Using Photo Stories to Teach English

      For both regular and flipped language classrooms, it is important to include various resources and different activities during the language class. Especially in our modern society, with the rapid development of technology, language learning can be developed through various resources rather than just based on textbooks. Using videos to create photo stories is considered as one effective and meaningful way to teach a foreign language. 

      For many language teachers, one way of having videos in the class is to create videos which are related to the topic by themselves. There are several Internet tools that can be used to create videos, for example, Animoto can be a good choice. Through Animoto, a language teacher is able to create a free video by adding pictures, music, and texts.

      I tried Animoto and used it to create a 30-second photo stroy, English Vocabulary for Clothes. I added six pictures that showed different clothes in my video, and I had a sentence which included clothes vocabulary for each scene. Through this short video, I believe that students will be well informed with vocabulary, especially some visual learners.

      In addition, I would like to encourage my students to create their own photo stories by using this Internet tool. For example, I could encourage my students to record the weather of each day by taking pictures. And then, after a week, students may be encouraged to create their videos which are based on the topic of weekly weather by adding some weather vocabulary and sentences in their videos.

Performance Indicator-ESL.E.2-4.1.1

Students learning English as a second language will use English to acquire, interpret, apply and transmit information for content area learning and personal use. They will develop and use skills and strategies appropriate to their level of English proficiency to collect data, facts, and ideas; discover relationships, concepts, and generalizations; and use knowledge generated from oral, written, and electronically produced texts.

      In order to assess students creations, it seems reasonable to encourage students to give a short presentation. For example, it is possible to invite students to share their photo stories in the class and encourage them to describe their photo stories through the presentation. Therefore, as a teacher, I will be able to check if students have mastered these related vocabulary, and how they use these vocabulary in their daily life.