The Best Online Tools for Language Learning

Online learning is an exciting development in the field of education.  Online learning tools can be used to make lessons more engaging, meaningful, and individualized than traditional teaching methods.  These tools can also be used to conduct classes that never meet in one location, and possibly, never all meet at one time.  This has worried some educators, because student-teacher interaction and collaborative learning activities are not only strongly correlated with student success, but, perhaps just as importantly, communication skills and teamwork are important job skills that employers expect students to develop throughout the course of their education.  For these reasons, the technological tools that use the Internet to facilitate interaction have been of particular interest to me.

                As a foreign language teacher, I consider the need for verbal communication to be of particular importance.  For this reason, the tool that most interested me so far has been VoiceThread.com.  I can use this platform to facilitate speaking activities that the students can complete asynchronously.    I particularly like the idea of creating a screencast that can be accessed through VoiceThread.com, so that students can actively participate in a pre-planned lesson at their convenience.  Writing and performing short skits has also traditionally played a significant role in world language classrooms.   In an exclusively online format, the students are never together at the same location, and it is not reasonable to expect them to edit together files recorded remotely for what is intended to be a brief practice activity or formative assessment.   Fortunately, these types of activities can also be adapted to an online format.  Students can write the dialogue either independently or collaboratively via a shared file, such as a Google Doc, and then create the skit using an animation tool, such as www.XtraNormal.com.  I was very happy to learn that XtraNormal is equipped to handle a variety of languages, including Spanish.  Unfortunately, I think students would have to pay to use XtraNormal, since when I tried it myself, I couldn’t save the video using a guest account, and our district doesn’t have a paid account.  Once I receive the skits, I can post them for the entire class to view and require the students to give each other feedback, either verbally through a platform such as VoiceThread.com or written on a discussion board. 

                Language acquisition teachers often use graphic organizers to work with vocabulary, and there are many potentially useful online tools that allow users to digitally create a huge variety of graphic organizers, but, personally, I am less likely to use these, because in most cases, I think it is just as effective for students to write out titles and lists.  I feel similarly about Prezi.  It’s like a slideshow, but with no sequence.  When I work through information, both as a presenter and as a learner, I want the progression of information to be well planned out, not haphazard or random, so this really doesn’t appeal to me.  Even in those rare cases where there is no advantage to planning out the sequence of the presentation, at least if I go through a sequence from a clearly identified beginning to end, I know that I haven’t missed anything.  There are various other services that I would probably make more use of if either my district had a paid license or if the systems were integrated with our grading system.  Quizlet comes to mind.  Quizlet has some good tools available free of charge, but any good practice activity takes time to make.  Because I currently have no way to track which of my students complete Quizlet activities, I cannot make them mandatory, and I don’t feel as though I have enough students that would be motivated to do these activities purely of their own initiative to justify the time that creating them would take away from something else I could to for my class. 

                Even though at this moment, I don’t plan on using every tool that I’ve learned about, I’m really glad to have learned about so many different options and ideas.  The tools that are less appealing to me right now might be exactly what I need in the future, and, if nothing else, I now have a better idea of the vast variety of tools and activities available for the blended or online classroom.