Get Students Practicing Language With Video

One of the most useful practical skills that any language student can have is to be able to verbally explain what they what to communicate. But so many times there is a vast divide that must be crossed in order for a student to feel comfortable connecting words when speaking.

Practice is the only way that students can jump that vast divide to be comfortable speaking. How can a teacher manage a group of 2 or 3 dozen students and ensure that all of them practice speaking? Using video is one great way, and that is what this article will focus on.

A Private Collaborative Youtube Playlist

In a previous article on getting language students speaking, I discussed several activities where students are prompted to describe what they see, or have a conversation with someone else. While these activities get students speaking, they don’t give the class much material to build on learning.

This is why it’s a great idea to take the activities discussed in my previous article, have students video their responses, then upload these videos to a private class Youtube Playlist.

To get started, you’ll want to create a Youtube Channel dedicated to your classes. Then you need to create a Playlist that can be shared with collaborators (see the link for how to do this). Then share the Playlist with your students so they can upload their videos.

I would suggest making separate playlists for each assignment. This way, students will know what objectives are being worked on. This will also make it easier for students to comment on each other's work.

As a follow-up assignment to having a conversation and uploading it to the dedicated private Playlist, have students comment in the target language on at least 5 of the other videos. This will keep students leveling up on their learning, and it will allow students to help each other in their language learning.

Flipgrid for Class Videos

Flipgrid is a tool that was built to mimic the above process, but the tech is simpler and involves fewer steps to operate. For each grid, an educator posts a topic, and students video themselves responding via video to the topic. For an example of what this…