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.
Twitter is a hot tool
for teaching nowadays. More and more teachers are using it inside and outside
the classroom. For teaching, one advantage Twitter has is the instant
interaction by posting and answering questions. Firstly, we can regard Twitter
as our tool case. Since we could find tons of resources, such as videos and
articles, related to our field there. We may also link tweets with other
sources. For instance, we could put the link to our blog or diigo library to
make the information available for our students. This is a way to enrich
our teaching content and raise the students’ interest. Secondly, we may use it
as a platform for our students to share their weekly or monthly reflection in
two or three short sentences. They may write about their opinion or question
towards the course, the atmosphere and the teacher. And they are required to
answer one or two students’ tweets. Since the limitation of one tweet is 140
characters, they won’t be so burdened. Everyone’s participation is needed, so
there will be a community of learners formed like the article Student engagement in large lectures in A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in your Classroom mentions.
What 10 Twitter Mistakes You Should Avoid refers should be brought to attention of all Twitter users. Although I seldom used Twitter before, I used Sina microblog every day. I’ve made some of the mistakes and experienced a lot from other bloggers, especially the first one Over Tweeting. I once followed some celebrities who posted several times for only one day with trivia and compliment. I believe that too much is as bad as too little. None of our followers, no matter our colleagues or students, can bear such huge amount of information. Opening up only one account, focuses on teaching, will never make Twitter a place glutted with tangle some information.
