Make your own movies and spice up the classroom

Video



The above video is something I accomplished within 10 minutes and it only shows one of the many possibilities you can do with "dvolver moviemaker".

This is definitely a fantastic website for teaching, or as Russel puts it, a blessing for technophobias. With this website, everyone is capable of creating their own little movie and livening the classroom up. You will just need to follow a few steps as shown below:

1.click here ->Dvolver Moviemaker

2.click " make a movie"

3.Select a background and a sky. This stage is where you can be creative and make your movie beautiful.You can take the audience's features into account. eg: if the majority are girls, maybe something pink and red will be well-received.

4.Decide the plot of the movie, a rendezvous or a pick-up? It's your choice. As a language teacher, we can use these options  both to give grammar instructions to the students or assign the students to work in pairs to create their own dialogues, reviewing what they have learnt from class.

5.Select two characters for the conversation. There are actually some really funky choices of this part. Sometimes, an ugly character might better catch the students attention in class, especially the naughty little boys. Still, the teacher should always take the audience into consideration.

6.Create your own dialogues. This is actually the most essential part of this tool concerning language teaching and learning. In this phase, the teacher might type some conversations and make them more appealing to the students by virtue of the help of animation. In plus, students are able to present their own unique conversations drawing from the lessons they had.However, there are two major limitations of this website : a) Chinese can't be typed on this web. b) each line contains 100 words at most.

7.Adding background music. This is my favorite part since you can add different charisma to different teaching context each time with different background music.

8.Naming it. The last thing you need to do is to give a title to your video and leave your name as the author. Then everything is done.

9.Share it with your friends. Within 5 minutes, a short piece of interesting and lively movie is all done. Now you can share it with your friends by simply adding their names on this page and clicking the "send" button.

Limitations:

1.Students might get distracted by the colorful images and background music rather than focus on the language points.

2.It can get pretty boring if used too many times in class due to its predictability.

3.Chinese typing,which is quite necessary sometimes, is not allowed. 

Using youtube to learn English

What is this?

This is a video from Youtube that demonstrates how we introduce ourselves and greet in English properly.

Why is the content good for language learning?

1.English subtitles are available, making it perfect for beginners
2.with background music on, relaxing the nervous students.
3.it shows the basic patterns when doing an English self-introduction

How might you use it in a language teaching context?

1. When teaching beginners how to use English to introduce themselves,the teacher can play this video before teaching, familiarizing the students with what they will go through next.

2.The students might watch this video again and again after class to review what they learned in the class

3.Also, when they click on the video, they will see other related or similar videos available there on youtube, which means they can enhance their understanding about some specific area with various resources as long as they are willing to.

Limitations:

1.Since this is an online video, the students might get easily distracted by other stuff when watching this on their own.

2.Watching the video alone and not being able to talk to someone in real conversations can be pretty boring for the students.