Epals!

Epals looks like a great medium for students to be able to interact with others from different countries and cultures.  What is especially nice for teachers is the fact that they have lessons already planned for teachers.  The only downside there is, is that they do not provide free research material for the students.  They suggest purchasing National Geographic Books/Magazines for the supplemental material.  However, research material can be easily substituted in other various forms.  Students can also have their own email account, where they can email other students in the epals community.

An idea that I have for classroom application would be to have students email questions (perhaps even weekly) to their epals, and then have students present their epal's responses.  This would help the students be able to experience more cultures.  Teachers would provide some questions to ask their epal, while students being able to add more if they choose so.  The only foreseen problem would be, if there was no/limited response from the other epal students.  The teacher could also introduce students to a certain aspect of the epal's culture so that students could have more background knowledge to the epal responses.  This would be a great way to 'push' students into new cultural realms, so that they can have a more diverse outlook on the world.

Digital Storytelling

Mugging by casey_boltes

Here is a comic that I made on stripgenerator. I really thought that students would get a blast out of making this! The choices of the characters is really unique, and there is a lot of objects that the students can choose from. There is not a lot of room to work with, but is it great for a really short story.

For the next story creator I used Stupeflix, I did not enjoy creating a story as much, as I did with the other website. Here is my video that I created of fall on Stupeflix. 

Relief Sculptures

Relief Sculptures, a photo by TushyD on Flickr.

Here is one of the structures excavated out of the vertical face of the Charanandri hills – being Buddhist, Hindu and Jain rock-cut Jain and Hindu templess and viharas and matha were built between the 5th century and 10th century.

As an ESL teacher it is important to incorporate authentic cultural artifacts from the students L1 country. This is why I choose this picture. I think that digital storytelling is a great way to introduce topics to students, in a way that they can easily understand because of the media content (voice and pictures). Students can then also take the same format to create their own story, using the same bookr framework. Creating new their own stories allows them to in corporate different modified literary aspects into their own digital story writing.

Bookr story

I created this bookr story of farms to introduce students to the topic of farming.  Some of the ESL students have experience on farms, so I wanted to incorporate their funds of knowledge into this new topic.  This is a great tool to 'hook' students into a new topic using pictures. This digital story can be a model, so that students will be able to create their own digital storybook using bookr.  The story that I created is the basis of a discussion for students so that they have the vocabulary to engage in a discussion about farms. My objectives are: having students become familiar with farm animal vocabulary and understanding that the products that they use come from the farm.