THE PERFECT TOOL FOR THE PRESENTATION

Hello everyone!

My aim while writing this post is to introduce you a tool that my friend Kader and I have presented in the classroom. The tool is the Zimmer Twins. I hope at the end of this post, you will find very useful implications about it.

The characters: Eva, Edgar and 13

First of all, what is Zimmer Twins and why is it used?

The Zimmer Twins is a site that is fun way to integrate technology into the classroom. It helps both teachers and students to create an amazing movie maker by using animation. You can create your movies by using story starters that allow you to create your own movie endings, or create a movie from scratch. You can tell your stories by choosing actions, characters and background. There are only three characters which are easy to use for young learners: Eva, Edgar and 13.

How the tool can be used?

When you open the site, you will see two different sections: one is kids and families, the other is educators and schools. According the your purpose, you can choose one. As we are interested in English language teaching, we can choose educators and schools section.


Then you have to sign up an account to create and save your movies. When you sign up, you will see the make a movie section. After clicking on it, there is the make from scratch section. Now you can start to create your own movie. There are four different types of clips to choose from: talk bubble clips, action clips, close up clips and star clips. You can use the talk bubble clips to make the characters talk, sing or think. With action clips you can make the characters run, dance or laugh. Close up clips help you make the characters act surprised, bored or scared. Finally the star clips for fun things like typing a newspaper headline. You have many options to choose from. If the movie is ready, you can click on the save movie button and save your movies. It is quite that easy.

Animation clips: talk bubble, action, close up, star clips.

You can also create your own movie endings using the story starters as you can see:

How the Zimmer Twins can be used in language teaching?

1. You can ask your students to watch a starter video and predict the ending of the story.
2. If you want to focus on grammar in your lessons, this tool will be efficient for practicing the newly structured grammar rules.
3. The tool will also improve students' vocabulary because they have to write a dialog for their movies. For example you can choose the topic that you have teached that day, and ask them to create a movie about that specific topic.
4. You can ask them to create a story of a day on their own.
5. You can give them feedback every week on how they can improve their stories and movies.

Of course, every tool has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage of this tool is autonomous learning. They can decide what is the best for their movies. They can learn better when they do something alone. In addition, their creativity and imagination will improve because they think about their stories. The site will also improve their vocabulary knowledge because it helps them visualize the verbs and know how to use the words that they have learned. The tool is fun and motivating for students because they will enjoy using the site, it is easy to use. You can also free lesson plans to use the Zimmer Twins with your students. I strongly advise you to examine the page, you will find very useful things about planning your lessons.

When we come to disadvantages, we see that it does not save your movies unless you sign up an account with Zimmer Twins. You can't make any changes after saving your movie. The video that you produced cannot be embedded onto your blogs or other websites and you have to purchase a VIP membership to share your movies or view other movies.

I can't share the video that we created because of the VIP membership so I took a video. Please watch it to see an example.

If you are looking for a tool which is useful, fun and efficient in language teaching, I recommend you the Zimmer Twins. I think it is hard to make your young students love English. At the same time they need to have fun and learn English and you have to integrate technology into the classroom. When all of them come together, Zimmer Twins is a perfect tool that provides them. While we were preparing for the presentation, we had fun exploring and using it. So you can easily use the Zimmer Twins in your classroom. I am sure your students will love it! See you.