Saturday, January 7, 2012

Tool # 5 This is just great!

Although I found this tool very interesting and fun, I encountered various problems or challenges along the way. For starters,some of the videos in the 11 tools blog, are not longer working! so I had to find the information somewhere else. Then, I had some trouble uploading my prezi presentation on the blog. I wanted to embed the  presentation on the post not to hot link, and that, although easy in the end, took me quite some time to figure out.
Then, I visited, explored and even created something on go animated, which I thought would be awesome to add as an assignment for the students; however, at the last step, it prompted me to pay if I actually wanted to see what I had created. Then, I tried other sites that sounded interesting, but also were either paid or just would not work for what I had in mind. Finally, I ended up with prezi and storybird.com
I found prezi very easy to use. I really like it because you can add  images, videos and text with no hassle at all and put together a nice presentation in just minutes!
Bellow is  my presentation which I plan to use to introduce the Present progressive to the class.



Storybird, I plan to use it as an assignment for the students at the end of the semester. At the end of the semester when they have learned the past tense and the imperfect, I ask them to write a short story using the two tenses. This year, I will have them work in storybird where they can also collaborate and publish their work. Although I opened a regular account, I plan to open a teacher account later when I am ready for the project. Students can download their book if they want to at the reasonable price of $2.99 or just have it in their account in storybird.
Here is the short story I wrote, which is a sample of what I might expect to see from my students.


la historia de martha by yosetm on Storybird

2 comments:

  1. Goodness! Please let them know that they are not working by commenting directly on the 11 Tools page. They definitely need to know that - how frustrating! I wasn't familiar with storybird and I can't wait to play with it! I enjoyed your story - even though I didn't understand it - LOL But I figured out the story from the pictures so that says something, right? Once again, you have been a shining example of the perfect 11 Tooler :)

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  2. I finally was able to find the comment section so I could comment on your blog!

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