A teacher can be a movie maker

Dvolver is an ICT tool that I came across in my fifth week work on my course ICT in ELT. It is simple and fantastic tool to make some kind of short animated kind of movies that can help teachers to supplement their lessons.

Now I become a movie maker!!! That is of course the important quality of a teacher. We have students from different background with different experiences in life. They also have different learning styles and strategies. Some enjoy visual learning, others prefer touching and practicing, still others are fond of listening to us like a singing bird. We are there in the classroom to meet their desires in any way we can. I understand it may not be always possible. What make us different is that we often feel responsible to do that. And we always try to do that. Just because we are teachers!!

Therefore, I am not surprised if we become movie makers. In the mean time I am not undermining that movie making is a simple job that anyone can join it whenever he can and wish. Rather, this is to show the advantages brought to us through Dvolver.

There are three important issues that I would like to make in this article. First, I will try to explain what it is . Then, I will try to comment on how can we use it to supplement our lesson in teaching English language. Finally, I will try to indicate its limitations and what can we do to use it to the maximum.

What is it?

Dvolver is an ICT tool that enables us to produce simple movies. We can choose our characters and the conversation that go with it. There are physical settings and background music to choose from.  Then we enter our conversation scripts and the rest is the duty of the tool. Very simple!

Its use in teaching English Language

The first thing that came to my mind when I see through the tool was the books that I used to learn on. Those books had pictures of people who engaged in dialogue. The scripts of the conversant are in boxes or circle and directed to the speaking characters using arrows. They often attract me. Dvolver can add one more feature to this practice by making it more natural like movies.

I can think of some exercises using Dvolver now. The first is grammar exercise. We can show students movies with grammar items included in the dialogues. We can also do the same thing to teach vocabulary items.  Furthermore, the activity may proceed as a home work. We can ask our students to prepare movies using language items that we taught in classroom.

It just needs the creativity of the teachers. Please give it a try. We can make a variety in our presentation at least. Look at the following move I did to teach past tense forms.

Example Dvolver lesson

Some limitations

I observed some limitations of Devolver. First, it is limited to types of settings, characters and background music to choose. In relation to that, it allows only limited number of script. It seems that Dvolver may not be an interesting tool to use at intermediate or advance level. However, we can creatively use it at lower level to make our lesson interactive.

Have a nice try