Project Proposal

The CALL tool we will be using is Photo Story 3. The purpose is to give students an outlet to be creative with their language skills. They will be using the program to create a digital story. The program allows students to post pictures in a strip and each one can be accompanied with text and audio. The students will have to find the photos online. This will give the added benefit of practicing their web browsing skills. This tool could potentially be used at any level because they are producing the dialogue. For advanced students, the stories would be very complex, but students at that level may be looking for more academic or real world learning experiences. For beginners, the stories would be simple, but they would still benefit from the activity. For the purpose of this lesson proposal, we are going to focus on younger EFL intermediate students. They have enough knowledge of the language to really play around and be creative with it, but they can still learn a lot from their peers while creating a fictional story.

The students will begin by working in pairs or groups of three. This will give them a chance to collaborate with others and hopefully learn new vocabulary from their peers. They will create a fictional story about five pages in length. They will then have to find pictures to accompany their pages. It will be Ok if they cannot find pictures that directly correspond. They will, however, have to explain why they chose the picture they did. After they have posted their pictures into the program and included the text, they will record themselves reading the pages and the voice link will be embedded into the online book. The students will present their stories to the class when they are finished. I think this tool will enhance the students’ investment into the project and improve their computer skills at the same time. Many of us have probably produced a fictional story at some point where we drew the pictures and wrote the text. The difference with this tool is that the students’ photo books will be blown up on the projector for everyone to see. Plus, they will have to use English to search for their pictures online. Additionally, they will record their reading instead of reading it out loud to the class. This will give them the chance to listen to their recording and hear their own pronunciation problems. They can redo the recordings as many times as they want. This will lower their affect because they will not have the pressure of pronouncing everything on the spot in front of the class.

There is no online site link because we are using a program, which will need to be downloaded onto the computers. It is a free program. The students will use the Internet to search for their photos but obviously they would use many different sites for that. One helpful site link is Google Image listed below.

http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi