1. Avatarise yourself

It’s quickly turning into the cinematic sensation of the new decade and if you do get the chance to see James Cameron’s Avatar in 3D, don’t worry about the simplistic plot or melodrama and you’re sure to be amazed.

Why not kick off a discussion of the film with your learners by showing them a blue-skinned version of yourself.

If you have an interactive whiteboard or data projector, you can do this and show them a video here.

Please note, this is the German language version of the tool – unfortunately, the English language version seems to have been closed down.

Hopefully, it’ll reappear again soon.

2. Mr. Picassohead

Want something more artistic?

Then ask your learners to create a picture of themselves using the Picassohead generator.

If they do this for homework and email it to you (you can do this automatically from the site), then they can decide how much the images looks like themselves in class.

Great for comparatives and descriptions – your eyes are bigger, etc.

3. Wii Mii

Nintendo’s Wii lets you create a Mii , a cute cartoon character, to represent yourself when you are playing the games on their console.

You don’t have to own one of these to be able to do this, however – http://www.weeworld.com/ lets you and your learners make their own.

Ask them to do this before the next class and send you the images.

Pin them to the wall and see how many of them can guess who’s who.

It’s a good way to start a discussion about the Wii and what console games they like.

You can follow this up with them writing a description of one of their classmate’s miis.

4. Lego-ize yourself

Ask the students if they ever played with lego or any similar kind of toy.

What did they make?

How long did they spend doing it?

Tell them they can build the Lego version of themselves here:

http://reasonablyclever.com/mini/flash/minifig.swf

5. Make a Manga version of yourself

Faceyourmanga allows you to create a Japanese Manga-style version of someone.

Because the menu selection is in English, it’s even worth doing as a computer room activity with lower level learners as they see quite a lot of vocabulary.

Back in the classroom, they can describe each other’s images and/or write a description of a classmate’s.

Alicia Rey, an English teacher who is no stranger to exploiting Web 2.0 tools with learners has created a tutorial for students for this.

6. Simpson-ize yourself

and… 7. South Park-ize yourself

Ask students to compare two similar TV series (such as The Simpsons and South Park) and introduce the topic by Simpsonsizing yourself and creating your South Park version .

South Park Studio is just as easy to use – you could ask learners to create a version of themselves using both and then write a comparison.

8. Ultimate Flash Face

If it’s accuracy you want, then http://flashface.ctapt.de/ gives you a far greater range of features. It’s similar to a police photofit, which means it could be used as a possible warmer for a game of Alibi or when looking at crime vocabulary.

Make a few faces based on some of your students and get them to say who they think the images look like

9. Build your Wild Self

For anyone with young learners, Build your Wild Self is ideal. It lets you create an avatar that looks like you , but also allows you to add animal parts to change the appearance completely – lots of fun, and because everything is labelled in English, a good computer room activity for revising parts of the body with a class.

10. Be Funky Photo Effects

Be Funky lets you take any photograph and transform it into something completely different.

Use it to create altered images of yourself, your learners and/or the other teachers in your school (can they guess who’s who?)

With this site, the only limit is your imagination.

Please note, if you decide to use this with learners, they’ll need to register for an account first (with an email address)

Want more?

If you like using images with your learners, be sure to check out the new blog by Ben Goldstein, author of the book Working with Images.

There’s also a TESOL EVO session on at the moment which is all about ideas for using images with learners. You can find this here: http://evosessions.pbworks.com/Images4Education

Have fun!

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Digital Play is a new blog aimed at language teachers who are interested in using computer games and other digital toys with learners. The main focus will be on English Language Teaching (ELT) as we (the authors of the blog) are both EFL teachers, but we think the ideas and suggestions should be useful and adaptable to all modern foreign language (MFL) teachers too.

For several years now, we have been adapting free online games to use with learners. We both work with young learners and teenagers and hope to share with you the experience we have had in the classroom and computer room when using games with students to practise English. How can  the use of online games help learners of a language? Here are just a few brief ideas:

• Motivation. An essential feature of learning a language and probably the hardest part to foreign language learning – every teacher knows that if the learners are motivated, then they will learn more and it will stick.
• Relevance.  Teaching a language needs to be relevant to the learners’ interests and lives.   Digital gaming has fast become one of the most popular free time activities  for many of our learners. And don’t just think games are only played by the young either. The average gamer is now 35 years old – every year this age tends to rise as more and more people continue to play games as part of their entertainment.
• Integrated skills work. Many online games, when  adapted for use with language learners, can provide an engaging mix of reading, writing, speaking and listening skills work. We’ll be showing you how to do this on this blog.

We continue to believe that using computer games with language learners is a valid use of classroom time and look forward to sharing our ideas, information, lesson plans and worksheets with you here.

If you’d like to keep up with this blog, then subscribe to the Digital Play mailing list, add us as a friend on Twitter or become a fan of our Facebook page and we’ll keep you informed of what’s going on.

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