Skip to main content

TeachVid

TeachVid is the latest online project from Martin Lapworth, who brought you Taskmagic and Textivate. The general principle here is the same: self-authored or uploaded language material, in this case video, which can the form the basis for a range of text reconstruction and quiz-style interactive tasks. Teachers will find some things in common between TeachVid and Ilini, which appeared a year or two ago. TeachVid, however, offers more interactivity and some original features which are of particular interest to teaches and learners.

So, in essence, you upload a video from an online source and the programme creates  range of interactive tasks for you. There are some ready-made "featured videos" for you to use too. Videos can be in any language you choose.

Most resources are based on a video transcript. To create a resource you type or paste in the transcript or use the YouTube caption search to look for automatically generated captions. (Careful! These can be inaccurate, so commonly you would create your own transcript which takes a little while.)  Each transcript-based resource contains a range of activities where the focus is on filling gaps, inserting in letters, re-ordering chunks of text, etc. Transcript-based activities are done caption by caption. The captions are often available in translation so students can follow a video with the aid of parallel texts. As you watch and listen to a video chunks of language are highlighted, so students get to listen and read at the same time.

As well as transcript-based activities, TeachVid also lets you to create interactive multi-choice quizzes based on any YouTube video. Resources can be transcript-based, quiz-based or a combination of both. In addition each resource also gives access to printable pdf transcripts, translations (where provided) and a range of worksheets, many of which resemble the interactive activities.

In addition you can assign activities and assessments for students to complete by creating classrooms. This allows you to view and download data regarding activities completed, scores, time taken and so on.  Assignments can be set which consist of resource previews, practice activities and assessments. A pass mark can be set for all assignment activities, and teachers can choose from several view modes for each activity. The TeachVid blog provides plenty of information and pedagogical advice for teachers.

I've no doubt this resource, as with Martin's others, will be of great use. Bear in mind that a constant challenge when sourcing video material for classes is finding clips which are comprehensible enough for novice and low intermediate learners. Ilini faces the same challenge. I know from my own experience designing video listening worksheets for frenchteacher that sourcing easy enough video is hard. Not surprising, therefore, that TeachVid's featured resources are aimed at intermediate and advanced learners for the large part.

How much does it cost? Most schools would go for the whole school option with access for teachers and students at a shade under 120 euros a year. It's the fact that it's a "self-authoring" tool which makes it much cheaper than, say, the excellent ThisisLanguage.

It's definitely worth exploring if you want to add some more interest and flavour to your stock of listening material. Pedagogically speaking, TeachVid has a lot going for it in that students can really work intensively on spoken texts rather than doing superficial, semi-understood comprehension tasks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,
4 comments
Read more

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).
Post a Comment
Read more

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g
2 comments
Read more