4+ Tools for Reading Reviews

While I haven’t had much time for reading myself lately, I’ve been instilling reading habits in my teen students.

To be honest, I’m not that demanding in what concerns language. In other words, whether they read in Portuguese or English, what really matters is that they start or keep reading. I do have one demand, though: whatever they read, they’ll have to present a review in English. Fair enough, after all I am their foreign language teacher.

For my students’ book reviews and recommendations, I’ve used the free tools below:

Animoto is an excellent tool for creating audio slideshows the only problem being the lack of space for writing / text; I have created 30 secs videos and  longer but only with an “Animoto for Education” account. 

Here are two examples: 

This is a multimedia storytelling tool that allows us to easily tell stories including photo, video, music, voice recordings and text. Have a look at this bilingual book review:

Fotobabble allows us to create beautiful talking photos / pictures. Listen to this book review now:

Another possibility is the creation of ebooks, flippable PDFs. An example is the one below I created with youblisher:

Let's not forget Tellagami which is also possible for book reviews as I mentioned in this previous post.
Hope you enjoy these tools and examples I've just shared with you. What others can you share with me? Thank you :))

Fotobabble - talking photos

By Christmas I left you this post, namely a talking photo, my personal Christmas card to all of you. To do that I used Fotobabble a very easy tool to use. After registration, 

1. Upload a picture

2. Choose Theme

3. Give it a title

4. Write tags

While one does not necessarily need to follow this order, I did leave the recording for the end. Just click on Record (Orange Icon) and then stop in the end. To check it, click on Play. After all steps, don't forget to save (right corner, below)! Easy, fast and FREE!

We can use it in classes for a listening activity; students can do it as well and share their recordings with the teacher and fellow mates and all can be embedabble into blogs – tutor blogs, class blogs, whatever. A great tool for students to develop fluency, to engage and attract!

My latest Fotobabble was to promote a book / reading for the school library ;)

The student didn’t want her own picture and therefore I just uploaded the book cover and then recorded her voice with my own computer. Please listen:

So, what do you think?
Two remarks: a bit fast, yep, I know, but the student "read" instead of simply using the info ;). The book cover is in Portuguese because I couldn't find any in English ):
Let me know what you think, will you? Thanks.

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