ePals---- Find Your Partner around the World

ePals is a worldwide site to find partners of other countries to accomplish a project together. I found an Indian project called “On My Plate” interesting because many projects deal with the exchange of language or culture among countries in the world, but this one aims at developing healthy, nutritional eating habit by exploring different cuisines and food facts of other countries. The topic of food is really a big issue in the world, especially in countries with large populations such as China and India. If there are proper ePals, this project will give the Indian primary students a new outlook to the food out of their country.

Another one is Collaborative Detective Story Project which is initiated in a class in Pakistan. In this project, students first know each other through emails and questionnaires, and then one class composes the first paragraph of the story and the second class read and proofread. The exchange continues until the end of the story. At the age of 11 to 13, boys and girls really have great curiosity and creative imagination. This project would arouse their interest easily and everybody is looking forward to knowing how the story will develop while they are learning the language through interaction.

After exploring the site, I feel like the young generation is so lucky because it was so hard to find a pen pal in other provinces when I was a teenager, let alone an epal. However, with the site, students are provided a world map to find their foreign friends who share the same value or characteristic with them.  One of the features of this site we can use is students will see and feel another country by their interaction with another group of students from that country rather than just read or watch some reports created by others on the newspaper or television. They can incorporate with each other to share any kind of authentic resource if there will be one or more classes to participate in the project.

How to Use GoAnimate in Classrooms

A Joke from Lovely Animals by chuxiaoxuan on GoAnimate


I used GoAnimate to create comic strips. It is more complicated than the photo story tool Animoto. Because of some technical problems, I tried two templates to finish this task. The first one was Lil’ Peepz, in which a user was asked to go through 17 steps from choosing background, adding a character and his/her actions and voice, making the character move and adding new scenes. Maybe because this template occupied too much memory, the website shut down. When I tried to reedit, I couldn’t load the autosaved video. Because it was time-consuming to start over the whole procedure, I had to choose another one, and I went to the template called Wildlife. The procedure to make comic strips with Wildlife is comparatively simple in 4 steps as the picture shows.

With this experience, I can put this tool into teaching practice for different level language learners. For intermediate and higher level students, I can combine the topic of comic strips with some grammar points. For instance, if the task is about past tense, the students are asked to create a story or a dialogue depicts events or actions happened in the past. While for beginner level students, I’ll use the simple template, such as Wildlife, to produce free topic comic strips to arouse their learning enthusiasm.

Animoto-- A Tool for Digital Story

Vacation on the beach

I used Animoto to create my first photo video with photos, text and music. It is easy to register with Facebook account. Adding photos and texts is just as simple as we usually do on social networking sites. However, users can only add 5 or 6 photos with texts to form a 30-second free video. Users will also find it convenient to find proper styles and background music for their music because Animoto suggests many of them. Besides computers, Animoto is available with smart phones and tablets. I made a video to share a girl’s one-day vacation on the beach. We can also use this way to assist teaching.

Firstly, a teacher can assign students to produce videos that work as weekly or monthly journals to reflect their daily life with this tool, aiming at practicing their language consciousness (especially grammar in writing) as well as enlarging their vocabulary. However, there is a character limit on Animoto, so it might be more helpful to ask them to include outlines in videos and leave details (or write the details down in their notebook).

Secondly, we could group students in small groups and ask them to reproduce more interesting stories from other group members’ videos. In this cooperative task, students are motivated to explore and innovate by themselves. New vocabulary or expressions will be added to their current language knowledge.

Thirdly, we can hide texts on the pictures and have students retell the story by writing it down or speaking it out to improve their writing or speaking skills. 

Why Not Try Digital Storytelling?

We must be quite familiar with storytelling because when we were little babies, our sleep was accompanied with storytelling done by our mom. As we grow up, our world is filled up by storytelling of others and ourselves. But what is digital storytelling?

According to Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, digital storytelling is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. What makes Digital Storytelling different with the traditional storytelling is that the former one is developed through the combination of the latter one and digital content, including images, sound, and video. 

From 7 Things You Should Know about Digital Storytelling we know that digital stories can be instructional, persuasive, historical, or reflective. Therefore, digital storytelling can be used as a part of classroom instruction between the teacher and students. For teachers, it is a novel way of arousing students’ interest, involving students’ participation and awakening their creative potentials. Since most of our future students must grow up with electronic products, combining traditional storytelling with what they like and use a lot is a good way to arouse their interest. With the new element, they are eager to participate and explore more. During the process of producing their own stories, they must gain some new skills or understanding about either the story topic or digital contents. For students, they could open their eyes and be interactive with other classmates by sharing different digital contents and views from the same story. Also, digital storytelling could be an impetus for them to explore more multimedia tools to assist their study.

From the brief introduction and further discussion of the use of digital storytelling, why don’t we try the new way of storytelling in the classroom setting?