xmas

Last week, I posted about the new web tool called “PixiClip” (see “PixiClip” Is A Neat Drawing Tool For English Language Learners). It’s a drawing tool that doesn’t require any registration and has a feature of letting you provide an audio commentary to your artistry. I explained that I thought it had a lot of potential for English Language Learners, and that I was going to give it a try this week and write about what happened.

As I’ve written in previous posts, I’ve been pretty aggressive this school year in trying out Web 2.0 tools with my ELL students. Our District has “lightened-up” considerably on its Internet content filters, and I’ve been taking advantage of this opening. You can see previous posts about the tools we’ve been using:

Geography Students Use “Stay.com” To Create Virtual Trips

English Language Learners Using Screencast-o-matic For Folktale Presentations

Having English Language Learners Use Cellphones To Identify High-Interest Vocabulary

Making Instagram Videos With English Language Learners

Using Freire & Fotobabble With English Language Learners

Terrific New Videos: Using English “Sister Classes” From Throughout The World In Our ELL Geography Class

Literably Is An Excellent Reading Site — If Used With Caution (I’ve been using this each week and it works well as a formative assessment — check them out here).

So, today, we tried out PixiClip….

It didn’t start-off well earlier in the day when an aide and I tried it out before school — even though the site wasn’t blocked, it appeared that our antiquated computers would only allow the “doodling” function and not let us record audio. That, of course, was the primary reason it was an attractive site.

After our lack of success using it in Firefox (it had worked at my home in that browser) and in Internet Explorer, we downloaded Google Chrome and were pleased to find that it worked fine there.

We began a unit on Christmas today, and my Beginner students wrote out a series of instructions on what to do with a Christmas tree (after learning the necessary vocabulary). We then went to the computer lab, and PixiClip worked like a charm. It was a great opportunity for a formative assessment, students got speaking practice, and they enjoyed it a lot.

Here are a couple of examples embedded below:

The only negative is that the videos seem to turn on automatically when you embed them.

I’ll definitely be adding PixiClip to my list of tools to regularly use!