CivieBlog

Here's something that's fun for the weekend and beyond. A site with a collection of image and gif generators that you can customise with your EFL ESL students and add their texts to. This is an example one I created with talking flowers giving a warning about the environment.

• The site also offers talking squirrels

• Talking cats

And a few other things like tomatoes, owls and a wizard. There's also a generator that helps you add a text to a packet of cigarettes and also a newspaper which I really like. It's really easy to do, you just add your text to a field and click the generate button.
You can then either download your image or get an embed code to add it to a blog or website.

So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?

• We can use the animal and vegetable animations to get students to express opinions about different topics we discuss. It can often be hard to motive students to do this and using a tool like this reduces their 'exposure'.
  

• We could get students to create an animal or vegetable very short story.

• We could use the cigarette packet generator for a competition to think up the best reason not to smoke (could use this for modals of obligation too - you shouldn't / mustn't smoke because..)

• We could use the newspaper gif to get students to write a short news stories about how they became famous, what they did at the weekend, their last holiday etc.

• They could also use the newspaper gif to write some classroom or celebrity gossip to share

• We could write news stories for the students as a prompt for questions - Write a short news text for them with the headline - 'Teacher Found Murdered' - add a few details and get them to write short questions to ask you more about the story. You could even develop this into a role play with students having to think of an alibi to explain where they were at the time of the murder and get some students to act as detectives and interrogate the other students.

• You could use the newspaper gif to create an editing task by creating a text with a number of your students' common errors in and asking them to act as newspaper editors and find the mistakes.
• You could use the newspaper gif to get students to convert a popular story form literature or folk tale (Romeo and Juliet, Goldilocks and the 3 bears, Cinderella etc.) into a quick news article. This is a good activity to practice summary writing skills.
• You could use the Ninja or Wizard animations to get students to create short advertising slogans.
  

What I like about this site

• It's free and really easy to use.
• Once you've created your images and animations you can either download them or get an embed code and add them to a blog or website.
• It's fun and adds an element of motivation to simple quick writing activities
• Ideal for warmer.
• It's all very 'low tech' and you don't need broadband.
  

What I'm not so sure about
You might have to be careful that students don't write too much. the wizard and ninja texts need to be very short.

Well I hope you find these useful and please leave comments with any other ideas or links to any materials your students create using these.

Related links:

• Animating vocabulary
• Make you own animated movies
• Picture phrases

Activities for students:

• Extending a Sentence
• 60 Second Writing Activity
• Create an English Cartoon

Best

Nik Peachey