Build Speaking & Pronunciation Tasks into your Moodle Course

SpeechAce is a great Moodle plugin for anyone who wants to build speaking and pronunciation activities into their online course.

The plugin allows you to build tasks and activities into your Moodle course that require a verbal response, these can be listen and answer, listen and repeat, watch multimedia and answer,  and which gives students useful constructive feedback on their pronunciation.

Students simply click to record their answers or input, this can be the answer to a questions or can be based around a text they have read or a recorded model (UK or US accent) they have listened to and tried to imitate.

They then they get a score and an analysis of their answer. They can get word by word feedback on their performance and see which phonemes they produced successfully and which they still need to work on.

Installing the plugin is pretty simple and then you just select it from the main tasks menu whenever you want to add a speaking activity to your course.

If you build it into a tutored course the students scores are recorded in the grade book and teachers can go and listen to their recordings too. This can really make teaching preparation effective in a blended learning course.

Like many teachers and language course designers, I’m usually pretty sceptical about a computers’ ability to evaluate student speaking, especially given the range of variation in native speaker output, but I think SpeechAce does a really good job of getting students to produce language, giving them feedback on their performance and encouraging them to listen and try again. Building this kind of capability into an online language course, especially a MOOC type one that has much less teacher contact, could really help students to stay motivated and engaged for longer.
 

Video demo

If you want to give it a try as a teacher then go to: https://playground.speechace.com/moodle/ where you can get access to the SpeechAce sandpit.

If you want to try it as a student then go to: www.speechace.com/pc and you can try a demo placement test.

I’ve known about SpeechAce for a couple of years now and it’s great to see how it has developed. It isn’t free (there is a free trial), but the company is clearly putting their money into developing a constantly improving product and I think that’s something worth supporting.

You can find 100 + more tools and resources like this in my ebook Digital Tools for Teachers - Second Edition or if you want to train other teachers to use these kinds of tools check out the Teacher Trainers’ Edition.

My Books:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

Build Professional Level Online and Blended Courses with this Free Plugin

H5P is a tool for building complete courses with a wide variety of interactive task types. The tool works as a plug in with a range of platforms including Moodle, Drupal and Wordpress (all of which have free versions available) .

It’s very easy to install the plug in (took me less than 5 mins with Wordpress) and once this is done  you can choose any of the interactive elements to add to your pages.

The activities the plug in produces are html5 so they will run equally well on both desktop and mobile platforms. Many of the activity types are also ideal for language learning and the development of multimedia content.

There are great tools for creating interactive video based quizzes, presentations, audio responses, a variety of games and text manipulation activities.

If you look at the content types here you’ll see examples of each one as well as some information about how to use them.


For such a powerful tool, the learning curve on creating the activities is quite gentle and you should be able to start producing content quite quickly. H5P is open source and there is a good community of developers sharing expertise on the support forums if you get stuck.

It is also a tool that’s being developed so it’s likely that it will continue to improve. So if you want to start building your own blended learning or online courses this could be a great tool to do the job.

I hope you enjoy building fantastic courses with H5P. You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

Related links:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

Why do students frequently drop out of online courses?

Over the past couple of years 'MOOCs' (massive open online courses) have become the latest trend in the attempt to harness the power of online learning. MOOCs though, just like other forms of online learning have suffered from very high drop out rates.

So what's the cause the high drop out rates among online learners and what can we actually do about it?

In the questionnaire below I've added some possible causes of drop out. Please could you add any others that you can think of and use the 'Pros' in the argument section to make any simple suggestions for how to combat the problem.

Thank you for sharing your suggestions and helping with this simple research questionnaire.

Related links

• How I use social media for my professional development 
• Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why
• Developing your digital study skills
• Learning Technology News Portal
• Web Tools for Learners

Best

Nik Peachey