Sign up for a free account and you gain access to masses of charming children’s illustrations and a tool for using them to build your own stories. The pictures are so gorgeous and the simple layouts so effective, that I defy you not to discover your creative streak. When you publish, you will have a fabulous digital story to show using your (interactive) whiteboard.

Don’t limit yourself to Primary students. Although it’s clearly a beautiful match: La Princesa.

Just remember, everyone loves a story – you just have to match the content to the class. My Y9′s are quite happy to read really carefully for Le Futur Simple in the story Les Vacances.

I see so many potential applications for this tool. I am challenging myself to write one my reluctant Y10 German students will enjoy. I’m sure if I get the content right, we can use it for a full 1 hr lesson.

My Y11′s are so mature now, that they adore ‘baby-ish’ stuff. This one really challenges their vocabulary knowledge: Julie et les animaux.

A couple of warnings:

• Storybird was not designed with MFL-ers in mind. We want to publish in languages other than English. This is not yet enabled. BUT it’s on its way because we demanded it! In the meantime, this is what you do: write your story in whatever language you can/want. When publishing, choose ‘ Private’. THEN, cleverly send a copy to YOURSELF! In this fashion, you will capture the ‘url’ (unique web-address) of your story to share/embed/favourite as you wish. 
• Check out the machine you anticipate using. It MUST have Flashplayer v. 10 or more. If not, Storybirds will not work and you will finish up like me on my first adventure in a small village primary: Flashplayer couldn’t handle it and I had to tell my little story Jackanory-presenter-stylee. Seat-of-the-pants-stuff.
• You can forestall this by using ‘print screen’ to capture your book’s pages and then use them to make a Powerpoint presentation. Time-consuming, but you still get to use the beautiful artwork.

Creative, charming, imaginative – Storybird has it all for us word-nerds. Find a moment and check it out – you will be glad you did!

This Blogpost first appeared on the Durham Tees Valley Ning, for MFL teachers in NE England. Do come and join us!

In simple terms, Xtranormal is a free-to-use website where the user can use a text-to-speech facility to make animated cartoons.

The brilliant thing is that the creators have enabled several languages. When setting up your new project, you choose from a great variety of cartoon characters and then specify a voice and language for each. (Choose from English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch and even Japanese..). You type in your chosen language – your character pronounces it correctly!

After that – you are free to create whatever you wish. You are limited to one or two characters – but I personally feel that any more would be a recipe for disastrous confusion. I’m only beginning to explore Xtranormal’s potential but so far I have:

• made a model mini-self-portrait and asked pupils to generate their own  in the MFL ICT suite  – this was a very encouraging experiment which I will develop.
• made a model presentation for a Y10 MFL day to demonstrate WJEC’s new GCE Specification demands
• made a simple Q&A session to give a flavour of the GCSE Speaking Test conversation element

(I have chosen to upload my movies to my YouTube account, but this is not necessary at all; you can view, embed and bookmark all your work from Xtranormal).

My future plans for it include encouraging GCSE pupils to use it to learn to pronounce their speaking test material (hope they can ‘iron out’ the computerised-voice aspect!) I also intend to use it for creative story-writing with material students prepare before they go into the ICT suite.

I loved Xtranormal so much that I subscribed (£5 a month or £36 pa). Subscription gives you access to more characters, settings and voices.

A few tips from my work so far:

• it’s a test of the user’s typing and spelling skills – if it’s typed wrong, the computer/character will say it wrong!
• it can be very fast – solve this by adding loads of pauses (at each comma and full stop if you can be bothered)
• use the brilliant Magicam button to make your movie more interesting to watch
• check out the sound effects and gestures. They are a potential distraction to some students (bodily functions are well-represented), but can add a fun dimension to a final movie
• I haven’t so far been able to set up a school account all pupils can access. We’ve managed so far by getting each pupil to register and set up their own individual account.

Finally (if you made it this far) my kids (age 8 and 9) LOVE it.

This Blogpost first appeared on the Durham Tees Valley Ning, for MFL teachers in NE England. Do come and join us!

Hershey my 12-year-old chocolate point siamese

 This will be an all-encompassing blog, because I find it hard to divide my life into categories. How can I – there’s only one of me leading it and I am not a filing cabinet with separate drawers for different activities. Each part of my life feeds into the others and I like it that way. I’m very open (sometimes too much) and dislike artificiality. This way seems more natural. 

 Should anyone ever read this – hello and welcome.