Online resources to support student tasks, projects and self-study

There are lots of online resources you can use to support task or project-based work and to encourage student self-study – and you can find out about many of them by thumbing through this blog. So in this post I'm just going to talk about some websites you can use for digital storytelling.

My favourite are:
ZimmerTwins
StoryJumper 
StoryBird

ZimmerTwins

This is a website where you can make attractive, short animated films. It's easy to use and intuitive, students pick it up in minutes and works well for age groups from about 7 – 12.
As with all these types of resources, you need to create an account first (which is free with no strings attached). You can either get your students to login with your account details or create a class login.

Ways to use ZimmerTwins in class
It's great for focussing on vocabulary related to actions, settings and emotions.
I usually make a demo movie to show to my class. In it I introduce the 3 characters that appear in every movie: a boy called Edgar, a girl called Eva and a cat called 13.
I show:

• the different things they can do: fly, hide, laugh, sing, dance etc 
• the different places they can visit: a desert, a jungle, outer space, a Chinese restaurant etc
• the different emotions they experience: angry, sad, scared, surprised etc

Sometimes, I've got students to write out their story beforehand in class or for homework and talk about it in a whole class situation before going to the computer room. You can also set the movie making part for homework. After students have made their movies, have a film premier session where they see what their classmates have done and vote for the movie they like best.

As with all these resources, I ask one of the students to help demonstrate how to use them on the IWB for the rest of the class. This enables you to check for any difficulties they may have in using them (that haven't occurred to you) and also is a good way of introducing important lexis: click there, scroll down a bit, not that one, this one etc. Moreover, you'll probably find that students pay much more attention to a classmate than to you!

Another tip: tell your students that they can work at the computers for the first 10 minutes or so in their first language. However, one of them has to note down the phrases that they say most. Then, stop work and ask them to write their phrases – or a translation of them in English – on the board. This gives them a language bank to work with when their back at the computers and is also a practical way to call their attention to the fact that you want them to work in English. You can back this up by having a barometer diagram displayed on the IWB with students' names at the side. As you go round the class monitoring your students, you can increase or decrease the barometer according to whether they are working in English or not and make it clear to them that this will form part of their speaking evaluation.

StoryJumper

You can use this for creating online picture book stories – here's an example from my Silver 3 class. The site is very teacher friendly and you can create a simple fun login for your whole class. I advise you to play with StoryJumper a bit before launching it on a class but it's quite simple to use and comes with a good tutorial. It will appeal to is the same age-group as for ZimmerTwins, about 7 – 12.

Ways to use StoryJumper in class

I've used this for practising writing descriptions but you can really adapt it for any topic or language focus you want. Again you can start in class and let students finish their stories for homework.

StoryBird

This is similar to StoryJumper but suitable for older students – basically of any age. It has a very helpful tour which will give you and your students an overview of what to do and how the site works. Like StoryBird, you can easily login a whole class and it offers a dashboard where you can check students' progress and give them stickers or even marks on their work. It also encourages collaborative work and students can invite each other to work on a story, so it's ideally suited for work outside the classroom.