Cat on a Rollercoaster: Using iMovie with young children

One way of using iMovie with children is to incorporate their natural imaginative play into a narrative. For this video, I helped Solana think of a beginning and then she became the director and began to add onto the story. We recorded the entire video in Photobooth: I'm still having some issues getting the backgrounds such as the rollercoaster in this video to look natural. I did something similar with my ESL student as a way of working on beginning, middle and ending. At the end of the year, I gave my student a DVD with her iMovie project and a slideshow of images from the year which her family enjoyed watching at home.

Voki for ESL vocabulary and Elephant and Piggy

I'm trying out voki with an ESL student: posting this voki using a vocabulary word to Moodle for gained exposure. My student and I are big fans of the Elephant and Piggy series by Mo Willems: great for buddy reading, reader's theatre, and laughs! I first saw this series when my friend's daughter was having the best time shouting the lines of the dramatic elephant character. Highly recommend elephant and piggy for early readers, ELLs, and below level readers in the early grades.

Get a Voki now!

Trippo Mondo

I'm still on a quest for useful educational apps for my Droid. We had fun with Trippo Mondo-- Solana translated a phrase in Russian and then sent it to me by email. Nice tool for language learning and would be fun in a class with ELLs of different language backgrounds for community building activities, translating, etc.