Zimmer Twins

Zimmer Twins is another tool for movie making. Similar to Dvolver, Zimmer Twins allows us to create digital video and share it across the interwebs. It is a tool perfectly made for English language teaching, making it more interactive and interesting.

Things to know about Zimmer Twins:

1. It offers 3 characters (Edgar, Eva and 13), talk bubble clips, action clips, expressions and settings
2. It provides several story starters that we can include our own endings to complete the story. 
3. The animated movie can be saved. 
4. We can also insert a title and a brief description to the movie.
5. We can always review and edit, if we are not satisfied with the movie.
6. We may also share our video to friends as an email. 

The three characters: Edgar, Eva and 13



The talk bubble clips, action clips, expressions, star clips and the settings.

How to use it in the class?

1. To practise new language point

• Zimmer Twins is a mean for practicing new grammar point. Teacher needs to first set a topic. The topic sets a context and also acts as a stimulation for students to apply the new language point. Without which, language will be used in a discrete way and loss its authenticity. 

• For example, instead of asking students to make conversation with party-related vocabulary, teacher may set a topic, called "A birthday Party". From there, students build up dialogues and story in relation to the topic and they unconsciously apply a range of topic-related vocabulary. Therefore, with a context, students can practise the new grammar in a real and meaningful way. At the same time, language acquisition take place naturally and unconsciously.

2. To stimulate students' creativity and imaginative skills

• Teacher may ask students to watch a starter video and create their own ending for the story. The starter video can either be elicited from the Zimmer Twins site or created by teacher himself/herself. This activity encourages students to explore on their imaginative minds and creativity to come up with any possible events that might take place after the early part of the story. It also stimulates students' thinking skills in making sensible predictions. 

3. To enhance students' storytelling skills

• Students can use Zimmer Twins to create any story they like and share it with the whole class via email. Besides, students can also have access to their peers' Zimmer Twins profiles in order to have a view of their friends' works. Teacher can set up this task as an out-of-class activity. To ensure that the plan is successful, students need to put in their commitment by updating their movie-maker consistently.

Why is it so special?

1. It promotes visual learning

• Students learn about language as they look at the photos while creating movies. They learn about different expressions of the characters, various vocabulary that explain the actions, and simple sentence constructions.

2. It gets students to be engrossed into the classroom activity

• Cartoons and animations offer a lot of fun in English language learning. Using them as part of classroom activities may generate greater interest of students in learning. Likewise, students' affective filter for learning is reduced; therefore, they can be seen more effective and focused in English language learning. 

3. It promotes autonomous learning.

• When teacher instructs students to create story individually, independent learning takes place. Students can be seen making their own decisions on how to generate a great story. 

4. It develops the sense of ownership

• As students take charge of their own creation of the story, they instill whatever they like and personalise the story. This in turns makes students to be proud of their own video, developing the sense of ownership

5. It is of the advantage of younger learners with limited linguistics knowledge

• Zimmer Twins is simple and easy to use. It has little barriers to entry. Also, the "action clips" and "expressions" provided are of students' competency level. Younger learners are able to explore on the vocabulary and maximise the usage through story-making.
  
  

The Limitations 

1. The characters in the Zimmer Twins cannot speak aloud.

2. We need to create an account for Zimmer Twins if we want to save the movies we create.

3. The tool does not provide an embedded code for us to embed the movie into our blog posts.
  

Have a look at the Zimmer Twins I have created http://www.zimmertwins.com/node/1330139?designated=new

You may log in to the website and have fun creating your story, too! 

Bubbl...R

What is Bubblr? 

Bubblr is a tool use to create comic strips using photos from flickr.com. It is a program produced by a company called pimpampun. We can use Bubblr to produce a presentation of loads of photos or to create a story. 

To create digital comic strips, we need to type in the key words to search the images we need. Drag them to a dynamic timeline structure. Bubbles for speech, ideas, thoughts and text can then be included to the images. What we get is a linear style scrolling comic book after publishing. The strips can be saved to online archive, printed, or shared to others through email or blog. 

Let me present to you the things I love about korea through Bubblr. Here you go.

How to use Bubblr in a language classroom?

1. To tell story
   Teacher can ask students to use bubblr to tell stories, like holidays, hobbies, childhood,  favourite food, festivals etc using a sequence of photos and text bubbles. 
2. To illustrate a historical timeline
   Students can use bubblr to present a series of past events. They can summerise a complicated and wordy historical text into a comic strip so as to visualise the historical events. This helps in the memorisation of the history. 
3. To do class presentation
   Bubblr is an alternative for doing presentation using Powerpoint presentation.

It is also an activity that teacher can assign the students as a homework. It is very easy to acquire and apply. Teacher may introduce to the students step-by step on the ways of uploading photos from flickr to bubblr in class. Once the students get a hang on the tool, they can perform their task back in the comfort zone of their home.

Why would you use Bubblr?

1. The program is free and easy to use. 
2. It gives rise to variety in classroom presentation. This facilitates the learning of students of different learning preferences.
3. It is interesting and engaging. Students have a wide selection of photos and they can create their own stories. 
4. It gives the sense of ownership. As students are given a lot of freedom when creating the comic strips, each comic strip is very different from one another. Comic strips become special when students personalise their work.
5. Images included into the timeline helps to visualise what students learn. This helps to attend to students who learn best through visual arts. 

What are the limitations?

1. Flickr.com may not provide enough photos for students to present their ideas and thoughts. 
2. Only photos can be added to the presentation. Videos and recordings are not applicable. 
3. The text bubbles included into the photos cannot be re-sized. It is can sometimes block the photos.
4. Students cannot put comments to the comic strips created by peers. 
5. When comic strip is embedded into blog, it become too small for visibility.