USING OPEN-ENDED TOOLS IN FACILITATING LANGUAGE LEARNING
LESSON 2 Student Sample Projects Using Open-Ended Tools
STUDENTS AS DIGITAL AUTHORS
• it is proper to be facilitators of learning to explore and understand some principles and guidelines to help your future students author or write digitally.
A. Language Learning Via Web Publishing
• language skills can be fully developed by allowing students to communicate through internet. There are two ways to contribute any authored documents to the World Wide Web. First, with the advent of ready-made websites that are meant to invite ans encourage contributors to share their authored stories, research, commentaries, and the like. Second, the students may create their own web pages because there are a lot of free apps for web development.
a. The Diary Project
• it encourages the students to contribute their narrations or daily diaries with different themes required by the web site. The topics can be on school activities, relationships, family, managing stress and others.
b. CyberKids
• its mission is to provide a voice for young people on the internet. It accomplishes this by publishing original creative work by kids ages 7-12.
c. Global Snow-N-Tell
• able to present some list for online publishing tools foe avid writer students who are looking for an online publishing tool to publish their works.
d. Atavist
• a beautiful tool founded in 2011 on the heels of what we once called the "death of longform". It's a drag-and-drop editor for creating beautiful online publications.
e. Calameo
• an online e-magazine publishing tool that lets you add multimedia and personal branding to anything you create.
f. Tikatok
• a creative publishing studio for young children. They can use it to publish digital and printed books of all kinds. It is designed specifically for K-6 classroom.
g. Storybird
• brings your words and global artists' work together in amazing storybooks. It's free for educators now and forever.
h. Lulu
• one of the first players that offered serious online publishing features.
i. Flipsnack
• a flip book creator. It renders shareable interactive creations that can also include multimedia.
j. Penzu
• it focuses in online journalling. It replicates an old leather-bound journal with lined paper.
B. Enhancing Language Skills through Digital Storytelling
• this meets the demand of today's learners living in a rapidly changing world with opportunities and challenges that are different from the ones many of the previous generations grew up with.
• in language education, storytelling is a common requirement that aims to share one's stories, culture, knowledge, values , language, and others.
• storytelling has been considered to have great contribution to literacy development by improving learner's language, writing, reading or listening skills.
• numerous researchers have proven that digital storytelling can bring benefits to students and other individuals.
• as an innovative and interactive approach to language skills acquisition, storytelling is seen as a very responsive variation of the traditional methods because it brings more meaningful and essential learners' engagement into the language skills acquisition process.
Storytelling Tools Listed and Described by Knapen (2018)
1. Steller
• free storytelling app developed by Mombo Labs, which lets you create photo and video stories with an emphasis on design-the next web. It focuses on telling a story through pictures and text.
2. Adobe Spark Page
• a free online web page builder. No coding or design skills needed.
3. WeVideo
• wants to make video editing available for everyone. It has a deep roots in education and believes that creativity is driven by what is inside the hearts and minds of people, not by complicated technology.
4. Popplet
• a tool to capture and organize your ideas. It helps students think ans learn visually.
5. Storybird
• it lets you discover an endless library of free books, picture books and poetry as well. It lets anyone make visual stories in seconds.
6. Bookcreator
• an open-minded book creation app that unleashes creativity.
C. Enhancing Language Skills through E-mail Activities
• good activities to develop language skills. The students are given the opportunity to practice and demonstrate their reading and writing skills.
1. Pen-Pal Activities
• the most common form of e-mail projects called electronic pen pals or e-pals.
a. Belouga
• started with a mission to encourage intercultural communication to create a better tomorrow. A global ecosystem connecting classes throughout the world where students and teachers can connect, collaborate and learn from one another.
b. Epals
• teachers can connect their classes with other classes around the world who are interested in collaborating on a special project together.
c. Empatico
• it empowers teachers and students to explore the world through experiences that spark curiosity, kindness, and empathy.
2. Peer-to-Peer Tutoring
• students will be provided with opportunities to practice their mentoring skills apart from enhancing their language skills.
3. Ask an Expert
• email is a vert powerful tool for students to use to engage the experts in the field especially if the experts are from their institution.
4. Round Robin Stories
• a participating class starts a story with one one paragraph.
Publication Requirements in the Light of the Digital Age
• it must be noted that the development of high-quality digital learning products and materials involves a complex combination of subject matter expertise, instructional design knowledge, and technical skills- graphic design, photography, audio, video, computer programming, etc.
A. Copyright Laws
• protects works of authorship. It is very important foe teachers and students to learn more about copyrights laws and copyright acts to ensure that there will be no copyright infringements.
B. Anti-Bullying Act of 2013
• directs all elementary and secondary schools to adopt policies to address the existence of bullying in their respective institutions.
C. Republic Act 101751
• known as Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 that declares a policy that states that the State recognizes the vital role of information and communications industries such as content production, telecommunications, broadcasting electronic commerce, and data processing.
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