Activity #4: Create your own monster

Activity 4: "Create your own monter" 

-Level: Begginers.

-Skills: Writing.

The teacher asks sts to write a story with the following title: "My favourite monster"

Sts have to write a story about the day when they met the monster, a short description about it and the reason why it is their favourite one. Once the story is corrected by the teacher, sts have to create the monster according to the description they provided in the story using "Gizmoz".

- Evaluation:

The teacher should correct the writings paying attention to the use of vocabulary related to the topic and the use of correct tenses (ex.: simple past for the day when they met the monster, simple present for the desciption of the character, etc.).

- Description:

Gizmoz has developed proprietary patented 3D and animation technology to let users express themselves by creating realistic 3D characters made from a single face photo. Gizmoz is the leader in 3D face-mapping technology, face manipulation and automatic face detection with several patents and pending patents in this field. Gizmoz provides a central service to design, manage and transport digital avatars that can be deployed in virtual worlds, online games, PC and console 3D games, social networks, video clips, greeting cards, mobile apps, as well as professional modeling and animation tools.

- How to use it: 

1- Go to the following website: www.gizmoz.com and click on "Create your avatar":

 2- First you have to sign up, complete the gaps and then click on "register":

3- Once you are logged in, the following window opens up for you to start creating your own avatar:

 4- You can start by choosing the "male presets":

 5- Then choose the morphs, and so on ( remember to click on "save" for every change you make):

 6- Once you are happy with your character, click on "publish" and the following window will open up:

7- Then click on "download" ( you can either choose to get your character for free, or pay some money to get your imagen in 3D) and the followinh winwow will open up suggesting you to wait a few minutes:

8-Once your image is processed, you have to click again on "download":

9- After that you will have the option to open the image or save it:

10- And you will get your final product:

- I find this tool useful for children since they are very amaginative and they love creating fantasy characters. 

Activity# 3: Likes and dislikes

Activity 3: "Likes and dislikes" 

-Level: Beginner.

-Skills: Speaking and writing.

The teacher asks sts to go round the classroom and and ask each student about their likes and dislikes, asking questions such as: Do you like animals? Do you like football? Do you like food?.

After this, the teacher asks sts to arrive to some conclusions such as: "Boys love football", "Girls love animals", "One girl hates spiders", etc. and then asks sts to create at least 5 sentences using the tool "pimpampum".

- Evaluation:

The teacher should correct  paying attention to the use of vocabulary related to the topic and correct use of simple present related to likes (especially the use of  "s" for verbs with singular pronuons.)

- Description:

PimPamPum is a collection of web applications that allow you to work with Flickr photographs and turn them into books, comics and more.

- How to use it:

1- Go to the following website: www.pimpampum.net./phrars/:

2- Write a phrase in the gap provided and click on "start":

3- The tool itself suggests some images for each word, you can either leave it like that or change them by clicking on the option "change":

4- Or change them by clicking on the option "change" and you can also leave some words without any image by choosing the option "I don`t want any image". Once you have decided which images to choose, click on "done":

 5- Then you must choose a title and a name in order to identify your work:

6- Once everything is ok, click on "publish" and the tool itself will show your own work.

- I find this tool useful especially for teenagers who love working with images and who want to work with tools that are fast and easy.

Activity # 2: Portrait avatar maker

Activity 2: Physical descriptions

- Level: Beginners.

- Skills: Writing.

The teacher asks sts to create a "cartoon" of each member of their family, including themselves. Once the characters are created, the teacher asks sts to copy the cartoons in a word document and then provide a full description of each of them.

- Evaluation: 

The teacher should correct paying attention to the use of vocabulary related to the topic and  the correct use of have got/ has got.

- Description:

Portrait avatar maker enables users to create an avatar, that is, a virtual picture of a user of a social network, MSN Messenger or a player in a game that identifies that person. This avatar maker in particular provides users with many different features to customize and create their avatars, like the avatar’s parts of the body (back, hairstyle, eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, body, hands), shoes, make-up and colorations (a section that lets users edit the colours of the features they have included in their avatars). When the avatar is finished, it can be downloaded in “.GIF” format. This application is free.

- How to use it:

1- Go to the following website: http://avatarmaker.abi-station.com/index_en.shtml:

2- You can start by choosing the back:

3- Continue with the hairstyle:

 4- The body, etc.:

5- Once you are happy with your avatar, click on the option "Download". Then choose the option: "open" or "save":

6- A window will open up with your own avatar creation:

- I find this tool useful to work with children since it is easy to use and sts will have great fun creating their own avatars.

Activity # 1: Wordle

Activity 1: "Our world is in danger" 

-Level: Intermediate.

-Skills: Reading and writing.

The teacher introduces the name of the activity: "Our world is in danger" and asks sts to provide examples of what people do to damage our environment. Then she/ he elicits phrases such as: global warming, air pllution, acid rain, etc.

After that, the teacher divides the class into groups of  3 people and gives each group a topic, for example: greenhouse effect, global warming, endangered species, etc. ( None of the groups should know what the rest of the class is working on. )

Each group is supposed to hand in a writing ( as a summary for each topic ) which will be evaluated by the teacher. Next, each writing will be used to create a word cloud.

The word clouds will be printed out and distributed among the different groups. Each group will have to prepare a writing trying to guess what the original text was about.

After correcting the second writings, the teacher will hand out the original texts for the sts to see if their guesses were right.

- Evaluation:

The teacher should correct the writings paying attention to the use of vocabulary related to the topic and the use of correct tenses (specifically present simple). She/ he should correct all the mistakes in the first writing so as to avoid mistakes inside the word cloud.

-Description:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

- How to use it:

1- Go to the following website: www.wordle.com and click on "CREATE":

2- A- Paste in a bunch of text or,

    B- Enter the URL of any blog, blog feed or any otherweb page that has an Atom or Rss feed     or,

    C- Enter a del.icio.us user name to see the tags.

And click on "GO":

3- The tools creates the word cloud an gives you options to edit it, change the language, the font, the layout and the color:

4-Once you concider your loud is perfect, click on the option "Print" or the option "Save it to public gallery". If you click on "Save to public gallery", you have to give your cloud a title and create your user`s name:

5- Finally the tool gives you the chance to copy and paste an embed code if you want to share it:

- This tool is useful because it makes it easy to create the clouds and you can relate it to any topic. By using word clouds you can work on improving students` writing and reading skills.

Sample 7 - Penzu

Penzu is a service that makes publishing your texts online simpler than you ever thought possible. You visit the site, start writing, click save and you're done.

Look at the first entry to my personal diary:

https://penzu.com/pad

Sample 6- Listen-and-write

Listen and write is a dictation tool. It allows you to listen to a whole range of news programmes and interviews.  The great thing about the tool is that all the listening activities are broken up into segments and the programme will continue to repeat and repeat that segment until the student has written it correctly. Then it will move onto the next segment. If the student is really stuck then they can press the hint button to get some help. The hint button provides the next letter in the dictation.

Listen to my song and try to write what you hear:
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1okmj6SjfhW65GKoctMGxS2mZM2XTSkSr-8e49nIWO-s&hl=en&authkey=CJPRzb8E&pli=1#

Sample 5 - Gizmoz

Gizmoz has developed proprietary patented 3D and animation technology to let users express themselves by creating realistic 3D characters made from a single face photo. Gizmoz is the leader in 3D face-mapping technology, face manipulation and automatic face detection with several patents and pending patents in this field. Gizmoz provides a central service to design, manage and transport digital avatars that can be deployed in virtual worlds, online games, PC and console 3D games, social networks, video clips, greeting cards, mobile apps, as well as professional modeling and animation tools.

Look at my character:

http://www.digimi.com/newsite/presite/itemPage.jsp?partner=studio&scene=30680370