How about 'Bubblr'?

The advantage of using multimedia resources to present our lesson is well discussed. However, my practice as a teacher of English as a foreign language informs me that I often ignore such relevant aspect of pedagogy. Of course one reason for such ignorance is the lack of access and expertly in suing resources available.

Situations are changing now. There are user friendly ICT and multimedia tools out there that can really make difference in English language teaching and learning. Using multimedia  resources in our presentations need to be a matter of necessity than option. We are lucky that there are thousands of them out there.

In this post I would like to share about ‘Bubblr’, a simple but a very exciting ICT tool that can help us design interesting lesson for our classes.  As usual, I will discuss on what is it? How can we use it in our language teaching and what are the issues that we need to consider to make the best use of it.

What is Bubblr?

Bubblr is a program that is produced by a company called Pimpampum.com. The company of course has other similar products. Bubblr helps to create a document that has series of images selected form the repository such as fliker. It has very simple and user friendly steps to create. Russell Stannared’s http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/newBubblr/index.html   video can show as how can we use to build our bubbler document.

This is the page that we see when we open the program.

What is its benefit for teaching English language?

As I mentioned earlier multimodal classroom inputs facilitate teaching learning in different ways. The first thing is that we create variety in classroom presentations. This facilitates the learning of students of different learning preferences. Bubblr enables us to display pictures in sequence and insert some written texts using the models of bubble given at the bottom of the program. Hence, leaners get advantage to facilitate their understanding.

We can think of different lessons based on the language item that we are interested to teach and the level of our students. At the lower level vocabulary practice and construction of simple sentences are ideal practices using bubblr. We can adapt similar decisions to the intermediate and advanced level. For example, we can integrate practice of the four language skills at intermediate level. Having presented a sequence of pictures we can ask students to make a story out of it. Then after, we can go on asking students to produce written version of that story. Bear in mind that while doing the above activities, students are also practicing listening and reading.

How can use the best out of Bubblr?

Planning any lesson require the teacher to consider the level of the students and the relevance of the lesson at that level. This are also the most important skills that teachers are trained to practice. As I mentioned earlier it is possible to use bubblr teach present our lesson for learners at different levels. The other important point to make best use of bubblr is to work on the integration of the pictures and the texts that we insert using the bubble diagram.

You can view from my blog what I did using bubblr to create a simple promotional note.

Good luck in using bubblr and
Good Day