By Melissa Fiori, Associate Professor of Spanish, Daemen College, Amherst, NY Introduction Music moves us all and is especially motivational in language learning. With the intersection of music and language, the web platform Lyricstraining makes acquiring a language even more
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By Rachel Mamiya Hernandez, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Introduction Perhaps one particularly challenging aspect of teaching over the past year and a half has been how to break the monotony of online classes. Video Conferencing tools can at times
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By Maria Khotimsky, Senior Lecturer in Russian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Using interactive digital presentations is a simple way to enhance student engagement during a warm-up, lesson summary, or a low-stakes assessment activity. Among the vast array of tools that
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By Shannon Donnally Quinn, Michigan State University One challenge that we faced when moving instruction online in the wake of COVID-19 was the potential of losing opportunities for students to practice speaking in the target language. H5P’s activity type “Speak
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By Maria Slusarek, Ph.D. Student, University of Iowa Introduction The world language classroom commonly uses videos as a way to foster an engaging, authentic and culturally centered language learning experience for students. EduNovela provides a unique 1:1 experience for Spanish
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By Sara Villa, Assistant Professor of Spanish, The New School, NY Introduction Digital spinners (also called random selector tools) allow instructors to engage students in language production in a turn-taking, game-like way. Most are free, and allow the wheel creator
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By Asya Vaisman Schulman, Yiddish Book Center Playing modified versions of card-based party games like “Cards Against Humanity” or “Apples to Apples” can allow students to practice the target language in a structured but fun way. By creating custom card
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By Sara Saez-Fajardo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Gather Town is a video-conferencing platform that allows teachers and students to explore a 2D map with an avatar and recover some of the most missed elements of face-to-face classroom interactions, thanks
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By Shannon Donnally Spasova, Michigan State University For those of us who normally teach face-to-face or hybrid, finding ways to replicate games that we normally play in class in the online environment has been one of our challenges. There are
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By Sherry A. Maggin, United States Military Academy Introduction Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based meeting and collaboration space, originally intended as a workplace tool. With the onset of the pandemic, it quickly became adopted as an additional remote classroom platform
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By Lauren Taylor, Spanish Teacher, Frisco Independent School District, Frisco, TX Introduction Given the increased pressure that teachers are under to develop interactive virtual tools for language instruction, it is no surprise that digital creation platforms like Genial.ly have become
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By Shannon Donnally Spasova, Michigan State University Many language teachers, especially those of us who teach languages with a different alphabet, have remained dependent on paper and pencil assignments for student homework. And, while there are a lot of good
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By Anna Dyer, Lecturer, University of Iowa Meet LearningApps.Org LearningApps.org is a free online platform that allows educators to create a wide variety of online learning activities: matching, fill-in-the-blanks, word grids (word search) and crosswords, maps, voting, ordering, to name
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By Betsy Lavolette, Kyoto Sangyo University Language teachers use video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Teams for many purposes, including teaching, meetings, professional development, and socializing. At times, it is more convenient to use a gesture to communicate, rather
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