TeachVid for Developing Listening Skills

I've always been a huge fan of using video for language development, so I was really delighted when I was sent a link to TeachVid and asked to have a look at it.

TeachVid is a really great resource for developing listening skills multiple languages, not just English. The learning is based around short video clips but there are a whole range of different activity types that students can select.

The activities use a parallel text technique that combines the use of L1 subtitles with L2 transcription so that students can understand the content they are listening to even if they are quite low level learners.

At the most basic level students can watch and listen to the videos with both languages visible, but if they click on 'Activities' this opens a whole range of choices for different ways students can challenge themselves to reconstruct the text.

When the students are in activity mode they watch chunks of the video and then reconstruct the text. This could be line by line with the words jumbled up or they may have all the letters and have to find the word boundaries. Once they complete a line the video advances.

All the time students are working with the activity their progress is being tracked.

There is also a great LMS feature for teachers called 'Classroom'. This allows you to set up assignments for your students and track their progress. You can select a video for an assignment and choose the types and sequence of activities you'd like your students to do. You can even set a due date for the assignment.

There are quite a few video resources already on the site, but if you can't find what you are looking for you can also create your own resources using TeachVid's resource creation tools, accessible via the 'My resources' tab on the resources page.

TeachVid is based on a freemium business model, so you can register for free as a teacher and create five resources for your students and track their progress. Students can also register independently for free and access any of the featured resources on the site. Registering for a paid account gives you access to many more features and is very reasonably priced. The best deal though is to register as a school. Prices will depend though on the number of student accounts you create.

I really recommend TeachVid as a language learning and development tool. I used it to try to improve my Spanish and found the activities really motivating and engaging. This is a great tool to get your students learning independently or in class.

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: https://payhip.com/peacheypublications

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Check Out My Books:

• Hacking Creativity
• 10 Short Image Lessons
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media 

Best
Nik Peachey