Using Google Story Builder

Story Builder is a Google App which helps students develop their writing skill in an enjoyable way. They can create stories, dialogues, interviews, short plays and much more! As they do not need to have a Google account to start making their own stories, they can learn to use Story Builder quickly and they will be able to navigate it easily.

Students can include up to ten characters which can be used multiple times. Once their stories are ready, they can add a music background. The final step is to give the story a title and copy the link to share it with their partners and the teacher.

This Story I created will be used together with a reader students will be working on in class and at home. They will be asked to read the first chapters at home. After that, they will watch the video in class and discuss the similarities and differences between the paper and online versions of Jumanji.
(Some vocabulary items will be pre-taught and a briefing on Google Story Builder will be provided)

Once the discussion is over, and only if students have not spotted it before, I will ask them to scan the text and find a grammar mistake. I realised there was one after writing the whole story. As editing meant erasing most of my work, I decided to leave it all the same.

Have you seen the film or read the story? Can you spot any differences? Check it out!

Using Google Apps 

This tool is called Google Forms. With Google Forms you can carry out surveys, create a pop quiz, collect e-mail addresses and much more! It is a very user-friendly tool; multiple people can work on one form at the same time and all the changes are automatically saved.

I created a quiz to revise Question Tags with a group of teens I teach. I included different kinds of questions: multiple choice, checkboxes, linear scale  and paragraph. As soon as students complete their forms on their mobile phones, tablets or personal computers, I will receive all their responses which can be clearly seen and analysed on a spreadsheet.

Picture Story - Tangled

This picture story was made with Photopeach.com. This application is very useful  for creating slideshow presentations using text, pictures and even music. These presentations can have as many uses as we can think of. I'm going to use it with my students in class to revise vocabulary (actions/objects), grammar (present continuous) and develop the speaking skill (through the description of photos).