Tools to Help With Listening
Edpuzzle is a wonderful new tool that allows you to add questions and comments on to a video and track your students understanding. it is easy to use and you can use your own videos or videos you find anywhere on the internet such as YouTube or TeacherTube or Vimeo. Watch the following very brief video to get an overview of what Edpuzzle can do for you.
To set up a free account navigate to the end puzzle website and click on teacher start now.
Use your Google or Edmodo account to create an account or just use an email address.
Adding a class is as simple as clicking on the Add class icon though you can also import classes from Google classroom.
Getting your students into an assignment is as simple as getting them a code or a link.
This is what an assignment looks like when it's done. You can see a preview of the video as well as the places underneath where questions will pop up as students play the video back.
Once you've created a lesson, it's trivial to pop it into your classroom, give it a due date, and decide whether you want students to be able to skip or not.
Each lesson video create appears in your dashboard.
Actually working with the videos is also very straightforward. you start by finding a video or uploading a video you want to use. The next step is to trim a video to include only as much of it as you want. Then watch the video and add questions - multiple choice or short answer - wherever you want in order to check understanding.
As students complete the work, you'll be able to see how many students are done and, if you're using multiple choice questions, what they got right and what they didn't get right.
Because you can add in voice comments and puzzle can also be used to help you guide students as they go through the listening process.
Listening comprehension is easy to measure once you have a suitable video. There's so much video content available online that you should be able to find videos relevant to what you're doing in class. But even if you can't, simply creating a video and using that can be an engaging and effective way to assess and improve listening comprehension.
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Playposit, which used to be called EduCanon, has very similar functionality to Edpuzzle. You really don't need both. Once you decide which one you prefer and are more comfortable with, it should be more than sufficient to just use that one. They both provide straightforward, effective functionality to help your students with their listening comprehension.
According to the website, “PlayPosit (fka eduCanon) is an online learning environment to create and share interactive video lessons. Teachers begin with any online video (screencasts, Khan Academy, TED, etc.) and transform what is traditionally passive content into an active experience for students, with time-embedded activities.”
One advantage Playposit has is a substantial help section, found here https://playposit.uservoice.com/knowledgebase
Here’s what a video lesson looks like:
https://www.playposit.com/public/1/370523/pass-com...
Once you have created your free acount, you need a video to work with. You can provide a URL of the video you want to use, or search on their website.
They have featured channels, or you can search for videos on the Internet.
They also have lots of pre-existing lesson videos you can use (though they call them bulbs).
Once you choose a video, it opens in a screen setup to start building your lesson.
To crop the video, click on the Crop Video icon. Up pops a little time bar so that you can adjust the starting and ending points. This is particularly useful for grabbing parts of longer videos.
Clicking on Add Question pops up a box to choose the question type. Note that the video should be at the place you want the question to appear.
Choosing Multiple choice gives you this screen
While choosing Free response gives you this one.
So when the student plays the video, and the video reaches this point, the question will pop up
Note that the purple Preview icon lets you quickly and easily see what the student will see.
As you are creating questions, they are listed helpfully to the right.
The Lesson Analytics lets you know how many of each question type you have.
When you are done, click on Finish Build and you will have the chance to assign the lesson to one of your classes, with a due date. You can also assign the same video to multiple classes.
When you have assigned the lesson, you get a screen giving you either a link to share, or an embed code to embed in your website.
Last but not least, Playposit give you a simple screen to look at videos you have assigned to your classes and which students completed them and, in the case of questions with objective answers, a right/wrong indication.
Edpuzzle has new functionality called Live Mode, which allows you to use it in class while students are watching the video and responding to questions. This requires that each student have a device, of course.
VLC is a media player, freely available for download. For the About screen:
VLC media player is a free and open source media player, encoder, and streamer made by the volunteers of the VideoLAN community.
VLC uses its internal codecs, works on essentially every popular platform, and can read almost all files, CDs, DVDs, network streams, capture cards and other media formats!
What we are interested in here is the Icecast Radio Directory. Like Tunein reviewed above, there is a plethora of content available here. It is a bit challenging to search on the VLC app - you have to enter a term that appears in the title - so we suggest going online to find what you want. The directory is also difficult to ind, so here it is https://dir.xiph.org/by_genre/Radio.
Once you do find a station you like, click and drag it to the Playlist to add it.
There is a nice writeup here about setting VLC up to come on automatically when you tunr on your computer, a great way to encourage listening.
Here's a link to the VLC Help wiki.
The types of text vary, as do the exercises, which are tailor-made for each lesson. No sign up is necessary, and the quality of both the material and the exercises is very good, if a bit boring. You might include a form that you make yourself as a way of getting feedback sent to you after students complete the exercises.
Here is the front page.
Searching for Korean listening lessons at Level 1.
Even for a lesser common language like Korean, we still get lots of results.
Choosing one, we get to the front screen of this unit.
As you work through, each screen has a popup instruction panel.
Each lesson has different exercises to help with comprehension.
