Cartoons, animations and presentations

ToonDoo: OK, so it is homework, but at least it's fun!

Below, some of the links I provided in a creative writing workshop I gave recently for Macmillan (and welcome to any of you who came/are coming in Girona, Lleida or Palma!).

Cartoons and animations

• Dfilm MovieMaker
• Toondoo.com
  
• Voki
• Zimmertwins
  

Note that Dfilm MovieMaker is possibly not suitable for young learners.

Presentations

• Animoto.com
  
• Prezi
• Voicethread
  

Personally, I have a preference for using good old Word, or even PowerPoint, or (best) a blog, for creative writing as I think that with some of the above your learners will end up spending more time on the technology and less time on the writing and the interaction in English (with the latter being what we're really trying to obtain in the language classroom)...

But I accept that, especially with younger learners, being able to animate things is probably more exciting, and hence more motivating and engaging and thus as likely as anything to produce learning.

No one writes postcards any more, especially not teens

At the seaside in Asturias | Photo: Isabel Walton

Below, the piece of writing my daughter (14) had to do for her English teacher this weekend, a task from a popular coursebook which asked the students to look at a model and then "Imagine you are on holiday. Write a postcard to a friend":

Dear Kate,

Greece is incredible! I'm having so much fun! The people I'm staying with are really nice and they have a beautiful huge white beach house in Santorini.

The weather is perfect. It's very sunny. Sometimes it's too hot but it's normally OK. At night there's always a gentle breeze that is very refreshing.

Here there are plenty of original tiny old shops that sell souvenirs, food, bracelets, clothes... I'll make sure I get you something before I leave.

Tomorrow we're going to a small sandy beach in a nice cosy village, in the seaside. I think it'll be great!

In bold, highlighted by my daughter, one of the language points that they were instructed to incorporate (and highlight).

My problem with the task is that it's just unrealistic. My daughter collects postcards but has never in her life written one to a friend while on holiday, nor is she ever likely to. And 14-year-olds, in my experience, aren't actually that interested in "nice cosy villages".

My daughter finished her "postcard" by saying:

The other day I was lying on the beach and suddenly this incredibly gorgeous blond Greek guy called Kostos, approaches and offers to take me on his boat. He's very nice. I think I may have fallen in love all over again.

See you soon.
Lots of love,

Miranda.

Her Dad is going to say "NO!!!" when she asks if it's OK to go with Kostos on the boat ,-) but that's more like it -- that's more what is going to occur to a 14-year-old to write about.

You have to feel some sympathy for coursebook writers: the book in question was published in 2006 -- long enough ago for Facebook to be practically unheard of, but Facebook is where my daughter would actually be writing about her holidays (or rather about Greek guys!).

While coursebook writers can't keep up with the speed of change, at least we teachers can, and a Facebook entry, or a text message or an email would be so much more realistic, and so much more interesting to young teens as a task.

If you had a class blog, they could also be posted there and shared and the "replies" could go there too, in the comments, also making it a more real, more engaging task. Partner your learners, and then "Kate" would have to reply to "Miranda's" messages, and vice versa.

Blog postings could also include photos, preferably not stolen from Google-is-Evil, but taken by the learners themselves, or their family, from their holidays (as in the example, above, which my daughter took while on holiday in the north of Spain).

Now if you had an interactive whiteboard...

Valentine's Day lesson plan

Harry met Sally on the Internet...

Here's an idea for a creative, collaborative writing activity for Valentine's Day, which is coming up shortly, which uses a process writing approach...

• Whole class, discuss what good love stories have in common and what they boil down to, preferably a single sentence... The conclusion we reached in the group I first tried this with was that all love stories are variations on "Harry met Sally".
• Individually, have learners expand on that single sentence, not necessarily to finish the story but to make it more romantic.
• In pairs, have the learners pick which of their two stories they like best and, together, expand the one they chose into a first draft of the story
• Whole class, share the stories... This could be done on the computer screens, if you are using computers, or by printing them out, or by posting them on a blog
• In pairs, have the learners give other pairs feedback (orally or in writing...) on their story (what they like/dislike, would add/take away...)
• Edit the story into a second draft, with possibly a second round of feedback...
• Publish the final versions (classroom walls, class blog...)

Process writing and word processing: they were just made for each other, and such activities are lots of fun to do in class, especially when the results are shared and (because the stories are written in pairs) there's no pressure on each individual to prove him/herself a brilliant writer.

Not many students say they enjoy writing, but most say they like doing things in pairs...

More ideas for Valentine's Day:

>> From Larry Ferlazzo
>> Be my Valentine!

Short, short stories

10 words...

Updated on Snopes.com is the claim that Ernest Hemingway once won a bet for writing a six-word story (the jury is still out, says Snopes).

Back in April, we actually used the idea with students studying Spanish at IH Barcelona, as the basis for a mini-writing project, which was fun -- Mi vida en solo 6 palabras (My life in just 6 words).

You might try the same -- though you might also consider giving them more words (Hemingway supposedly had a limit of 10), with 25 or 100 giving your students a little more scope for actually writing coherent text.

Snopes has an alternative: how about a story containing religion, royalty, sex and mystery... ,-) ?

Related posts >> Mini-sagas and 100-word stories

Text connections: a creative writing project

With one of my colleagues, Carolyn Edwards, I recently participated in an experimental creative writing project, Text Connections, in which we got learners to decide on a story from a series of photos torn from newspapers, which they then had to tell by writing a series of connected texts -- which could include emails, shopping lists, police reports...

I think the teacher's notes are interesting and the learners' comments on the project particularly so.

Previously, we did a very brief trial run of the project on a session on our Celta course.

A creative writing project

Our pictures: we could just have stolen them from Google, but went for the non-tech approach!

Below, the rough outline of a creative writing project I'm team-teaching with a colleague next week, with two groups of Intermediate and Upper-Intermediate adults, most of whom use English for work, who have recently been working on register.

Our materials are a series of photographs of people torn out of newspapers and magazines... and that's it.

Stages of the project:

1. Ss (=students) look at the photographs, select 6-8 of them, and decide how the people are related (relatives? work? living in the same block? )
2. Ss decide what "the story" is going to be (someone gets/doesn't get the job, consequences, etc., etc...)
3. Ss make brief "character notes" on the people selected (name, age, background, character...)
   
4. Ss decide what written texts there could be that would "tell" the story (job applications, emails, memos, reports, post-it notes...)
5. Ss agree on and make any alterations necessary for the story to be coherent
6. Ss then write the texts (in pairs, not individually), and post them on a blog
7. Ss write comments on the blog (both on the content, and to provide feedback on the project)
8. Ts (=teachers) provide feedback, correction, etc.

At Stages 1 to 7, the teachers will also be providing help with whatever language is necessary...

That's the outline, we'll provide a link to the actual results of the project... But what do you think so far...?

Creative writing with flowers

Say it with flowers...

Here's a creative writing exercise I liked, by Mario Rinvolucri, which I found in the latest issue of Humanising Language Teaching, online at hltmag.co.uk.

Suggested procedure:

• Bring a vase and 5 flowers into class
• Ask for a student volunteer to arrange the flowers in the vase
• Then say: "These flowers are a family. Please write three paragraphs about the family".

Unless you have a super creative class, used to such exercises, you might want to have a pre-writing stage in which, either whole class or in pairs/threes, you get the students to talk about the family first. If they bounce ideas off each other, the writing will be easier.

Don't forget to take a photo of the flowers, as they won't last as long as your text!

Summer camp flowers
The flowers in the photo, above, were cut out from egg cartons and painted. If you were on a summer camp, you could get your learners to each make their own flower, and start from there...

Blogging flowers
If you have a class blog, I'd suggest that this is the sort of activity you want to post on it. It's fun, it's creative, and it's more motivating knowing that the work is going to be posted somewhere, and kept...

Getting your students to write

The excellent teachingenglish.org.uk site has a new article on Making writing communicative (which it often isn't in a language classroom, particularly when writing is something the learner does, hands in to the teacher... and that's that).

The article mentions blogging, which is one way writing can be made more communicative, particularly if all your learners are writing on a single class blog, and writing comments on each others' work, too. Doing so, and creating something that is shared will also create "tasks that are intellectually satisfying", I would suggest.

Among the books listed in the bibliography at the end of the article is Process Writing (Arndt and White, Longman 1991), one which I can highly recommend. Getting people to write in pairs, or at least to comment on each other's work (whether or not it is via a blog) is one aspect of process writing and -- because you talk about what you are writing -- another way in which it can be made communicative.

Getting learners to write -- and read -- stories is another. Some of your learners will no doubt say that they don't like writing, but there's also fun in the process that I think even they will come to share.

Here's a fun story from Ananova.com about fish making a bolt for it from a trout farm that might make the start of a piece of (shared) creative writing. Process writing would require you to brainstorm first, before you start to write: who will the narrator be? One of the characters named in the story? Or one of the trout, perhaps?

And that's where the fun begins...

>> More on Process Writing

Mini-sagas and 100-word stories

Mini-sagas
The idea for mini-sagas came from an excellent book by Puchta and Schratz, Teaching Teenagers, one that I highly recommend if you ever have to teach teens.

Their rules for this creative writing exercise are:

• Each saga must have exactly fifty words
• The title can contain up to a maximum of five other words
• The saga can only be a story (not a joke, description of someone, etc)
  

100-word stories
This idea came from Michael Lewis's The Lexical Approach, another book that all language teachers should read, and is similar.

• Each story must have exactly 100 words
• The title can contain up to a maximum of five other words
• None of the words can be repeated

Yes, that is what is meant: if your title was 5 words, your story would contain a total of 105 words, none of which would be repeated.

You'd obviously require a fairly decent level of English to do this second one -- around Upper Intermediate at least, I would suggest.

What's this got to do with technology?
Of course, both of the above creative writing exercises you could do without ever going near a computer.

Whether or not you used technology for them, I would recommend a collaborative, process writing approach, with students reading each other's work, and commenting on it, before they ever hand it in to you, "finished" (another recommendation: Process Writing, by White and Arndt).

Personally, I would get my learners to write on computers -- apart from anything else as it makes it so much easier for them to edit and correct. Ask students to make amendments to something they've hand written, and they'll understandably be a bit put out. Ask them to amend a Word document, and it's just so easy!

Computers were just made for process writing...

Blogging projects
Both of the above would make great blogging projects. Have all your students as authors on the same "team blog", and get them to write their stories as posts, which they can save as drafts until they are ready for others to comment on them.

They could write new posts for second versions, and perhaps a separate one for final versions.

Important that they do use the comments feature... Blogging was just made for collaborative writing.