The Puckish Twins: Zimmer Twins!

Hi buddies! Today you will meet with Zimmer Twins. Their names are Edgar and Eva. I said 'you' will meet because I've already been acquainted with them. Actually it is a website which makes learning English entertaining for kids. We presented it in the classroomwith my partner Leyla. The site's movie-making tool is designed around elements of sentence structure and creative expression, which reinforces reading and writing skills.The Zimmer Twins is known for its unique format which combines online participation. Its animations enhance almost any curriculum subject. 

And how to use the Zimmer Twins? I am going to try to explain it step by step. Firstly, when you open the page you see a screen and you need to choose one of the two  options(kids or educators). We chose the second one. It isn’t a must to sign up the website but unless you sign up you can’t save your movies. In order to start to create your movie you need to click ''make a video''. You can change the character but you just have three options Edgar, Eva, 13( the cat). You can also change the background. Let’s pick an animation clip. There are four different types of clips to choose from. First, you can use the talk bubble clips to make the characters talk.These action clips let your characters walk, run, dance and more. Close up clips let your characters act surprised, happy or even scared. I mean you can add expressions to your characters. Let’s check the star clips. You can find headlines to use here. You can also arrange your animations on the timeline. If you change your mind about the order of your clip, click and drop it to the new location. If you want a longer animation just add another clip right after.  After all, in order to save your movie you can click ''save movie'' and you can give a name to it. If  you need to get more help you can click ''how to make a video'' and watch the introductory video. I add it here for facilitate your work.

                              


 Furthermore you can add students to your class . As for classroom implication of Zimmer Twins, it is a fun way to incorporate technology into the classroom. Watch your students, become junior movie producers, practice proper writing habits and expand their vocabulary. 

Unfortunately, there are some limitations of this site. You can add only up to five students to your class, create maximum of 12 movies,  make pre-scripted comments.There is simple content moderation and no sound clip in the videos. Also, students can't edit their movies with free membership and it is not possible to embed your video. You can only share it with e-mail. Despite all, thanks to its simple usage and enjoyable outcomes, we as future teachers, definitely recommend you to use it for your edutaining.

As I said it is not possible to embed the movie that you have created, I took a video of our movie with my telephone. Let me share our example with you.

Here is another example of the website.

                          

English Is Loading...

Hi guys! I'm writing you on my smart phone. Almost all of us use these devices in recent years.

Let's Create A Digital Story!

Hi everyone! Today I will share you a digital storytelling which we made with my partner Leyla.

Firstly if you don't know what a digital storytelling is, let me define you. Digital storytelling is a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story. The media used may include the digital equivalent of film techniques (full-motion video with sound), animation, stills, audio only, or any of the other forms of non-physical media (material that exists only as electronic files as opposed to actual paintings or photographs on paper, sounds stored on tape or disc, movies stored on film) which individuals can use to tell a story or present an idea. You can think of digital storytelling as the modern extension of the ancient art of storytelling, now interwoven with digitized still and moving images and sound.

When it comes to our task, as you understand it was preparing a digital story in pairs. When you have a partner not only preparation phase of the task becomes easier and more enjoyable but also the output becomes more creative and productive. However, even if you have a pair you can have a lot of difficulties in prepearing this task of course. For example we had the first difficulty in choosing a software. As we had wrote our story before we determined the software we had to change the program we used several times. Because few of the characters and images are free on most of the softwares and we chose the most appropriate one; Animaker. After we chose it, we had another difficulty in using the program because it was our first time. Nevertheless exploring the program was quite funny. You can try to use this program even just for fun. 

Just like creating a digital story, benefiting from it is also enjoyable and educational . Unlike the traditional methods, this kind of method is more efficient about memorability. Whether you are a learner or a teacher doesn't matter, I recommend it to everyone who wants to get rid of boring texts and written dialogs to improve the daily language.

Listen To The Voice Of Voice Of America!

             Hi everyone. Here I am again. Today I will share a website which I ran into while I was searching for a good website to improve my listening skill in English. The author of this web site is Voice Of America which is an internatioanal brand. VOA launched in 1959. It has been working for more than half a century. Since its foundation it was working on teaching English as Special English. In 2014, its line of products was expanded to include more English teaching materials, and the service became known as Learning English.  

             This website is generally based on world news which includes business, science, U.S. life, popular culture and other topics. There are various online texts, MP3s and podcasts that let people read, listen and learn American English on these topics. Its audio programs and captioned videos are written using vocabulary at the pre-intermediate and intermediate level. The site's programs are read one-third slower than normal English speed so anyone can understand this native speech easily.

                According to the author "VOA Learning English" is appropriate for beginners. It is true that there are some videos including very beginning topics like acquaintance phase. But  it is not enough to consider the site at beginning level. In my opinion, the words and texts in the website are too difficult for beginners' comprehension. As I observed, "VOA Learning English" aims to improve one's level rather than teach English from the beginning. 

                Because of its long-standing background, VOA has a good quality on Learning English brand. It is really a reliable about accuracy of the information and there is no broken link on the website. Thanks to all these positive features of it, not only learners but also teachers can benefit from VOA with the peace of mind. Teachers who don't have any facility to create a natural environment for the students can suggest this website to his/her students. Because the videos on the website are dramatised by experts from real conversations and this makes the colloquial language catchy. 

  

                  There are much more materials which I haven't mentioned about that website. So let's explore more and listen to the voice of Voice Of America all together! 

Here is The New Face of RSS: Cute Cube Dude!

Hey!
Nowadays, I've explored a practical way of subscribing web sites and now, I'm going to introduce you this way called RSS.

Firstly, if you don't know what is RSS, don't worry about it. I will make it clear for you.

RSS means Rich Site Summary and it is often called Really Simple Syndication. An RSS document called "feed" includes full or summarized text, publishing date, author's name etc. There are lots of services for RSS such as Feed Reader, Digg Reader, Fresh RSS, Flow Reader, Feedly (Please click here for more options). You can use any of them. If you ask my choice let me tell you, it is "Feed Reader". As all the other RSS services, Feed Reader enables us to surf on our followed pages tidily without wasting time. It also prevents the loss of our favourite links.

Let's begin to use this beneficial technology all together by discovering a new blog! Here is my favourite one. The blog which I've attached is a marvelous resource for English learners of all levels who are literates. You can find a lot of materials such as games, songs, reading passages, videos, all kinds of exercises and also suggestions for some learning problems. Thanks to its rich content I highly recommend it. In addition to learners, teachers who want to enrich their lessons with such an innovative tool should make use of this site.

Boring Coursebooks Out, Popcorn In!

Hi guys! Today I will attach our new task given by our lecturer. Actually it is a recreation rather than a task for us because of the "watching a film" part of it. We were supposed to watch a film in pairs as you understand and write a review for it. The aim of this task indeed was learning how to use a wiki page. Me and my partner had some difficulties about phrasing when we were writing the review but we helped each other and we conveyed our opinions more efficiently thanks to this collaboration. After we worked on this task we found out using wiki in the classroom is quite beneficial so I recommend this alternative method to all teachers not only to language teachers. By using it students can share their knowledge, experiments, comments or recommendations about anything in an entertaining way.

Here is our review for "Mad Max: Fury Road". Let's glance at that action film all together. I hope you  decide to watch it and after that I hope you enjoy at least as much as we do. 

Have a good time!

The Mysterious Scream

Hi everybody! Here is my first podcast. Firstly this post is appropriate for all ages. You can listen the podcast and I hope it will be useful for you. My partner is Leyla SAV in this job. We had some difficulties while we were creating this podcast because of some technological problems about uploading the voice record to our blogs. Apart from that, we had really fun while we were preparing for this post. In my opinion podcasts are certainly useful tools in edutaining so I strongly recommend to all teachers to use them in order to make their lessons more efficient and entertaining.





Record music with Vocaroo >>

Welcome My Fellow Travellers!

Hello and welcome to my page dear “Learning Volunteer”!  Although the goal of this page is the same with other English teaching based blogs, its method will be totally different. Because when I share new posts I will never be only a teacher but also a learner as in real life. In other words, I will just be the driver for the journey on the way of learning English and we will explore all together. Come and join me on this entertaining journey! By this way let me edutain you who is a learning volunteer as a learning volunteer!