Dvolver

This simple animation tool allows students to create a three-scenes-animation on the narrative tenses.  They are able to select the setting, the number of persons, characters, dialogues, background music and the plot from the given data with fun. This will be good to use as an introduction tool to technology.

In the first lesson, teachers show how to create an account and the videos on 'Dvolver'.  For their smooth performance, teachers may give students some questions or tasks in advance as the followings.

* What kind of a birthday present do you want?
* Which place do you wish to visit?
* Describe something you were surprised in the past.
Or, teachers may fix some target words or phrases to use in their dialogues.

Teaching Procedures:
* Explain students how to use Dvolver
* Students select a picture et cetera, create dialogues for contextualizing, add new scenes with
   a pair, and send it to a teacher by e-mail. (also to their friends or parents if they like)
* Teachers can evaluate students' works and provide feedback.
* Peers' observation at the next class. Reflection and feedback.

This virtually creating tool will surely provide not only a technology but also a great deal of interests to learners. Teachers can use this tool as a pair or group work such as a role play or other task-based activities, depending on individual classroom situations and a quantity of computers in order to promote their interaction and collaboration, by which students can also receive feedback from their pair, classmates and a teacher.  They can revise the characters or dialogues at any time by returning the scenes to the previous ones.

I am sure that students will love this tool playing with the target language in productive ways which is different from an ordinary situation, and it will help them enhance their motivation in a classroom.  Students can additionally create any videos outside the class once they have mastered the way, and in addition, they can embed their own completed 'Dvolver' films on their personal web pages.

Nevertheless, there are some limitations. The given data such as characters etc are not being renewed since I experienced it firstly in Canada in 2008, and the selected sound appears and influences on my blog troublesomely whenever I open this blog - as you may be aware. Therefore, I created this one again without any ground music.  (If you wish to embed your Dvolver on the site or file, I truly reccommend you to create it without any sounds!)  In particular, the numbers of characters are limited to one or two, and the number of scenes are also limited to three.  Moreover, I guess that these simple and monotonous procedures might be boring for advanced learners.

Nevertheless, I am still sure that any students will love this Dvolver as their first science tool in language learning.  So, why don't you try it!

Here is my sample 'Dvolver' titled 'Technophobic Alien';

http://www.dvolver.com/live/movies-824651