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My First Digital Journey

Özge Karaoğlu Ergen

and

Jennifer Verschoor

A round publication

the-

. © 2012 Özge Karaoğlu Ergen and Jennifer Verschoor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the authors. Please contact us at the- for more information.

Cover design by Mark Bain.

Edited by Penny Hands.

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1

2 For teachers who are willing to innovate.

Contents

WELCOME TO YOUR FIRST DIGITAL JOURNEY

Get Ready

Set

In the Lab

Go!

BEFORE YOU SET OFF: GETTING FAMILIAR WITH THE TOOLS

1 Animoto

2 Big Huge Labs

3 Bookr

4 Build Your Wild Self

5 Domo Animate

6 EduGlogster

7 Friv

8 Google Search Stories

9 Kerpoof

10 Penzu

11 PhotoPeach

12 Popplet

13 Shidonni

14 Storybird

15 Toondo

16 Vocaroo

17 Voicethread

18 Voki

19 Wallwisher

20 Wordle

THE JOURNEY: PLAY WITH THE TOOLS

1 Animoto: Create a Fairy Tale Trailer

2 Big Huge Labs: Create a Set of Classroom Rules

3 Bookr: Create a Property Brochure

4 Build Your Wild Self: Describe a Virtual Monster

5 Domo Animate: Plan a Virtual Weekend

6 EduGlogster: Design a Visual Book Report

7 Friv: Describe a Digital Game

8 Google Search Stories: Design a Video Catalogue

9 Kerpoof: Illustrate a picture

10 Penzu: Create a Journal

11 PhotoPeach: Design a Quiz

12 Popplet: Create a Timeline

13 Shidonni: Create a Virtual Pet

14 StoryBird: Tell a Story Together

15 Toondo: Create a Comic Strip

16 Vocaroo: Solving the Problems

17 VoiceThread: Describe Your Favourite Season

18 Voki: Create an Avatar with a Job

19 Wallwisher: Construct an Online Board

20 Wordle: Construct a Visual Biography

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

INDEX BY TOOL TYPE

Welcome to Your First Digital Journey

Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.

Greg Anderson

School is the place to make friends, paint pictures, tell stories, play games and have fun while learning. Wooden blocks and lego have always been favourites of ours since kindergarten classes. With the advent of new technologies, the world is undergoing a digital transformation, changing our learners and our toys alike.

If we can find a way to integrate new technologies into our teaching, we can help our young learners to broaden their learning experience and boost their creativity. It is also a way of enhancing your innovative skills as a teacher – designing lessons or creating new projects with your learners. The idea of using web-based tools with young learners may seem difficult to implement, but the results can be highly rewarding. There are plenty of online tools to help you to bring technology into your classes; many will inspire and stimulate your learners, enabling them to make connections with the rest of the world.

Which tools should a teacher of young learners know about before graduating from a teacher training college? This is the question we have asked ourselves after years of integrating web-based tools into our daily teaching. The purpose of this e-book is to explore different web-based tools that foster creativity and innovation in young learners, and also to give a jump-start to teachers who are eager to start integrating technology into their lessons.

There are many articles, books and blog posts that deal with the integration of web tools into language teaching, but few of these focus on using technology with young learners. This e-book will give a complete and thorough overview of all of the most useful tools, with easy steps and straightforward instructions.

We have both been experimenting with these tools in real teaching contexts for a long time, and therefore feel that we are in a good position to recommend the ones that we think will serve teachers best.

In short, we feel this is a book whose time has come. We invite you and your young learners to join us on a journey through these tools.

Happy travels.

Get Ready

Before you implement any kind of technology inside or outside the classroom with your learners, first ensure that you talk to your school and get permission.

As you will be using photos and audio or video recordings of the learners, you need to ask parents for permission beforehand as well. You should also ask parents to sign a form stating that they are happy for you to use their children’s pictures and videos. You might also like to give a presentation to parents explaining what your plans are, and what kind of technologies you will be using with their children inside and outside the classroom. You should also inform them that their children may have to work on online projects at home, so they will need access to a home computer. You might want to send parents a small note when you start a new online project. If parents do not give permission, you can still use most of the tools which don’t require using pictures or videos. Examples of these are Storybird, Voki, Build Your Wild Self, and many more.

Be sure to teach your learners the importance of the Creative Commons licence. This will allow them to license their own pictures and videos. If your learners need to look for content online, suggest that they use Creative Commons Search as their main search engine. This will ensure that any materials they find are properly licensed for use in their projects.

If you are going to allow your learners to navigate alone, encourage them to use KidsClick (where they can find age-appropriate websites), AskKids (where they can search safely online) or KidRex (a Google search engine specially designed for young children).

Plan your lesson before you do your activities and make sure that you have a backup plan in case the technology doesn’t work properly. Your backup plan should not include technology. Try using one of the biggest free downloadable PowerPoint banks called PPPST as a backup, just in case there is no internet access at school.

Plan only one activity that is related to your topic each time.

Make sure that you are familiar with the tools that you are going to use, and that you are ready to answer any question that comes from the learners about the tools. Review the tips in this e-book on how to use each tool.

Be aware of the fact that web tools are likely to change frequently, and that they may sometimes be down for a couple of days.

Prepare extra materials for fast learners who have completed their tasks before the others. It is always useful to have a list of websites or web tools that learners can play around with.

You may want to prepare short video tutorials for your learners on how to use each tool. These are a great way to invest your time, as they can be used over and over again with future learners. To create the tutorials, you can use Jing. A tutorial (created by Russell Stannard) on how to use Jing can be found at

Set

Ensure that everyone in the class has an email address that they can use while they are signing up for websites.

Ask learners not to give out any personal information (such as their address or last name) before you approve this. We recommend that they use a nickname whenever they sign up for websites. Don’t forget to note down your learners’ email addresses and their nicknames.

If they need to upload a picture of themselves, it is a good idea to have learners spend the first lesson creating an avatar for themselves. Here are some websites that you can use: DoppelMe, CreateMyAvatar, MiniMizer or WeeWorld.

You can use some websites to highlight online safety in the first lessons. 4Kids, Webwise and CyberTreeHouse are good websites to start teaching about online safety while having fun at the same time.

With your learners, have a brainstorming session to decide on some class rules that they should adhere to while using technology. The rules should be about using the computer lab, about their behaviour, and about how they use computers. Clarify beforehand that they may use the computers only for their work. Make sure that everyone understands and agrees to the rules. Display the rules around the walls of the computer lab and classroom.

If learners need to use pictures, videos, or any other information while they are working with the tools, find some extra materials for anyone who has forgotten to bring their own.

Ask the IT department to give one of the computers ‘admin’ status. This should be the one that controls all the other computers and their activities. That way, when you access a website on the admin computer, the other computers automatically open that page.

Ask the IT department to create a shared folder on all the computers. Use this shared folder to keep extra pictures and videos for the learners to use in their projects. You can also use this folder to store shortcuts to websites that you are going to use.

Create bookmarks beforehand for the web tools/websites and links that you are going to show to the learners.

Use a bulletin board to display the projects that your learners have done.

In the lab

Make sure that the projector and all the computers are working properly.

Ensure that the websites you will be using can be accessed via all the computers in the lab. You may need to download web tools such as Flash, or to update a program. You might want to give some learners the responsibility of checking for these things themselves, and for starting up all the computers so that they are ready to use.

In order to use some of the web tools, you may need to use a microphone. Ask learners to bring a microphone from home if they have one. You can bring a few spare microphones for learners to use in case there is a problem.

Prepare your seating plan before you go into the lab. If you don’t have enough computers, you can pair the learners up. Use the same seating arrangement each time.

Display the rules you have agreed for technology use, as well as instructions on how to use the computer lab, around the computer lab walls.

Go!

- Provide some examples of the web tools that you are going to use with your learners.

- Remind learners that they should save their projects frequently while they are working on them.

- Make sure that everyone is working on the project and not looking at other websites. If anyone is looking elsewhere, apply the class technology use rules.

- Make sure that pairs are taking turns in using the computer every time you are in the lab.

- When the learners have finished their task, give them some time to walk around the class and look at each other’s work.

- Ask them to send their finished products to you via email. Collect all the links in a single document to show them in class later.

- Ask learners to turn off the computers as they leave the computer lab. You can ask older learners to help you between the breaks.

- Leave the computer lab early and make the class ready for the next lesson.

And always remember to have FUN!

Before You Set Off: Getting Familiar with the Tools

1 Animoto

What is it?

Animoto is a tool for creating video slideshows using text, music, pictures and videos.

Getting started

Go to and sign up. Animoto for Educators gives teachers unlimited access to the full range of Animoto services. This means you can make longer videos with more pictures and videos.

Try it out

Click on ‘Create a video’. Choose a style. Add your pictures and videos from your computer, from Animoto’s collection or from your Facebook/Flickr account. Upload music from your computer or choose one of the songs from the Animoto library. Finally, add your text and produce your video. Your video will be ready to publish in a minute. If you wish, you can download your video onto your computer, or get a link to show it to others.

2 Big Huge Labs

What is it?

Big Huge Labs is a site that enables you to do some fun stuff such a magazine cover, mosaic picture, movie poster or a badge with your Flickr images (a photo sharing service) or with your own pictures.

Getting Started

You don’t need to sign up unless you want to download the image that you have created. If you want to use the tool with your class, you should sign up for a free educator account. This allows your students to sign in without entering an email address and to use the site without ads. Go to .

Try it out

Choose one of the tools such as Mosaic Maker, Magazine Cover, Map Maker etc. Upload your picture and follow the steps to create your project and share.

….

The Journey: Play With the Tools

1 Animoto: Create a Fairy Tale Trailer

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Curriculum area: Fairy tales

What you need: A computer lab or a computer, pictures of some fairy tales.

You will be using Animoto () for this journey.

Before the journey

Explain Animoto to your learners. You can show them an example if necessary.

Show some pictures from well-known fairy tales such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella etc. Ask learners to name them. As a class, brainstorm the names of other fairy tales that they know.

Put the learners into groups. Ask each group to choose one of the fairy tales. Each group should have a different fairy tale.

The journey

Write the URL of the website on the board, or open the website in a browser on each computer before the learners come in. Explain, step by step, how to use Animoto. Demonstrate it on your computer if necessary.

Put the learners back into their groups and give them some time to search for pictures on Google about their fairy tales. Each group then creates a trailer for their fairy tale, using their images and adding text. Circulate, helping groups with the text for their trailers. The trailer text might consist of very short descriptions of the pictures, for example:

A handsome prince

A beautiful princess

A dangerous place

A terrible dragon

An unforgettable story

The trailer then finishes with the title of the fairy tale, and ‘credits’ (the names of the children). Ask them to add music to their trailer, using the Animoto music library.

Collect the links of each of the trailers into a single document. In the next class, show the trailers in the classroom.

Follow-up activity

As a class, read the fairy tale of one of the trailers, chosen by the children.

2 Big Huge Labs: Create a Set of Classroom Rules

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Curriculum area: Classroom rules

What you need: A computer lab or a computer, printouts.

You will be using Big Huge Labs (billboard.php) for this journey.

Before the journey

Tell your learners that they are going to create an online billboard on classroom rules. Hand out some printed ideas for them to read and discuss. The ideas might look like this:

- Listen when others are talking

- Work and play safely

- Follow instructions

- Be respectful to one another

- Keep your phone switched off during the lesson

- Raise your hand before speaking

- Always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’

Brainstorm some of the rules that they had to follow last year and write them on the board. Then discuss which of these should become the classroom rules for this year. If there are new ideas, include them in your list.

The journey

Write the URL of the website on the board or open the website in a browser on each computer before the learners come in. Explain, step by step, how to use Big Huge Labs to create a billboard.

Divide the class into groups and ask each group to find an image for their billboard.

Explain to learners that they are going to create their own personalized billboard showing classroom rules. They will need to choose the billboard style, the style of text that will go at the top and bottom of the board, and the text colour. Remind learners that they can only use a limited number of letter characters.

When each group has finished their billboard, show them to class. Ask each group to talk about the rules and their reasons for writing them. Compare the billboards.

Follow-up activity

Display all the printed billboards in class and choose the best one for your class.

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