Let’s find out what can ePals do to help you in English teaching?

When you firstly enter the realm of ePals, the first thing that draw your attention is the notebook style which easily make you feel you are in an online classroom. The website designed for ePals is very academic-like.

The next step is clearly to match a classroom suitable for you. You can filter the most appropriate classroom by typing in the language and the students’ age that you want to search, and then here we go, the results are listed neatly for you!! If you want to narrow down the results, you can choose to provide more information to make the results even more accurate.

Once you find a suitable classroom, you can email to contact the teacher for further information after you’ve signed in as a member of ePals. It’s very convenient for teachers who teach the same age group and same language to exchange experience via email.

The second point I have to mention here is the amount of teachers’ resources in ePals, you can read the articles shared by other members. Also you can narrow down your search by choosing students’ age, number, subjects and topic, etc. Like as shown in the picture, you can download these articles after you become a member. These articles can be used for making lesson plan, which is especially helpful for new teachers.

Where are you from?—digital comic for teaching directions

This week I created a digital story comic using GoAnimate, which is very convenient to use.

where are you from? on GoAnimate

This story comic can be used for teaching directions in English. Because I remember when I first learned to tell directions in English, it’s very confusing that my teacher only pointed the direction so that it’s a little difficult for me to understand. Using this dialog, students can look at the map and listen to the dialog at the same time. Teachers don’t have to explain which each direction is and at mean time the dialog could be imitated for conversation practices.

Photo stories—a good tool for teaching writing

Still in trouble on how to give instruction guidelines to your students for writing tasks? Digital stories come to rescue!

This week our star guest is Animoto. Through simply uploading photos and typing in the words you want to say, then congratulations, you just make one mini-film.

 

Save our home

As for this short digital story I made using Animoto, I think it’s very helpful especially in writing class.

Advantages are:

1. More engaging than words on the blackboard.                         

2. Can be re-used in the future.
3. Clearer to give students guidelines through pictures.

This class is designed as a topic writing class which is around environment protection. Firstly, students will watch this video and understand the theme they will compose. Students can use the sentence structure appeared in the video—I don’t want to--to make sentences in their writings. And then they can talk about how pollutions harm our only home earth so that they can write around this topic through different aspects. Next, they will watch this video again and this time they will focus on the beauty of Earth so that they can understand the significance of protecting our home planet. For this part, they can write sentences like “I want to, or I hope” etc. to express their wishes for environment protection.

 It’s a meaningful writing task, which not only practice writing skills on particular sentence structures but also cultivate students’ awareness on saving our home--Earth.

Digital storytelling for beginners

       With the development of cutting-edge technology, storytelling is no longer restricted to the traditional way that parents or teachers holding a book and reading stories to children. There is a new

way to tell story which is not only easy to conduct but also more fascinating—digital storytelling, the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component.

       Wow, it seems like to create one digital story you should prepare so many things. Don’t get bewildered! Although groups of students can collaborate on digital stories, the form is well suited to projects by individual users. Most digital storytelling programs promote the notion that users with little or no technical background should be able to create digital stories. For beginners, I have a good suggestion: paying so much attention on digital technic is unnecessary, starting by focusing on script and writing a good story is more effective.

       Why is digital storytelling significant to education? The cooperative learning process of debate, discussion, and reflection that students engage in as they work together to storyboard, shoot, and edit

their digital stories is critical to the learning process. (The educational uses of digital storytelling) As we can see, through creating an original story, students can practice logical thinking and writing skills, which involves using learned knowledge and acquiring new knowledge needed in this procedure.
      
       How to use digital storytelling in classroom? Firstly, give students a clear example of how to create a digital story. It doesn’t need to contain too much cool digital effect, but rather focus on procedure instruction, step by step. Secondly, give students a concrete topic to write about, for example, to create a newly version fairy tale which they can imagine happened in nowadays. Students can do group work so that they can learn how to write cooperatively and make their story more completed and creative. Thirdly, students can find pictures and videos around their story to make it attracting. For each step, teachers would better give feedback and assistance in time, good suggestions and encouragement can be a good motivation for them to fulfill the task excellently.