Tellagami as a writing prompt and motivation for old school writing

Objectives:

• Become familiar with a powerful app that is easily shared with learners back in their classrooms
• Publish first autobiographical piece of writing, crafted for an audience and published on an iPad.
• Grow capability of the learners to create and share what they have done.
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The first tool we are going to explore is Tellagami. Here is the lesson sequence.

The Tellagami app (free)

What it does: Create a talking avatar by selecting various features. When done craft a piece of writing that takes no longer than 30 seconds to read aloud, record as a movie. Also have it read aloud for you in a variety of voices. Exports to the Camera Roll or via email. The app also works on your iPhone or iPad Touch.

https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/tellagami/id572737805?mt=8

It is also available for Android devices via Google Play

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tellagami.Tellagami&hl=en

Lesson One:

Show the app- how it looks when it’s done. Share an example already published as an exemplar. Sharing a little more about the teacher at the same time.

• Then share how to construct the character, take a photo and add the background.
• Learners craft their 30 second name challenge
• Practice recording it.
• A couple are published to the class blog
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To get the videos or photos to me for uploading to Vimeo or YouTube use Drop It To Me

http://dropitto.me/

Need to have blog icon set up on the home screen of each of the iPads as an app like icon ready for children to access. The idea of Drop It To Me is that it links to your DropBox Folder for easy upload of photos and video.

Workflow- Tellagami- Camera Roll- Blog Link- upload to teacher Dropbox- upload to Vimeo- embed in blog for sharing- share blog with whānau.

Reflections: 

• All of the boys were very motivated to get their writing done and could see the point of practising reading aloud to fluency if their creation was going to be shared.
• Some of the boys could speak knowledgeably about how they got their name but some had no idea.
• Pairing the boys up teina/tuakana was good so the older ones taught the younger ones- need some discussion around assisting the younger ones rather than doing it for them.
• I need to have a basic Spell-Write list of the most common words available to each child so they can be more independent in accessing basic words.
• I need to make my instructions more visible/spoken so the boys can hear my thinking as well as see it as we are working.
• Dropittome worked a treat. Next time I will have the boys do the uploads themselves.
• I need to construct a note to whanau sharing the blog URL with them so they can see and share their boys creations.
• Some boys needed another ten minutes to get finished- time was tight. I think next time it will be easier as we covered a lot in the first activity.

Tellagami Example from Writing Boys on Vimeo.