A few language teachers at the high school where I work have recently delved into making a few of their composition exercises digital, using the animation tool Xtranormal.  Joe Dale wrote an excellent introductory article on the subject, which really got the ball rolling here in my district.

The purpose of this post isn’t to duplicate Joe’s efforts — for an introduction, please read his blog post — but to provide a bit of an update and a couple supporting materials I recently created.

The main update on Xtranormal is that the company listened to their users.  Joe commented on the edginess of some of the content and how prominently that content was displayed on the site.  Even my early adopters were hesitant to use the service because of this (and one even took it upon herself to e-mail the company).  To my delight, the site was updated sometime between last spring and this fall, and what a difference.  Xtranormal is now a site I can more publicly recommend to my secondary teachers.

I recently ran through an introductory Xtranormal project with a French teacher here and developed a couple resources she found helpful.  One was a two-page summary handout on Xtranormal for students (I’ve added a page for some teaching tips).    Another was a hint sheet for typing diacritical marks on our Windows-based student computers.  Our tech department incorporated the U.S. International keyboard setting on the latest image and that change has made it possible for  students to compose much faster.

I’ll embed both documents below.  Feel free to use, but please drop feedback in the comments!  What would you change?  Have you used Xtranormal?  What advice would you have for teachers new to teaching with it?

Xtranormal

Typing with Diacritical Marks Student instructions –