Dvolver

http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/make.html

What is this?

Dvolver is a 3-scene-cartoon online movie maker, you can design your own characters, setting, form of communication, background music and the content of conversation using this tool. Students can send the movies they made by sending the link to teachers and classmates through email after they have finished doing that.

How do you use it?

1. First of all, select the background and sky you like for your first scene
You can choose the climate and culture from the setting

2. Choose a plot for your scene

3. Select one or two character(s).

4. Type in the characters' lines

5. Select the background music



6. Select music title design



7. Preview and send the movie



8. Copy the code the white box and you have to make sure that it pastes into your blog in 'HTML' mode

DONE!

Dvolver is really user-friendly, it is free of charge and you do not even need to sign up for it. By simply clicking the link "Make a Movie", you start the first step of making your movie.


Choose characters you like, more than 30 different characters are provided, range from
there is a description of each character, some of them are normal-looking folks, some of them are celebrities lookalikes, some of them are animals, etc. 

Why is the content good for language learning?

1. students can create videos outside class, this video making tool is not restricted to time and space we can actually share the film with other people by email, or providing code to embed into your video of a blog post, Facebook page or Myspace page
2. it encourages creativity when students can create their own movies using their own ideas of story making
3. it introduces dialogues in a much more interesting way than rigid textbooks, it is a great tool in attracting young learners
4. it does not consume any space of your computer, as it is saved online

How might you use it in a language teaching context?

1. during the class, teachers introduce the movie using Dvolver, students learn the L2 dialogue from the movie
2. teachers can highlight some of the specific terms students encountered during the process, students can jot the difficult vocabulary down and practise writing and speaking when they go back home
3. teachers ask students to design their own movies based on the conversation they learn from class using Dvolver
4. students send their movies to their peers and give feedback to each other

Limitations

1. advanced learners may find it bored for the monotonous setting
2. conversation between characters is no longer than 3 sentences, more descriptive ideas cannot be written
3. it would be more interesting if speakers' voices can be recorded
4. teachers and students need to download the movies with internet service, the movie cannot be saved
5. the design of characters is not attractive or not familiar to students, at least not familiar to Hong Kong or Chinese students where I come from