In this post from the authors of Interactive, Samantha Lewis explores some online tools for showing off students’ writing skills.
Recently I have been using a couple of web tools with my young teen learners to encourage them to write for an audience other than their teacher. As well as being motivating, I selected these particular tools on the basis that they are free and easy to use.
Animoto
All my learners have loved using a video creation tool called Animoto. It offers an option to create short videos for free, and learners can upload images, music and text to a ready-made template. In terms of writing development, it works better for writing shorter texts at lower levels and for writing at sentence rather than text level, as there is a limit to the number of characters for each slide. Having said that, there are a number of writing activities that lend themselves well to this platform, including descriptions of places (e.g. my town or school), personal experiences (e.g. summer camps or holidays) and biographies of famous people or celebrities.
It is essential to get learners to plan the text and images for each slide on paper first and follow up with a review stage so that they can correct their mistakes before writing the final version on the template. The free version of Animoto, long enough to create a 30-second video of around 6 slides, can be completed in a single lesson. Learners gain a real sense of achievement showing their final videos to the rest of the class. Beforehand, I get them to think of a question which relates to the content of their video for their peers to answer while viewing.
Padlet
Another webtool I believe has great potential for developing writing with ELT learners is Padlet, “paper for the web”. It’s a collaborative online space where learners can showcase their work and post comments. The settings allow you to create ‘walls’ which can only be viewed by your learners and can be password protected. Once students have the wall address and password, they can share their work or post comments either in the computer lab or at home, which makes it a great way to assign some interesting homework. I love the fact that it is easy for the teacher to set up an account and create as many ‘walls’ as they want for one class or different classes. Learners can write posts directly onto the wall or upload longer pieces of writing as word documents and pdfs, and they can accompany their written work with images and video. The wall doesn’t have to limit itself to the class, either – it’s a great way of setting up inter-class projects or school competitions.
Here are a few of the writing activities that I have found work well with online collaborative tools:
- Film, book or album reviews. Alongside their review, learners can upload images or video. Afterwards, they read each others’ reviews and post comments.
- Descriptions, e.g. Guess who? Learners write descriptions of themselves or well-known celebrities and then they read each others’ descriptions and write the name of who they think it is. This idea can also be extended to descriptions of animals or places.
- Invitations. Learners write an invitation to someone else in the class, who then reads it and responds.
- Comics. Learners can create comics using an online comic builder and upload the final version as a pdf. Before students create their comics, it is useful to get them to plan the main events of the story and the content of each panel (background, characters, speech balloons and captions). In my experience, the students love reading each others’ comics and commenting on them.
- Stories. Longer narratives can be uploaded as word documents and 50-word mini sagas can be written straight onto the wall. Learners can then read the stories and post comments.
- Recipes. Learners write up their favourite recipes and then they bring along their dish to class for everyone to enjoy! Before they tuck in, they can take a photo of their creation and upload it next to their recipe.
- Discussions and opinions. When beginning a new unit or topic, you could set up a discussion or ask learners to post their opinions about the topic for homework.
Preparation and Correction
As with any written task, it is important to give learners time to plan what they are going to write beforehand and give them an opportunity to review their work before posting the final version. Once they have posted their work, you can also write comments or highlight parts of the text to guide self-correction. You can also change the settings so that learners can modify their own posts.
Assessment
In terms of assessment, these tools provide a record of your learners’ written work over a term or a course and allow you and your learners to evaluate their progress and assess their writing skills.
My learners had a lot of fun with these tools and were motivated both in class and at home to work on their English while using them.