Teaching writing through movie maker

In ESL classroom setting, teachers usually ask to students practice language by putting them into groups and assigning role-plays or simulations. It is considered to be important and effective for students actually produce the target language. As one of the interesting and innovative way of producing language collaboratively, I reommand a powerful tool, Zimmer Twins movie maker.

I found this website from one of the 2009 blog wards winner's blog: Free Technology for teachers. In the post Creat Simple Animated movies with Zimmer Twins, the bloger introduces Zimmer Twins as a powerful tool, letting elementary students creat their own stories just by clicking the pictures and typing the texts. One of the good thing is, the website provides promts for the story with which students can make up the following stories.



In the classroom, I think teachers, using this tool, can ask students to make up stories in groups and share thier movies either during the class or after the class. It is very interesting enough to motivate students and yielding a lot of communication and interaction between students.

Looking for a classroom reading material?

When I first visited this blog and looked around for useful information, I was overwhelmed. It seems that this blog deals with a lot of things on English learning and teaching. After more than one hour of investigation, I could find some useful resources for me as and English teacher. What I think the handiest for me is flash stories under TEACH category. Reading in language education has a number of benefits especially to child learners providing more natural setting of acquisition of the target language. However, in Korea, in public schools, the curriculum or English syllabus do not provide reading opportunities to kids because they densely focus on oral and aural aspects of English learning. I could not find many resources or materials for reading and even though we have some English books at the library, they were not very useful in classroom teaching because of its limited numbers for every students and small size to present in front of the class.


The flash stories I found on this blog is very useful for two reasons. First, every student can get access to the web site so I can ask them to watch and read for homework. Second, I can use this during my class. We have pretty big TV in every classroom so that everyone can watch and read at the same time just like the text books we have. Besides these reading materials this blog also forms broad network of English teachers across countries which enables teacher and learners to share variety of ideas. Also, I think this blog would help my learners gain learning autonomy by providing self-learning tools and games and stuffs.

EFL English classroom 2.0

Learners of Today

As a way of getting information changes, the construct on learning has been changed as well. Now, people create and share knowledge, so the previous learning theories that perceive learning occurs inside a person is challenged since the learning could occur outside of a person with the help of technology. Using computers, learners need not memorize and manipulate certain knowledge by themselves. Instead, they need to search and evaluate new knowledge by connecting to each other. Siemens (2005) says, in his theory connectivism, “the pipe is more important than the content within the pipe”, which means it is more important to build connection to new source of knowledge than what you really have in your hand. According to this new way of perceiving learning, we could analogize new type of learner as follows.


Today, learners are like bees. Bees who are in charge of finding food sources make their journey to look for honey. When they find a good food source, they signal to other bees by dancing. Then, other bees come to carry the honey but also share their information about other food sources and their qualities. In this way, bees create a network of food supplies in which they keep giving and receiving information about the state of resources found. Depending on the resource available this network can expand or decrease in size. And sometimes it just dies out If all the food supplies were depleted. Likewise, learners make their way to look for the information. When they find good information, now they share it by connecting to other learners. However, this information sharing is both ways since learners are giving and receiving what they found, namely, they communicate. Also, like the food sources of bees, information today is not absolute. It keeps changing and disappearing as the society and technology change. And this is why networking is important as the video “the network is the learning” says. One needs to link to others “to stay in current” in ones’ field since if one is disconnected, he or she does not adapt to change, namely, might possess out of date knowledge. These days, we all need to be aware of this trait of information and navigate ourselves to look for what we want and make a connection each other, instead of only believing knowledge in our hand.