Monday, January 20, 2014

All about me digital posters

All about Me posters are usually created at the beginning of the school year but I thought of  some creative activities that you can do on number of occasions. For example announcing the students of the month  with the Most Wanted Students poster, teaching past tenses with My Timeline poster, teaching body parts and physical characteristics with Missing Person Announcement poster or at the end of the school year and a lesson on summer vacation with My Passport poster.
Here are some tips and ideas how to create all of these digital All About Me posters :

My Passport
Aim: present simple, past simple, ing-form
Level: pre-intermediate, intermediate, advanced
Time: 30-40 minutes 
Preparation: Make sure you have created a umapper account before the lesson. You can assign your students to make accounts also, but it just would be a waste of time. I always make one account and give my students the username and password. Not only will you save time but you will also have all their creations in one place and you can edit any mistakes that they might have made. Or you can mark everything in one map. You can enter Canva with Facebook accounts and you can do this on the lesson.
Procedure:The students will be creating their own passports. The first thing is the visual design of it. You should think about all the elements that a real passport contains like photo, name, date of birth, sex, birth town and country, fingerprints and stamps. To make it as realistic as it can possibly be you need to find a tool where you can add all these features. A perfect tool for creating a passport is Canva. It's a good idea to decide on one design that all of the students will use, but they will change the colours and data. Take a look at this:
Now they need to bring it to life.Upload it to Thinglink and start adding tags.
Thee first activity is about the photo. Now all passport contain a photo but ours is a passport of the inside me. So ask your students to tag
their mouth with the sentence The things that I most laugh at are...;
their nose to the sentence The things that make me most proud are...;
their eyes to the sentence The things that make me sad are...;
the eyebrows to the sentence The things that scare me most are...;
cheeks to The things I love most...;
and chin to The things that I find most annoying are...;
Now go over the photo with your mouse cursor and see the examples.
The second activity is The story of my name. This could also be a writing activity but I always prefer to have an audio story to a written one. If you are making an audio story make sure you use SoundCloud or Audioboo since they both can be embedded on your Thinglink photo.  Students need to think about the meaning of their name, why were they named so, the name they would have been given had they been the opposite sex, if they like their name and what name would have they chosen for themselves (encourage them to make up names according to their character)
Third they only need to create an online map marking the hospital wing where they were born

and tag it to the map on the photo.
To finish up they could add a tag to the fingerprint stating one thing that makes them unique, a countdown to their birthday, and a thing or two they like about being a girl or boy (they can even upload photos).

Missing Person Announcement
Aim: used to, past simple, present simple
Level: pre-intermediate, intermediate, advanced
Time: 10-20 minutes 
Preparation:For Coogle you will need a Google account, so create one and they can all work using one account  and at the end of the lesson you have all in one place and you can download their maps and keep them for the portfolios. No need to create accounts for Smore before the lesson since you can log in with a Facebook account.
Procedure: In the original missing person activity students write announcements about each other leaving the name space blank and the rest of the class has to guess who the missing person is. But this is a new version of that activity. Students are encouraged to draw a mind map of what they used to look like (think of hairstyle, height, weight, shoe size, braces, glasses, clothes and accessories...) , favourite activities that they used to have, things that they used to like (films, music, games..), best friends, favourite objects... They can use Coogle which is a very simple mind mapping tool.
Now they can write their missing person announcements and they are looking for their old selves. You can use Smore for publishing the announcements and it is so easy to use. Here is an example and the outline:
Most Wanted
Aim: ing-form
Level:all levels
Time: 10-15 minutes 
Preparation:Build a Padlet wall and share the link with the students
Procedure:Create a Padlet most wanted wall with names and photos of the students and what they are wanted for. My idea is not to upload photos but rather create avatars. I think picasohead would be great for this activity. Once they created their most wanted picaso heads they can stick them to the wall with a click and write why would they be most wanted in an English language class. The idea is to be most wanted for an amazing thing you did in your class. Here is an example:


My Timeline
Aim:past simple, past continuous
Level:all levels
Time: 10-20 minutes 
Preparation: Make sure you get acquainted with TikiToki. You don't want your students to make accounts at home since they have to pay special attention to the starting and ending dates.
Procedure: Students will create an online timeline about their life. They will use TikiToki timeline. First you need to create accounts and be sure the starting date of the timeline is the birth date month and year of the student. Using TikiToki is very easy and I have already used it in my class with my youngest students. Once you created your timeline encourage your students to add notes on the timeline about things that they did and when they did them. Things like started talking, walking, first tooth, first word, first school day, first English lesson, football match, first prizes... They can also upload audio and video recordings and photos of them all.

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