about posts made by other students. There are a huge variety of places that you can set up a blog for free. Blogger, wordpress and typepad are some of the biggeest providers of free blogs. All of these blogs are freely viewable by anyone with an internet connection, so an awareness of this is important in an educational context. Edublogs (www.edublogs.org) provide free blogging accounts for teachers and educators. The advantage of edublogs is that a teacher can create accounts for students whilst retaining a kind of administrator role, moderating comments etc before they go live.
Some examples of blogs;
A really good use of a school using blogs with each class
http://www.wroxham.herts.sch.uk
Vokis (www.voki.com) Vokis are talking avatars! You choose your avatar – could be an animal, anime, alien etc and background, then either record or upload sound (or you can type and the site turns it into speech!) Press Ok and you have a talking avatar that can be downloaded or just kept on the site. In MFL could be used for recording and assessing speaking in a fun way – and as it’s saved online, it can be reviewed later, allowing teacher to work with some whilst others record. Voki avoid the issue of videoing children and saving.
An example of a voki
There are some good vokis at the following sites;
http://roydslanguagesdepartment.typepad.com/my_weblog/ks3_french_listening_and_speaking/
http://www.asisehace.net/blog/?tag=voki
Voicethread (www.voicethread.com) A collaborative online tool that enable you to make slideshows (can be kept private or made public) and then invite comments in text, sound or video from collaborators. Examples of use – eTwinning projects, practicing vocabulary, creative writing.
A great example of how voicethread can be used in MFL especially at key stage 2.
Stop Motion Animation Stop Motion Animation is a great way of developing literacy and writing skills. To make good quality animation, it is important to build the project around a unit of work. Storyboarding and planning the story is the first stage, and is extremely important to help younger students especially to break a story down into the key points. Also at this stage, especially in MFL, vocab and stucture of sentences can also be worked on. Digital Blue cameras are ideal for use with primary school students, although older Key Stage 2 students may wish to explore more professional DV cameras and software such as icananimate (MAC) or stopmotionpro (PC) (www.kudlian.net). There are some excellent tutorials for using the digital blue cameras and I have included a very thorough one from Teacher Tube by Jason Dilling.
Excellent Digital Blue guides for both video and plasticene animation.
Simply click the link below and download the two pdf files.
Digital Blue Video and Animation Guides
Oscar Stringer, Apple ADE and Director of Animation for Education has also created a fantastic slideshow to help teachers to explain to students how to create models for plasticene animation. It can be found here;
Link to slideshow of how to create plasticene models for animation
