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

SUMMLY - for more Reading!

Summly logo

Summly is a free mobile app that automatically summarises full news pages from different sources. Developed by a now seventeen year-old British schoolboy, Nick D'Aloisio, and already dubbed “the internet’s newest boy genius” and “the next Mark Zuckerberg”, this young tech whizz found it difficult to look for what he needed when surfing the web and created a simple and easy to use app. According to him, regular news articles and blog posts are long and always sprouting the web, don’t fit in a mobile screen and we can’t afford to waste so much time reading huge blocks of texts that may end up not being what we were looking for. So, why not a convenient app that customizes content for a mobile screen, now that we are always on the go?

Summly condenses news articles into three key paragraphs that fit onto an iPhone screen. It already includes package categories such as BUSINESS / TECHNOLOGY / ENTERTAINMENT and ARTS / US NEWS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL and obviously APPLE (the only platform that currently supports it). These categories are represented by large horizontal color blocks and the latest story shows up after choosing one. By swiping left or right, you can navigate through the latest summaries.  If any of them sounds interesting, you may save it for later use, email it, tweet it or share on Facebook – you just hold down and a flower-shaped menu shows up for sharing options.

Why am I interested in this? Well, first I believe it may improve reading skills and habits taking advantage of the fact that even our students own a smartphone… though it’s only available for iPhones (or any other iOS-using hardware) yet, it’s surely just a question of time to make it available for Androids, thus allowing many more to download this free app and READ short texts, eventually longer ones. As a teacher and an avid reader, hope dies last, and for reluctant readers (either adults or teens) this can be a start – with news, then with other areas that Summly might develop.

I did try to introduce a new category… EDUCATION… then CULTURE… none of them worked and my doubts are whether they don’t work at all and still need to be developed once this app is brand new, or whether it’s simply blocked due to excessive traffic overloading Summly servers.

On a final note, I find it relevant that this app is simple to use even with more troubled students since the UI (user interface) changes according to the user’s country, thus making it easier to understand how it works whilst still having to read the SUMMLYS and news articles in English ;=)

To sum up, Summly is still pretty much a fresh app with its downsides, but has had a good start and is looking promising.

Let’s wait and see!