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.