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Teaching Languages Remotely: Must-have Apps

Student-centered activities while teaching languages remotely:

I wanted to share a few student centered activities that I loved as a learner and as a teacher to share with you, and I hope you find them helpful. They’re a really positive thing. I think that can come out of all of this, which I know it’s really difficult to find positive things with all the suffering and so many bad things happening.

At least from a teaching perspective is to really create some engaging activities that are student-centered that can help students independently study languages successfully when they’re done with school.

So this first one I just wanted to share with you. It’s called La Vie. It’s a YouTube channel obviously and they have lots of real life videos from France, real life shows, etc. They play lots of trailers. This is great language immersion. You really see it. It’s all French lives, life in French, and it’s one example, so there are so many that we could use but using something like YouTube, that has free access. 

Of course, you’re going to have to fit some of these things to give students a really immersive experience, you know, they can watch they can write a summary, find something that really interests them and is school-appropriate, of course, but the idea rings true we have the ultimate language learning lab online.

Really love language immersion. So technically language immersion. Of course, you’re learning something through comprehensible input in another language that you’re learning content. And of course the language is how the medium is being delivered. One of my very favorite activities for Spanish is to do something that involves TPR-Total Physical response. YouTube is a great resource for salsa.

This is a really fun one that a friend introduced to me some years ago called but Batuka, and so this gives great brain breaks if you’re in your physical classroom or students can spend some time doing this. You can send them the link on Google Meet.

How to play the guitar, you could learn history through watching documentaries, you could learn to watch current events news if that interests you you can learn cooking and French there’s so many possibilities, but I absolutely love it.

Journals

So fluency journals. I’m a huge fan of fluency journals. I do these as regularly as I can.

This is great for independent language learners. And this is a great time to assign something students sent you to your class.

So basically, students. You would give them tasks to write about and would actually have to physically- write it, you can have them do it on a Google doc. I personally don’t like to do that, especially when we’re doing distance learning. I like to do it as an independent learner for a couple of reasons. I’ll talk about in a second basically give them a topic family whether something and you set a timer and they write and you can give students.

A few prompts for a week for them to do whatever you’re studying. And I’d have them handwrite it and maybe they can send you a picture of it if that’s not possible. Google Docs works. But of course Google Docs, you have the danger of the Google Translate,