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.