Tellagami for listening / speaking

Some of my academic readings have recently included the listening and speaking skills. As much as I like

designing activities and developing materials, I have to admit that these two skills have been somehow more neglected. I have therefore decided to invest more and more time and effort to activate them.

I shall start with Tellagami, a free mobile app, that lets you share a quick animated video, a gami.

In education gamis can be easily created by students as a speaking / listening activity; as a teacher and having my last blogpost in mind, I came up with a book recommendation.


Here it is:

Procedures

First of all, download this app for your Android (version 4.1 and above) or iOS and then you can start creating  your gami in 3 easy steps:

1. Customise a character and choose your background; alternatively, you can personalize with a photo background (I chose the book cover);

2.  Record your voice or type a message for your character to say;

3. Share your gami on FB, Twitter,… or send it by email; there is also an embed code available.

Steps 1 and 3 were fast and fun but step 2 took me longer than all the others: the recordings have to be real short (around 20secs) and I had some problems stopping where I should as there was so much to say.

Hope you enjoy. Please share your links and/or resources, too.

Thanks to Zeljko for sharing the link J

The Book Thief

About a year ago, I read and published in my one of my Padlet walls my recommendation of an awesome book, The Book Thief by Australian writer Markus Zusak.
I absolutely loved every page but do not wish to tell you more than the site has published because you should really read it. According to the official website, "The Book Thief" "tells the inspirational story of a spirited and courageous young girl who transforms the lives of everyone around her when she is sent to live with a new family in World War II Germany". It has already been translated into Portuguese and already belongs to our PNL (Plano Nacional de Leitura) for our 9th graders. In case you do wish to read it, or have read it already, I've embedded below a discussion guide.

Anyway, this week, on Jan 23rd (Thursday) the film will be screened around the country and I'm looking forward to watching it! Here's the trailer. Mind you, young Liesel Meminger, aka Sophie Nélisse, has won the "Breakthrough Performance Award" for her work in "The Book Thief" movie at the Satellite Awards in 2013!



Further info / links:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-07/the-book-thief-reveals-australian-connection/5189576 - interview

http://zusakbooks.tumblr.com/post/67323859561/little-free-libraries-and-the-book-thief - Zusak's Tumblr

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75qIV9qM228 - a relevant bit from the movie: it's a dictionary!

ExamTime

For their Christmas break, I asked my 10th graders to watch the movie Spanglish, and to prepare a 5-minute presentation on it. I would be naive if I was expecting all students to do it... so, I created a set of flashcards using ExamTime for review and consolidation.
ExamTime is a free tool that allows us (or the students themselves) to create, share and discover resources and in which we can build mind maps, flashcards, quizzes and notes - all for free. It's a very user-friendly tool, but in the cards in which I chose to introduce images, I couldn't add any text, ie, a question.
Below is my first set of flashcards with Examtime!


by Teacher Alex