Blog #6: Digital Storytelling

1. Write brief reviews about the two tools you used to create short lessons.

     The one that I tried to use is Zimmer Twins. On this site, we can make a short movie as a flash player without signing in. If we click 'Make a movie', we can see some of the examples. By clicking 'Make from scratch', we can make our own video clip. Several sections are provided as static picture with a speech balloon (We can type in some talks in it), more active movement, facial expressions and even some objects. As we choose and click some of them, the scenes we click are arranged in a row, and we can edit as needed. After it is all done, we can restore it as clicking 'save movie'.
     The other one is Pixton. This provides various functions to make comics. Since it's deviced well in detail and variety, I prefer using this. The best thing I've ever liked is that this tool serves in three separate parts according to the purpose of making comics; Fun, School, Business. If I get into the site clicking 'fun', you can see 'Get started in 3 easy steps' and just simply follow the guide. To create a comic, first you have to choose a comic frame, a template and two characters. Then, you can see many kinds of tools around the layout like shown below. Or you can just click the joint and freely move it to change the posture.

2. How could these tools be used by teachers AND students?  How could they be incorporated into a class?

     Text books in class don't offer everything especially nowadays when students are exposed to the Internet and medias everyday. So if teachers try to download materials from outside the classroom, however, there are a lot of risks that learners could be easily exposed to sexual or violent things. Thus, these tools could be really helpful to make students interested and actively motivated in class. Teachers can use these tools making conversation using target languages in preactivity. Also, it can be used for students to make their own comics. A teacher distributes the comics having speech balloons empty, so that they can fill in those balloons as they imagine, which will develop their creativity.