Tellagami: Be who you want to be in speaking class!
Week 7👻Tellagami: Be who you want to be in speaking class!
👾Introduction
As an English teacher, especially for those young learners in primary and secondary schools, do you know how to let students engage more in class? Are you worried about how to motivate them to think more, write more and even speak more? Now, I will recommend you an absolute must-try: Tellagami!
👽What is Tellagami?
Tellagami is a mobile
app that lets you create and share a quick animated Gami video. With this fun
and new tool, you are allowed to customise your character, change its mood or
outfit and record your voice or add
dialogue. Actually, I guess some people, may feel familiar with the
introduction. Yes, it is a little similar with Voki! They are both for
animating and fun. But I think Tellagami is more
advanced. For example, you can
change the mood and use your own photos as the background.
👼Tellagami in language learning
- Why it is useful for young learners of foreign languages?
When
students in their early ages, interest or motivation is very important for their SLA. How to help them engage
in language learning has become a hot issue among educators. In my opinion,
Tellagami can help arouse students’ interest. Firstly, it can benefit those
intrinsic and shy students who have speaking anxiety and thus refusing to speak
in public. Secondly, as the audience, when their peers present the Gami video,
students may concentrate more on listening because of curiosity.
- Who can use it: teachers or students?
The answer
definitely is both! But from my point of view, only when teachers give a
particular task and clear guidance, the tool can play the maximum effect.
Otherwise, students may just waste their time after class without ideas about
what to do.
- How to use
Tellagami?
(1) Make the most use of “How to”
When you enter the interface of the app, you can see two options: "Create" and "How to". If you press the later one, it will guide you how to use it step by step.
(2) For those who have no access to the app at present, I will give you some instructions here
a. After entering "Create", you can firstly click the button "message" and text or voice what you want to say.
b. Secondly, you can change the image of the Gami and his or her emotion.
c. Then as for the background, you can take photos by yourself or just use what the app provide.
💫An example of using Tellagami
- My context: Grade 5 in English class
- The design of class tasks:
1. Warm-up: At the beginning of the class, I bring some tags and let students find what the classroom has. For example, the student who knows the word "desk" can write it on one tag and stick it on the desk in the classroom.
2. I will teach them essential vocabularies according to the demand of the syllabus.
3. Give them an example of Tellagami in which I introduce what and how they should do after class.
4. The homework is to require them to make their own Gami and by using it, they should introduce "what are there in my bedroom?" It is worth noticing that the background the Tellagami character should be their own bedrooms. Thus, the teacher and peers can check whether their descriptions are right or wrong.
5. In the next class, students are expected to share their animated images to others and from this activities, students can learn more vocabularies about where they live in and also practice their oracy.
- Why I think this activity is beneficial for language learning?
- My Gami as an example for the students
👿The shortcomings of this app
- The limitation of resources in it: For example, the users are allowed to use only 30 seconds for video. Also, the options of characters, emotions and so on are limited.
- The application of it does not work in some systems of mobile phones.
I think it is a wonderful post. At the beginning part, there is a comparison with Voki. I also think these two websites are similar with each other in function. The structure is very clear. But I think it woould be better to add some labels in order to give readers a general impression of what the content is about..
ReplyDeleteHello, Ada. This post is really well-organized and clear for the readers to follow, and i think it would be a quite important point for us to observe when writing our own blogs. What's more, I think the example you designed would be very effective for these students. I like this example.
ReplyDeleteHi yujia! Thanks for giving such a detailed introduction about tellagami.. I like your subtitles because it makes readers follow your ides easily.
ReplyDelete