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May 19, 2009

Using BOOKR for an IT lesson (2).

Following my success with year 9 (13-14 years old) using BOOKR in the IT room, I decided to get my year 8 (12-13 years old) low ability group to the IT room and use BOOKR as well.

But this time, students had to create a photo book about their last holidays. You can see some of the work they produced, it's great and this is the first time I had no behavioural issues with this group in the IT room. All the students were engaged and focused in the task, and even some of them asked me if they could email their work to themselves.
So thumbs up BOOKR :)


To view some more of my students' work, go on http://www.leprofesseur.edublogs.org/

Filed under  //   bookr   Flickr   French   IT   languages   lesson   photo book   photos   pictures   teaching  

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May 14, 2009

Using BOOKR for an IT lesson.

I had a productive day today in the IT room. Because it doesn't happen that often (i.e. computers don't work, the Internet is off, this site is blocked ....), I thought I would blog about it ;)

I used an easy web tool called BOOKR. Again I read about this on Ana Maria's blog
Ana Maria is an EFL teacher and works at a language Institute in Brazil, she also played a big part in the online course Images 4 Education. You can follow Ana Maria on twitter @anamariacult


BOOKR allows you to create a simple photo book using pictures form Flickr and adding captions below the pictures.

So, why is it an "easy" web tool?
  • First, you don't have to sign in/register, you can start straight away. It is a big bonus for me as some of my students still don't have email addresses or I presume they have one from school, but they still don't know they have one!
  • Also, there are no fancy designs, backgrounds, sounds, you just add pictures and captions. Some might argue it is boring but I find students don't get too distracted by those effects and they can really focus on the task, which is to create a photo book in French.
  • To Find and add pictures, students enter keywords/tags in the tag box at the bottom of the screen, they can then choose a picture from Flickr. So no going on Google to find pictures but in fact reading a football website!
  • Finally, when students have finished their photo books, they publish it and all they have to do is to send an email to myself. I then get a link in my mailbox to their photo books and I can either copy and paste the code to the school blog, or save their url links. Esay, peasy!

I parted my lesson in two. First part, I gave students a template of the text they had to write in the captions (they are year 9/13-14 years old low ability groups, so they need a bit of extra help), I showed them a photo book I created and explained to them how it worked. Second part, students went into the IT room, went onto www.pimpampum.net/bookr and created their photobooks.
At the end of the lesson, I asked them to send their work to my email address. And at the end of the day, my mailbox was full of BOOKR messages! I then embedded the best photo books on the school blog. Job done!

I am very happy with myself and the students because for once I have some IT work to show and view!
Also, the students worked hard and were engaged in the lesson, which is quite of a challenge at the moment as most of them won't study French next year.

And you? Have used any "easy" web tools?






Filed under  //   bookr   Flickr   French   IT   lesson   photo book   photos   pictures   teaching   web 2.0   web tool  

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