Dvolver Movie Maker

What is Dvolver?

Dvolver is a very useful website which can help English teachers to conduct a lesson in a different and interesting way. It enhances the learners knowledge of vocabulary as they try to use as much vocabulary items to construct the dialogues. The website allows teachers and the learners to create a short movie by giving them the opportunity to choose from a number of cartoon characters and create their own dialogues to put them into a movie. English learners from the age of thirteen can be taught to use the website as it requires simple technique of using the ICT.

How to use Dvolver?

When you go into the website, you will first choose the background and atmosphere that you prefer your movie should be. The next stage, you will have to select the plot of the movie and two characters involved in the interaction. Then you will be able to start filling in the dialogue boxes with your own creativity based on the plot you already have in mind. As a final touch up, you can select a background music to give a mood to your movie and that's it, you have become a movie director! To learn more about Dvolver movie maker, you can go to the website and try it. Dvolver makes directing a movie is like A,B,C ! Here is the link to the web. http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/make.html

What I personally like about Dvolver?

• A new approach to teaching and learning
• Learners get to learn English language and the use of ICT at the same time
• The activity is fun and interesting to be done whether in the classroom or as a homework
• It allows creativity which learners can express their idea into the form of movie
• Step-by-step and easy to use web for beginners which they just have to click and choose from the available selection of how to create the movie
• Users can embed and share the link of the completed movie into their social network such as blogs, facebook, twitter and etc.
• It's a free web!!

However in my opinion there are some limitations to the use of the website:

• Some contents or characters in the web might not suitable for younger learners.
• The content is dictated by the tools thus it limits the learners' opportunity to choose their own content.
• Some learners might take the advantage of freedom to use their own words by using such inappropriate language in the dialogue.
• It might be time-consuming for learners to create dialogues to suit the plot in a very limited lesson period.

Dvolver is one of the various tool for learning language rather than learning the grammar or writing an essay. Learners can forget about the language grammar for a while and enjoy the exploration of the language in a different way. With a close monitoring from the teachers, I personally encourage them to integrate this tool into their language learning course so that learning English can be fun too!

-Suze-