By this post, I would like to show how we can teach English language via the app iMovie, which I find is a very good app.
So, what is iMovie? iMovie is an app from Mac. So if you do have an Ipad or Mac computer, you can use it, and it´s free to download. Thru this app, you can make your own movies, by taken pictures on your Ipad or camera. You can use snapshots or short films that you allready have made, or take them during the time that you work with the movie. It is an easy app to work with, I already do use it together with young children, 6years old and the older ones does also like it very much. In the app you can do a lot of effects, you can choose the overall look of your movie, with different formats and you can choose to have a background music while your movie is playing. There are some for performed movies which you can choose to just put your own pictures into, or you can make your own from start. When you have choosen those things, you can start to work with your pictures. While making the movie you can make more effects, on each picture. You can write sentences, make voiceeffects like applauses or fireworks or even record your own voice in! And it´s easy for children to do this by themselfes, they found it very enjoyable! Try it out!
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| iMovie |
Now, how can we use this app as a tool for teach language in school? Because the children of today are used to work with pictures and movies at home and among firends, I think it is a popular method to use in lessons. It´s a hugh benefit to make pupils work in pairs, it make them interact, communicate and reflect over the language with each other. One way to use it could be to get them to work with a subject, like dogs. Here they can find pictures from Internet, books or reality, take pictures of those, find facts, write and record them down. They can also do an interview of each others, take snapshots of each others doing things they like and write it in the pictures. They then can record their voices down (in English of course) where they talk about their friend, facts about him/her, what he/she likes and so on. When the movie are finished they can presentate it for the whole class and get supplementaries from the teacher or the other pupils.
It is also a good tool of documentation for you as a teacher, to use for pupils to see their own learning over a period of time, or to present for parents in appraisals.
I will here link to a youtube clip where you can see and hear a start of how you use the app. Good look!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZKjsF_bzKs
/Josefin Ehnebom
iMovie is a great app! I have not had the time to use it in my teaching yet, but I have been working with it on my own to know what I should do when I show it to the students. Just as you wrote, it is perfect to use as a tool in teaching. If you have a class blog where you can share your movie, you can give friends and family a chance to see what the students have been working with at school. This app, like so many others, is a good way to work thematically and get into more topics than just English. However, this requires access to several iPads so that you can divide the children into small groups. Unfortunately this is not always a possibility. For example, at my school we currently only have access to two iPads in each class (some classes have more, some less, depending on how many students are assigned a personal iPad). I usually borrow iPads from other classes when I am going to work thematically and want to include this tool.
ReplyDeleteHi Maria! We only have two class iPads and all of us teachers has one on our own, so in my class we have 5 iPads. In work with aps like this we do it in half-class and they usually works in pairs, so it works well. If there are classes which might have only one, one option is to work with a rotation over a period of time.
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