Macmillan Iberia ELT Teacher Training blog

Location: www.voki.com

Voki is a tool for creating your own avatar (an animated picture of someone). You can personalise your avatar and record (or type in) the words you want it to speak.

1) How to use it:

PRIMARY:

Voki PowerPoint tutorial

SECONDARY:

2) Teaching ideas

PRIMARY:

Use Voki to add a speaking and listening dimension to any writing activity. For example, if your pupils are writing about their likes and dislikes (as in the example below from Bugs World 3), they can record or key the sentences into Voki and hear them spoken. They can watch and listen to each other’s avatars.

Taken from Bugs World 3 by Elisenda Papiol and Maria Toth (Macmillan ELT)

Here’s an example we made:

Get a Voki now!

SECONDARY:

Make dictations more student centred by getting them to record their own voices then transcribe what each other’s avatar is saying. Or extend a letter or email-writing activity by bringing it to life through an avatar! Here’s an example from Voices 1.  Students are given the following writing task:

Taken from Voices 1 by Catherine McBeth (Macmillan ELT)

Here’s our example:

Get a Voki now!

Location: www.glogster.com

Glogster is a great way to bring projects to life. You can create a poster with text, images and even sound files. The tutorials below show how to create a ‘glog’:

PRIMARY:
Here’s an example of how a project task in a Primary coursebook can be presented using Glogster. This is the task…

Taken from Bugs World 3 by Elisenda Papiol and Maria Toth (Macmillan ELT)

…and here’s the glog we made:

Watch how we did it in the PowerPoint tutorial below:

Glogster PowerPoint tutorial

SECONDARY:
Here’s an example of how a project task in a Secondary coursebook can be presented using Glogster.

The following tutorial shows students can create their project poster through Glogster, using mind maps to help plan the contents:

Location: www.toondoo.com

Toondoo is a great tool which allows you to create your own cartoons, complete with speech bubbles and captions. It can be found at www.toondoo.com

Students can either create their own cartoons (possible around a certain grammar point) or fill in captions / speech bubbles in cartoons created by the teacher or their classmates.

Location: www.triptico.co.uk
 

PRIMARY:
Watch this PowerPoint presentation to find out how to locate and use Word Magnets, as well as some teaching ideas.

Word Magnets PointPoint tutorial

SECONDARY:
Watch this tutorial on how to locate Word Magnets on the www.triptico.co.uk site.

The following tutorial suggests some more ideas for working with Word Magnets:

Location: www.wordle.net

Wordle provides a novel way of working with a text, randomising the words into any number of different patterns such as the one above.

Why not use Wordle to get your students to predict the content of a reading text? Just type in the a few sentences and the programme will randomise them. Or challenge your students to predict sentences from the text with the words they see. Watch our Wordle tutorials for some more ideas.

PRIMARY:
Here’s an idea to use Wordle in order to get pupils to do some predicting work before reading a couple of texts (from Find Out! 5 by Mark Ormerod with Donna Shaw, Macmillan ELT):

Wordle PowerPoint tutorial

SECONDARY:
This tutorial shows a similar idea using a Secondary text from the Voices 2 Student website: