Animoto sideshows

I like Animoto sideshows which is an online website that allows teachers and students to create photo slideshows by using one of the sleek video styles and adding song.  A unique feature of Animoto is that one can use and type different language words/characters and there are over 50 different video styles to choose.One can also choose songs in the built-in music library and add them to photos and video clip trimmer. Students can try and make their own videos based on their knowledge and present by a targeted language.

In my classroom, I guided my students to create a Halloween poster in Chinese, in which students selected their favorite pictures based on commonly used Halloween vocabularies and sentences. The students selected different Halloween pictures, video styles, songs and wrote the corresponding Chinese characters and sentences based on the pictures. Students were really excited and enjoyed making the Chinese Halloween posters. I was happy to see that students participated and shared their efforts in the second language learning. By creating the Halloween video stories, I can check students’ vocabulary and grammar writing, and evaluate their understanding of the main theme of Halloween. I use two ways to assess students’ creations about the Halloween poster in Chinese. One is written format assessment which requires students to construct a Chinese writing format based on their selected Halloween pictures. The other assessment is to create pictures and add music based on the content topic. I feel that this is an effective approach to assess students’ understanding and learning a second language.