One of the things that our consultant is teaching the foreign language team at my school is to start every unit plan with a "hook" - something super interesting that it can't help but get the students engaged and ready to learn about the next unit. Some examples of "hooks" are books, songs, pictures (not the flashcard kind though), and short video clips. Most of my experience is with books but I decided to branch out and use some video clips for my next units with 5th grade (Help! I don't feel well) and 4th grade (Let's play sports!). Surprisingly enough (well, not really) there aren't really any video clips already out there on the internet that I could use with my students so I decided to create my own. I used two different websites: xtranormal and goanimate. I found out about xtranormal from my mother actually (thanks mom!) because she used it in one of her graduate courses to become a principal. I'll talk about this website first.
Here is the first video I made about a doctor's office using xtranormal. It's fairly easy to use. The main idea is that you just type what you want the characters to say and then they'll say it. However, if you want your characters to move, walk, look at each other, look at the camera... that takes more time. All those little details can be fairly time consuming depending on how intricate you want your video to be. It gets easier with practice, I promise. The website itself allows a max of 2 characters per video. However, if you download the desktop version (which I did) you can have as many characters as you want. The desktop version is pretty much the same. You still need to be connected to the internet to use it but otherwise it's very similar. The only other con to this website is that you have to "pay" for each new character and each new scene that you use with points. There are a couple ways to earn points. You can just buy thousands of points with a credit card. You can also earn points for free, but I haven't been able to figure this one out. There is an educator monthly package discount if you feel like you'll use it all the time. Also, with this educator discount you can provide "tokens" to your students so they can use it for free. There is also a business package but I'm not really sure what that does because I didn't look at it. I just used the free version, which starts you off with so many points to buy your characters and settings. So my video is kind of boring but if I want to use it more in the future, then I'll think about buying. When you are finished, this video downloads to an .avi file so you need windows media player (or an .avi converter program for Macs) in order to view the program.
The other website is goanimate. This is so quick and so easy to use because you literally choose your scene, type your lines (10 max for the free version), and hit publish! The catch? You can't really choose your own characters or settings (or at least, I haven't been able to figure that out). You have to choose one of their presets. But since I wanted to talk about sports and March madness is going on right now, I was all set. Here's my video. This one took probably 5 minutes to create.
During the actual teaching of the video, we watched it straight thru one time. At the end, I mostly heard "They talked so fast!" among the whispers of my students. Then we took a break and did some TPR with vocabulary both in the video and just about the content in general (body parts for 5th grade, sports for 4th grade). After this break, we watched the video again. A few students did ask to watch in English, which I obviously denied (it's SPANISH class...) but most students were excited to figure out more of the video. This time, I stopped the video every now and then and asked some clarification questions. Yes, unfortunately, I did make them translation questions but in the future I plan to try and keep even their answers in Spanish. By the second time around though, they were understanding quite a bit and could answer most of my questions! They loved the videos and I think the videos definitely "hooked" the classes in!
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